This research starts from the question: What conditions allow people to imagine the futures they desire to live in and feel they can act towards? Beginning from the understanding that futures-making capacities are not absent, but suppressed — by Modernity’s structural forces, colonized imaginaries, fragmentation of mind from body, and a futures field that has too often reproduced these same conditions — this study explores what it takes to restore them.

Through literature review, eleven expert interviews, and two series of participatory workshops with fourteen participants, this research developed and prototyped the Germination Model, a nine-stage framework for collective futures-making grounded in embodied, arts-based, and relational approaches. This model moves from within outward, from individual reconnection to the body and mind, through the surfacing of anticipatory assumptions and the naming of desires, toward collective imagination and shared practice. The ecological metaphor grounds the approach, understanding imagination not as a cognitive skill to be taught but as a living capacity to be tended.

Workshop findings suggest that when people are supported to arrive in their bodies, feel their emotional relationship to the future, name what they desire, and imagine collectively through creative and multisensory practice, something shifts. Changes arise in what they can picture, in their relationship to hope, and in their sense of agency. Hope emerged not as an outcome, but as a renewable energy that is contagious, relational, and cultivated through collective practice.

This research listens to and lifts the voices already shaping this field, weaving them with our own to contribute a futures practice that centers the whole person, expands who gets to imagine, and understands futures-making as an act of collective care.