This handbook responds to the increasing urgency for reimagining futures beyond dystopias and utopias. It features essays that explore the challenges of how to think about compelling futures, what these better futures might be like, and what personal and collective practices are emerging that support the creation of more desirable futures.

Recently, an organizational leader expressed to us a frustration we’ve been hearing a lot lately: “These days, I can’t seem to get it right. On the one hand, everyone is tired and overwhelmed, so they want me to make all the decisions. But on the other hand, these same people rebel against any decision that doesn’t include them in the process.”

To open pathways of imagination beyond these habituated responses, I often invite groups to move together—and dwell for a while—into divergent spaces of not-knowing. Can we pause and stretch (even in the discomfort of it) before our habitual responses set our direction, inadvertently taking us into the same-old ruts and dead ends?

Compassion is increasingly considered an essential aspect of a thriving and resilient community. The Charter for Compassion, based on an international movement and network among scholars, organizations, and community development practitioners, believe that compassionate driven actions are central to community wellbeing and ecological sustainability.

This essay explores creativity as a more fulsome force for positive social change, and in particular, how a deeper cultivation of the creative attitude (in contrast to an authoritarian attitude) both individually and collectively, may increase the transformative potential of activist and social movement cultures and spaces.

Many practitioners in the field of systems change in North America and Europe frame the current era as a time between stories, a time of opposing worldviews. This article suggests one way of navigating the increasing uncertainty and tumultuousness of the current context is through framing these worldviews as in a generative relationship with one another.