A few weeks back we shared an update about the work we’re continuing to grow and invest in, in relation to collective imagination - creating the capacity in communities of practice, draw on, and shape futures with their collective imaginations.

Much of this work is happening on the ground, in places and we’ve previously talked about this as tending to the soil. Tending to, so that new and different kinds of growth can flourish, and giving attention to, so we notice seeds of that new growth are already there, waiting for the right conditions to germinate and grow.

This work, a new funding programme to find and resource visionaries, is perhaps more like looking upwards and outwards to the night sky and beyond, into the vast expanse of the cosmos, for those stars, constellations and galaxies that orient us towards somewhere different.

Whilst we broadly believe that some of the most important theory comes through practice, we also know there is a real need for a new wave of ‘public scholars’ - people who can open up different and unfamiliar ways of seeing, and draw us away from the status quo with the contours of new ideas. As Maurice Mitchel says in this truly stunning piece of analysis “...there is a very real intellectual component to this work” or as the brilliant tamara.k.hopper tweeted recently “Ideas matter. Serious scholarship matters.”

With this Visionaries programme we are in search of those ideas, and culture-makers. We hope to find UK-based visionaries and a next generation of public scholars who could sit alongside the people we list below, who we have looked to as sources of inspiration and orientation, as well as the amazing practitioners we are also planning to support through our Emerging Futures work.

In late spring of 2023 we will be doing a call out to find and then resource a group of visionaries. To do this well, we want to work with a partner who can help us do the following:

• Design the right framing for the programme
• Find the right partners for the programme
• Design the programme - criteria etc.

Here are some of the people we already see as visionaries - some of whom have been inspiring us for many years, and some of whom have been more recent sources of hope. As we head into a couple of weeks of rest and recuperation, we wanted to share their work for you to explore.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs who describes herself as a Queer Black Troublemaker and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings
• Sophie Strand who believes that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences and, mythical gradients.
• Vanessa Andreotti and her work of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures - who talks about ‘the pre-natal care needed for what is coming, to be present for it, without getting in front of it.’
• The ideas of Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer, who’s books - Farming While Black and Black Earth Wisdom (2023) she describes as “love songs for the land and her people.”
• We could quote bell hooks over and over, but this gem deeply resonates - “Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (though that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
• Audrey Lorde whose words “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” are so important in this work of building towards futures that live outside of dominant oppressive structures.
• Bayo Akomolafe in his now infamous essay talks of “Oh, the times are urgent, let us slow down.”