We use fiction, visual art, and research to help teams imagine and communicate hopeful futures.
The Problem
What gets our attention, grows. What if we aren’t amplifying what we most want?
The stories we tell ourselves as a society affect how we communicate, the choices we can see, and what we dream is possible. Seen through the lens of current, popular culture, the future can look dystopian.
TV shows, movies, and books feed us a disproportionate amount of imagery and stories of danger, greed, and collapse. And within our businesses and organizations, forecasting risks can often leave us seeing the future as pre-determined with outcomes to fear.
Here's the problem: When we invest our attention toward how things could get even worse, we divert some of our attention from imagining what it could be like if things got better.
Imagining dystopia has become an industry, and in many ways, its greatest beneficiaries are also those that most stand to profit from turning our attention away from "what could be."
Our collective imagination is constricted. It takes intention and practice to release it.
About Us
What if the future could be better than what we currently imagine?
Research shows that businesses and organizations that invest time in the act of imagining positive futures, find their work becomes smarter and more innovative, their teams feel greater purpose, and their ideas attract more attention.
The worlds we want blossom from prioritizing imagination as a practice and the act of illustrating positive futures as a crucial skill. We create what we can imagine.
Building on economics, design, architecture, fiction, and biomimicry, the Futuring Collective supports teams and leaders to imagine positive futures so they can more effectively create the worlds they desire through their work.
The Futuring Collective also cultivates spaces for co-learning with other practitioners to advance the emerging field of futuring.
The Futuring Collective brings the practice of positive futuring to:
Teams and individuals
to help organizations and businesses advance and better communicate their work.
Fiction and TV/film writers
to unlock positive, possible alternatives to the status quo in their work.
Curious listeners through The Light Ahead podcast
produced annually with select partners at the forefront of re-imagining the status quo.
We work in collaboration with
a global collective of storytellers, researchers, and artists to offer:
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Workshops
We offer transformative workshops that help individuals strengthen their imagination-muscle through co-creative storytelling, visual fiction, and cross-disciplinary thinking. Workshops introduce and help participants explore the practice of futuring as a tool to refine their social impact and enhance their work.
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Coaching
We offer regular coaching for leaders designed to elevate imagination through positive futuring exercises, guided protopian application, reflection, and support for cultivating a regenerative mindset.
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Consultations
We support organizations and companies to envision and tell the story of future worlds in which their core mission and intervention is the status quo of a transformed society aligned with repair, regeneration, and justice.
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Toolkits
We offer worldbuilding toolkits designed for culture-makers and backed by research, to help inspire systems change through optimistic portrayals of future possibilities.
Our Commitment
The Futuring Collective is committed to supporting groups that want to step out of what isn’t working about business as usual and bring their visions for better ways into practical focus by situating them in possible regenerative and reparative futures.
Not all futures are imagined equal, and “positive” is a relative term. We support individuals and teams interested in imagining and being a part of transformed societies aligned with repair, regeneration, and social justice, and a positive re-integration of humans into healthy reciprocity with other species and ecological ecosystems.
We acknowledge that the present world is already a dystopia by many accounts.
We believe deep change is possible, and we want it now.
Our Team
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Co-Director & Co-founder, the Futuring Collective
Co-Showrunner, The Light AheadJess Rimington is a next economy practitioner and researcher focused on ethics. She is the co-author of Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work. Jess served as co-director of the Beloved Economies research initiative, learning alongside more than sixty organizations and companies that were boldly breaking out of business as usual. Prior, Jess served as managing director of a post-capitalist, narrative change collective called /The Rules and executive director of a cross-cultural, education initiative rooted in principles of pedagogy of the oppressed.
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Co-Director & Co-founder of Futuring Collective
Futuring Coach, The Light AheadAsha Singhal is a biomimicry practitioner, architect, and researcher focused on design. Integrating biology, architecture, and technology, she weaves pragmatic narratives of hope inspired by nature. Beyond architecture, Asha bridges imaginative futures with reality. She has served as the Executive Design Lead at Biomimicry Frontiers and Advisor at Biomimicry Academy. With an international portfolio spanning diverse projects, she advocates for a world where our built systems not only harmonize with nature but also shape a possible and regenerative tomorrow.
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Writer and Co-Showrunner, The Light Ahead
Catherine Eaton is a director, writer, actor, and storytelling activist. Catherine directed/co-wrote the feature THE SOUNDING - starring Harris Yulin (OZARK) and Frankie Faison (THE WIRE) – which won over two-dozen awards on the festival circuit, sold to HBO for international broadcast, myCinema for North American theatrical, and was nominated for the SAMHSA Voice Awards for activism. She is currently at work on her next feature film, THE CONTROL ROOM, co-written by Naomi McDougall-Jones and Christian Coulson. She is one of the first six Regenerative Filmmakers for reGEN Media. She was selected as a Shadowing-Director for Ryan Murphy's Half Program and for Tribeca Film Festival's "Through Her Lens" Director’s Lab and Grant. Catherine is a Statera Mentee under Showrunner Kit Steinkellner and an inaugural Avalon: Story Fellow. Catherine’s pilot FREE RADICAL – based on her experience working with freelance news crews in conflict zones – was selected for The Gotham/IFP's Project Forum. Catherine is a Director/Writer at Next Chapter Podcasts where she’s directed seven fiction episodes and wrote/adapted 55 episodes in collaboration with Marcus Gardley (THE CHI), Oscar-winner Jeffrey Witty and others. She has created content for MSG's Garden of Dreams Foundation and shares an Emmy with the production team on "The Human Toll of Ethanol" (Bloomberg TV). As an actor, she has performed on Broadway. Catherine teaches Screen Directing at Harvard. She is Paraguayan and French-American.
