Our ambition
Many experts predict that the forces shaping the second quarter of the 21st century – climate change, extremism, and machine intelligence – will accelerate inequity and marginalisation, unless we choose to do something about it.
In response, with seed funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation we’re starting the National Futures Initiative. Our ambition is to create the opportunity and resources for individuals, communities and organisations to explore the future and inform the development of services, policies and systems that will shape it. And we plan to do this by partnering with like-minded organisations across Australia.
From the learning and listening work we did with future thinkers in 2023/2024, this is the work that we believe needs to happen:
- Expand Australia’s sense of possibility so that what seems unthinkable today becomes a sensible choice tomorrow.
- Support and mobilise the people who will drive just transitions.
- Invest in iconic demonstrations that inspire action and provide proof of what’s possible
- Develop R&D systems to spread the know-how & innovations that will accelerate socially just transitions
- Engage in socially just processes that include the expertise often left out of conversations about the future: the public, First Nations people, people experiencing marginalisation and future generations themselves.
The focus right now
Right now the focus is to develop alliances between organisations who are passionate about a more just future in particular domains. Areas of interest so far include:
- The future of childhood
- The futures of communities
- The future of human-machine collaboration
Each alliance will engage in future-exploration and develop ambitious proposals for future funding. We’re also establishing alliances of future-focused practitioners in Australia, as well as a global network of future-focused initiatives.
Our long term goals
- Develop networks to support 500 future-focused changemakers
- Create an ongoing National Imagination Initiative that stretches our national sense of possibility
- Catalyse 20 iconic demonstrations of new ways of living and working
- Enhance Australia’s strategic capability for future-focused social R&D
The work begins now. But it doesn’t begin alone. This future is something we can create together, bound by our shared commitment to making the world more just, and inclusive.
How we got here
In 2024, as Australia’s national centre for social innovation, we started to think about the role we should play in Australia’s future.
As part of this reflection, we reached out to people at the edges of our network that spend a lot of time thinking about the future: film makers, Aboriginal activists, economists, technology experts, community leaders, venture capitalists.
You can read more about who we spoke to and what we learnt about the work it will take to get to a just future in this article.
Paper: Practices for realising just futures
There are many ways to look at the future; some people approach it through trend analysis, others through collaborative art making, some turn to experts, others draw on their spirituality, some believe it’s important to look back before looking forward, while others prefer to build on unlikely inspiration.
To better understand these diverse practices and learn from what people have done before us, we’re written a series of papers. The first reviews existing futuring practices and sets forward a hypothesis for the practices we need to embrace as part of the National Futures Initiative, to get to a more just future.
Paper: Seven Circles of Design and Inquiry
This paper tells the story of a non-Indigenous organisation (us) being guided through a re-orienting process based in living systems and Indigenous Systems Knowledges by AIME.
Told in two parts, first by AIME and then by the TACSI team, the paper introduces frameworks and protocols that illustrate practical processes for working with Indigenous Systems Knowledges.
