“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
In this time of global pandemic and economic crisis, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the present moment and long for the familiar past. It would be understandable for us to just try to make it through this crisis with as many of us alive, housed, and fed as possible. That is a commendable mission and a perilous task on its own.
But what if we decided that wasn’t enough? What if we decided we wanted to not just to survive, but to thrive after this crisis? What if we decided to live up to the social sector’s mission to help civilization reach its collective potential? This is the most important moment in our lifetimes for us to dwell on the future.
The future doesn’t just happen to us, we create it with the decisions that we make each day. The days that we are living in right now are critical days. The ways that we treat our sick, our caregivers, our elders, and our most marginalized will determine what our future will look like.
So how do we do this? We must make time for the future in our present. Just take 2 hours a week, away from the news and away from your email to imagine what you’d like the future to look like. Here are a few tools you can use to get to that ideal future.
Stop
Stop loving the problem. While it is important to understand how many COVID-19 cases are in your community and how long businesses that aren’t deemed essential will be closed, spending all of your time focused on the problem takes you away from possible solutions. Our brains stay in fight or flight mode and we can’t develop creative solutions. What if we spent some of our time skipping the problem of COVID-19 and instead imagined our ideal result? What would we like our communities or the issue your organization works on to look like after this pandemic is over? What can you do now to make that future more likely?
Look
Look for signals of the future in the present. Today is giving us clues about what the future might look like. Take some time to notice those signals and write them down in a notebook or in an app like Evernote. What are some new innovations or new ways of being that are emerging from this challenge? For foundations, how did you expedite grant requests? What parts of that process could you use for regular grant rounds? For nonprofits, how did you hear about needs from community members? Can you keep those communication lines open for the future? How can we keep the positive habits we have developed in this moment?
Go
Go try it out. This is a time when innovation and experimentation is critical. As a social sector we need to take big risks that could have huge payoff for our community. We need to invest more of our time and resources in community engagement and advocacy. How do we leverage the learning of this moment into new public policy on things like tech access for school children, paid sick leave for all employees, and health insurance that you can access with or without employment?
This is the time for us to play big and to create our dent on society. What the world needs now are masses of visionaries working to build a better future. You are that visionary. I can’t wait to see the future we are building together but I think I can hear her breathing.