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Writer, The Light Ahead
Jacqueline Pereda is a writer, producer, and comedian who is passionate about creating stories that comment on the culture and our universal struggle with identity.
Jacqueline wrote, directed and produced the half-hour comedic pilot, GENERATION POR QUÉ? that was licensed to Max. HBO Latino acquired the film after a successful festival run and was an official selection for SeriesFest, where Jacqueline was awarded the Caz Matthews Fund - a fund supporting filmmakers who are committed to diversity and the dispelling of stereotypes in storytelling, as well as the Women In Comedy Festival and the LA Comedy Festival. Additionally her work has appeared on TruTV, Funny or Die, Mas Mejor, WhoHaha, Brown Girl Magazine, the Women in Comedy Festival and Brooklyn Comedy Festival. She also wrote, produced and directed the satirical news show, The Ethnically Ambiguous News Hour, that aired weekly on her YouTube channel. She has written, directed and produced over 20 shorts and musical parodies in NYC and on her YouTube channel.
She is a proud alum of the UCB sketch program and was a semifinalist for the Sundance New Voices Lab in 2017. Her full-length play, A Visitor's Pass on the Virgin Mary was a Finalist for the 2020 Screencraft Play competition and awarded the 2019 Residency at the New York's Governor Island's Arts Center through Hypokrit Theater Company. Most recently, Jacqueline was the Story Editor on a scripted bilingual comedy with Ochenta Podcasts for Spotify LATAM Originals.
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Writer, The Light Ahead
Makia Martin is an actor, writer, and cookie lover lurking around NYC. She’s been seen in Law & Order: SVU, NBC's The Blacklist, and most recently Hulu's Only Murders In The Building. Makia is super excited to be working with this amazing team again. So, sit back, relax, and prepare your eardrums for some gentle, smooth podcasting tones.
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Writers, The Light Ahead
Nat & Veronica Moonhill are LA based filmmakers by way of New Orleans experimental theater. This dynamic Cancer/Scorpio duo met at Bard College over a decade ago and have been collaborating on weird, freaky projects ever since.
Recently, they were fellows in the 2023 Film Independent Screenwriter's Lab with their feature film script 'Kiki Goes Baby Crazy!' In 2021 Veronica assisted director Oliva Newman on the set of Sony Picture’s'Where the Crawdads Sing' and Nat was awarded Grand Prize in the Creative Screenwriting competition.
Their award winning work has been presented by OUT Fest, New Orleans Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, NoBudge, Deep Focus, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, Fischer Center for the Performing Arts, Prospect 1, Catch, FringeArts Philly, New Orleans Fringe Festival, Mount Tremper Arts, PARSE Gallery, DUST, The Front Gallery, FORGE Festival, The Off Center and more.
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Writer, The Light Ahead
Sami Bass is a filmmaker and ancestral healer bringing the ancient ceremonial elements of storytelling into the future of filmmaking. Sami has traveled the globe to study with elders from various traditions, and brought these practices to their work as a filmmaker and healer. Sami has been an influential voice in groundbreaking films and advocacy including the gender-parity platform, MoviesByHer, and social documentary series, Disrupting the Silence, which held space for people from all walks of life to tackle difficult conversations regarding race, gender, identity and equality in front of the camera to encourage a culture that tackles adversity head on.
Sami has also worked alongside such organizations as LevelForward (Slave Play, Jagged Little Pill) + The Red Sands Project on advocacy and impact, carving space for lesser-heard voices in the industry. In 2021 Sami worked alongside Golden Globe winner, Irene Bedard, on a Sundance Institute film to explore how indigenous stories could take up space in modern media without being exploited. Sami uses their skills as a healer, a Black and indigenous womxn, queer person, and award-winning filmmaker to weave safer spaces for the previously-voiceless while digging deep into the shadows of society, forging equality and healing for all.
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Writer, The Light Ahead
Sarah Springer is an Emmy-nominated producer, documentary filmmaker, and creative working in unscripted and scripted development for production companies and labs. She started her career at CNN where she reported and wrote stories about race and identity for Soledad O’Brien’s In America series, then later worked as a producer for ABC's Good Morning America, Nike, CBS News/60 Minutes, BET, and VICE Media. She began working in immersive storytelling at RYOT Media where she oversaw creative direction and production for immersive, branded, and linear series before becoming an independent consultant, producer and director.
Sarah was voted one of the top 28 most powerful Black people in media by Blavity, was recently nominated for a Clio Award, and is the Co-creator of STILL HERE, an immersive experience that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Festival created in partnership with Al Jazeera Contrast. She recently produced Love, Lizzo for HBO Max and a documentary series following the Women's National Soccer team with TIME Studios for Netflix. She continues to work as a Professor of Journalism at USC and the CEO of TISSUE LLC and co-founder of Advocates for Inclusion in Media, an organization dedicated to supporting Black creatives in the industry.
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