Speaking at Paris' ChangeNOW Conference of 35,000 change agents

"Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history."

These are the words I shared with the audience of change agents at ChangeNOW two months ago.

The role of an imagination activist is to build the longing for a different kind of future. It’s to build the sensation that this is possible, that it’s real. As Eve Ensler once said, the role of a normal activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.

The role of an imagination activist is to remind you what it is you are fighting for, what it is you believe in, what is it that is driving you to make the changes, to do the work of creating a more just, beautiful and flourishing future every day. Imagination activists create more activists in the world. They connect them back to the longing for a future in line with their values.

Speaking at the ChangeNOW 2024 Conference on Imagination Activism

In March, I joined 35,000 people at the ChangeNOW conference in Paris, to deliver a message on their stage on being an imagination activist. In order to change the world, we need to escape the ways of thinking that are perpetuating the mess we currently find ourselves in. The system is self-perpetuating, and so seeing differently takes work, it is a form of resistance, and it's a form of activism.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a fantastic sci fi author, an absolute heroine of mine, said ‘any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. And that resistance and change starts in art, and often in the art of words’, in storytelling. We need to keep the dream alive that things can be different, that we have the solutions we need - you can find them all around the world at the edges, and equitable, human, life-centric ways are not impossible, but they require choosing, and protecting.

One of the mantras of being an imagination activist is: "We think that we have resource problems, but in fact we have imagination problems". We think that the problems we face are technological, we think that we need facts, that it’s a lack of resources or a lack of knowledge or intelligence. I promise you that if we closed the doors on this stage and we said nobody here is going home until we fix these problems, we would fix them. We have all the intelligence, all the ideas and talent we need.

Thank you very much for having me #ChangeNOW, and to all those who made this session brilliant and inspiring: Maëlle Bousquié Gaspard Plantevin Martina Catherine Buchal Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy Olivier Maurel Amandine Roche