Collective Imagination
Collective imagination is often described as envisioning different futures together. At its deepest, it does something more fundamental: it can enable ontological shifts — changes in what people understand as real, possible, and valuable. Not swapping one opinion for another, but waking up in a different world.
An ontological shift means disinvesting from the logic of separability, control, and domination that modernity taught us; reactivating our capacity to feel, sense, and relate as entangled beings within a living web; and staying with complexity, paradox, and discomfort without rushing to fix, flee, or simplify.
It is also about power: who gets to define what counts as real, and where the boundaries of the possible lie. Understood this way, imagination is a political capacity — it shapes what can be seen, attempted, or believed, and offers orientation when maps no longer suffice.
The Collective Imagination Practice Community (CIPC) was founded in 2022 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Emerging Futures team, with Huddlecraft and Canopy as community stewards. It exists to grow and deepen collective imagination practice in the UK and beyond.
As of April 2026 the community has over 1,700 members globally.
The community works through an open programme of learning activities, a series of hosted Huddles, and a Practice Fund offering micro-grants.
Micro-funded projects — the stories and ripples from a Practitioner’s Fund of £300k which supports imagination projects, practice experiments, practitioner exchanges and more.
Learning themes — deeper, peer-led learning journeys (Huddles) where they incubated imagination themes and practice over several months.
Community events and initiatives — join the online community on Hylo↗︎ and explore past and future online meet-ups which explore questions about imagination practice.
**A Seed Library**↗︎ — sharing activities (practices), projects and learnings from across the ecosystem.
In late 2023 Arising Quo added a further £50k to this fund, earmarked for practitioners in Europe — enough to support 18 projects across the continent.
Arising Quo seeded this work in Europe because they hold collective imagination not as a technique for sharper foresight, but as a practice capable of changing the ground people stand on. Aware of no other funders doing the same, they had hoped to draw more funders into this 'soil work'.
Some of the amazing stories of initiatives that the CIPC supported are shared here, from Tidal Bodies, to Town Anywhere and Death and the Collective Imagination. Below you can access the report created by CIPC for Arising Quo sharing their experience and insights from trying to seed and grow this work in Europe.
