Food Futures
Dream Labs
Join a Dream Lab online this Summer
Rivers Running Through Us
June 11, 2024, 5:00-6:30pm PT, virtualWhat becomes possible when caring for our waters and upholding water sovereignty is a cultural and relational act?
Together, we'll dream of a food futures reshaped so that all of our infrastructure, homes, and systems now celebrate the life of water, and the abundance that water offers us.
Food as Gender Affirming Care
June 27, 2024, 5:00-6:30pm PT, virtualWhat becomes possible when sovereignty is about receiving care?
Together, we'll dream of a food futures reshaped by communities being deeply grounded in food as love, food is love, food is care, and food is nourishment as a right for all people, all bodies.
Food Futures Dream Labs are designed to spark visions of a food future rooted in joy, care, and reciprocity.
To create a food future that breaks free of cycles of extraction and exploitation, we first have to envision it.
The Food Futures Dream Lab is a creative process that brings together the radical and transformative power of dreaming with collective visioning. We'll listen to stories to spark our imagination, and immerse in a guided visioning session to help us get specific on the futures we want to create, and grow our collective capacity to bring our dreams into reality.
Interested in dreaming with your community?
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This is about the radical and transformative power of dreaming in community.
Rather than continuously replicating cycles of extraction, we believe that envisioning futures rooted in joy, care, and mutual belonging in community is a first step toward breaking out of harmful cycles and creating an irresistible future.If we can see it, we can move towards it.
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Dreams from the lab will live on a public, digital page on Food Culture Collective’s website, to affirm our collective power to grow the futures we long for.
Artists will also be commissioned to produce artistic expressions of dreams from labs, to reflect back our collective dreams and celebrate the multitude of creative expressions inspired by community visions of a future of care.
Dreaming into the future…
Imagine the place you call home, 7 generations in the future… The values that you heard about in this story about mutuality have flourished and spread… The places we live have been completely reshaped so that all of our infrastructure, homes, and systems now support mutuality. We’ve recognized that we all belong to the land, and that together we have what we need to flourish.
In this future, how are we living? What supports our mutuality?
How is this community governed to support the processes and cycles of the earth?
What is our relationship to labor?
A taste of Dream Lab prompts to spark imagination…
A taste of Dream Lab prompts to spark imagination…
This is about the power of dreaming in community.
Stories are seeds
Each Food Futures Dream Lab will ground in a story of food community reclaiming self-determination and sovereignty from the Radical Nourishment podcast. Each Dream Lab will listen to a story together then immerse in a guided collective visioning session to capture glimpses of a future where our relationships to food, land, and each other are rooted in joy, care, and reciprocity. Glimpse the story seeds here:
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Producer: Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer
The history of indigo and its dye, and how the cultivation of this plant weaves with the history of enslavement and colonization in the Americas and Black land stewardship today.
Listen to Seeding the Blues -
Producer: Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer and host of the excellent Queers at the End of the World podcast
An interview in the field that travels, with an extraordinary Black land steward in Ohio growing a community garden created by her mother, an 88 year old powerhouse, community organizer and accomplished gardener.
Listen to Nourishing Black Food -Sovereignty in Bronzeville, OH with Julialynn Walker
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Release date: 10/30/23
Producer: Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED
The story of how the Black-led and POC-staffed BK Rot -- a community- centered composting organization that's changing how New York city composts -- came to be, and its vision for transformation.
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Producer: Shephali, farmer/land steward & first-time producer
Seed sovereignty and land stewardship access rights in Seattle's Black and Indigenous communities, rooted in the long arc of movement history and rich archival tape from protests
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Producer: Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer and host of the excellent Queers at the End of the World podcast
Food as more than nourishment - food as love, as queer and trans community care after top surgery. Featuring the voices of folks with varying experiences of nourishment after surgery, interwoven with Nino's moving personal narrative of their own experience
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Producer: Shephali Patel, farmer/land steward & first-time producer
Indigenous efforts to protect the River Duwamish, formerly declared a superfund site in Seattle. Spiritual ties to water, a narrative centering the river as a sovereign being with profound lessons to teach us.
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Producer: Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer
Grief gardens as an act of radical self-determination and community healing
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Producer: Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED
A deep dive into composting as sovereignty that delves into Pakistani, Colombian and traditional western ways of composting. The story centers Earth matter, a community org that composts over 7000 tons of food in Long Island and grows multicultural heritage gardens
Listen to Growing Community from Compost
Art by Aisha Shillingford
Lineages & Gratitude
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Anti-disciplinary artist; Intelligent Mischief’s Futures Design Lab has inspired the format and questions in our toolkit.
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Such as Octavia Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Walidah Imarisha, for being leaders in building worlds where we are all free.
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The group of folx who produced the audio stories that serve as the seeds for this project.
Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer; Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer; Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED; Shephali Patel, farmer/land steward & first-time producer; gratitude to fellows for illuminating stories to nourish our dreams; Natasha Mmonatau, Narrative Strategist and Zak Rosen, Story maker for supporting the story and audio production.
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Zen Priest & Movement Strategist, teaches Long-Arc strategy honoring our relationships across generations.
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A cross-movement learning and strategy network convened by Movement Strategy Center to engage social justice movements in Just Transition; especially the founding team: Jovida Ross, Julie Quiroz, Kristen Zimmerman, Mimi Ho, and Taj James. The Transitions Labs blended futuring practices, cultural immersion, design thinking methodology, and embodied wisdom practices.