In 2023, as the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) approached its 15-year anniversary, the team began having conversations about the future.
What they learnt from speaking with more than 30 visionary thinkers from across the country, is the forces already shaping our society – climate change, extremism, machine intelligence – are likely to accelerate inequity and marginalisation. This leaves us a choice: prepare for this future or actively shape a different one.
PRF provided five years’ seed funding to TACSI in 2024 to establish the National Futures Initiative, designed to build Australia’s capacity to imagine and create a more just and sustainable future.
The Initiative is not about predicting the future but about expanding the nation’s sense of possibility.
“It can be difficult to imagine a better future,” says PRF Chief Alliances Officer Liz Yeo, “but we know that it is essential work to do if we want services, policies and systems that are intentionally set up so people and communities have what they need to thrive.”
Over the past year TACSI has laid the groundwork for the National Futures Initiative. Its first publication, Practices for Realising Just Futures, surveyed global examples of futures practice and distilled lessons that can guide efforts in Australia. TACSI has also established two initial networks, the Future of Childhood and the Future of Community, which bring together a diverse cross-section of people to explore how we can reimagine the systems that shape our lives. Participants, including practitioners, community members, artists, academics and people with lived experience, will meet regularly over the next two years.
Claire Marshall, who is leading the National Futures Initiative at TACSI, says these futures networks are set up to, “intentionally create relationships between people who might be unlikely connections, but who each bring with them valuable experience, knowledges, practices, and different levers of change. Our aim in these networks is to support them to collaborate in a way that shifts the status quo and advances systemic change.”
The team has been intentional about including people and expertise often left out of conversations about the future: the public, First Nations peoples, Indigenous Knowledges, people experiencing marginalisation and future generations themselves.
Claire says that while researchers and governments recognise the need for new ways of doing things to manage and adapt to future crises, there is less energy put into imagining a more just future and how we might get there together.
“In these times we are living in, change and uncertainty can bring with them fear and division. A national focus on actively shaping imaginations and innovations for how we might live through the next quarter of the 21st century in just and regenerative ways is not just valuable, it can be a salve for our times.
“Through this initiative we’re aiming to expand Australians’ sense of possibility, provide proof of what’s possible, and support and mobilise the people and networks to make it happen.”
