What Is an Imagination Activist?

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Sustainability by 2030: planetary or internal sustainability? What scale are they looking at? I think for the sustainable development goals, it's planetary sustainability. How do you actually create that bridge into the systems that we're building? Right. We've been playing with these different memes of how do you embed imagination. It's not enough just to imagine and dream the future. You also have to be equipped with the tools to build new systems to save our planet. That's a really key part. And what about the inner sustainability goals? The conflict. So it's really... Yes, it definitely is.

What are the most effective tools we can engage to create new, different, better futures? How do we translate our visions of a generative future into action now? What are our bridging tools, that exist now and take us forward to a world that would work for everyone?

Phoebe Tickell is an imagination activist, renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur. Originally trained as a biologist (she has a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University), she now works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. Until 2021 she was working in philanthropy at The National Lottery Community Fund to implement systems-thinking approaches to funding and and leading insight and learning in the £12.5 million Digital Fund.

On the way through, she has co-founded a series of organisations dedicated to systems change via innovative approaches, including 225 Academy, which delivered 5-day transformative experiences for young people aged 11-18 globally; Future Farm Lab, which created systemic interventions to the food system and the Our Field Project — an experiment in a group of citizens co-owning and co-governing a field of grain in Hertfordshire.

More recently, she is founder of Moral Imaginations and RenaissanceU, a member of Enspiral, part of the Don't Go Back to Normal Project, on the board of Renaissance U, and an advisor to the Consilience Project. She's a certified Warm Data Lab host and an advisor to the International Bateson Institute. She recently led 1,000 people in a Collective Imagination journey in Berlin and then 4,000 in Sweden.

In all of this, she took time out to talk to Accidental Gods about the nature of the present moment, how we can find the learning tools that will bridge to the future we want to envision, and how we translate those visions of the future into values. In a wide ranging, inspiring, edge-walking conversation, she explored the balance of inner and outer worlds, tangible and intangible and how we might connect them; she talks of falling in love with Solar Punk again (her Twitter handle is @solarpunk_girl, so that feels quite huge), having read that 'Solar Punk without the end of capitalism, is just greenwasher CyberPunk'. So we explore what cyber punk is, too, and Protopian writing, and how it relates to Thrutopian writing, before we move onto the nature of existing Solar Punk communities and how they frame their underlying values.

This was a genuinely sparky conversation: it felt as if we really dug deep into the nuts and bolts of change and how it could happen - come along for the ride!

SolarPunk links:

SOLARPUNK: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrow

How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (ft. @Andrewism)
How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future (ft. @Our Changing Climate)