Narrative Futures Design - The new video course is live!

Dear friends, family, collaborators & community...

Welcome to 2022!

Narrative Futures Design
The new video course is live!

I know, I know, it's March already, but this past winter's months moved in winter time, and so here we are, with the first I4NW news of 2022 - and oh, is it good. 

This year, I'm trying out shorter newsletters slightly more often (think actually once a month) - with one piece of news each, so it's easy for you to know what's happening over here at Index for the Next World, and to get involved / get access to each offering!

This month's news is particularly big and exciting: I have a new online course for you!

In partnership with the excellent facilitators and design thinkers over at Voltage Control, I just launched my new online video course, Narrative Futures Design. The course is available through the Voltage Control Elective Courses platform here, and if you enroll right now you get $50 off!

If you're a group facilitator, a leader of a team, collective, or small-to-medium company / organization, and you have an interest in expanding your group’s creative change-making capacities beyond business-as-usual, this course is for you.

Please share the link with your communities, check it out, and let me know what you think! And if someone signs up for the course based on your recommendation, let me know, and I'll send you a special gift :) 

Narrative Futures Design: The Course In More Detail

What will happen in this course?

Participants will learn to utilize and facilitate “backwards design” skills to support their projects and teams; they will gain tools to promote emergent thinking and collaboration (rather than emergency/scarcity thinking), in order to access wide and unexpected futures innovation; and they will access and build neurological somatic practices for expanding beyond barriers and roadblocks that can appear in forwards design.

What are "Narrative Futures" tools?

Narrative Futures tools allow us to do backwards design, working from “inside a future” in which the problem is already solved! In this course, we’ll learn and practice tools for outside-the-box innovation and backwards futures-design, using story, creative practices, somatic tools, and design-thinking to expand the futures we design and create. Plus, you’ll learn skills for sharing these practices with your team or group. Create beyond apparent contradictions and perceived scarcity. Uncover the stories you’re enacting now, and the ones you actually want to embody, whether as an individual, a team, or an organization. Connect with your team and bring their dreams and offerings into the group ecosystem, and access wild and unexpected innovation, so that you can make the futures you imagine possible starting with actions and designs today.

www.indexforthenextworld.com

Design Your Edible Garden Today!

Edible Garden Design
For All Kinds Of Locations & Needs

I am edible garden designer.

For my whole life growing up, I didn’t know that’s something you could be. At 21, I approached my Environmental Studies thesis advisor in despair, asking, “But what am I going to do?” I’m not a policy and lobbying person (thank you from the bottom of my toes in the dirt to those who are!), and seem to shrivel if I spend more than one day indoors.

“Have you thought about edible landscape design?” she asked? I had not. I had never even heard of it.

It would be many more years working and learning in community food systems, sustainable agriculture, farm-based science and skills education, and permaculture design and practice, before I remembered that this was something one could do. And I remembered because I was slowly realizing it was something I really, really wanted to do.

And so I trained. I have practiced visual arts my whole life, with a particular focus on sketching and a love of designing spaces. I had also trained and worked for many years in garden-based education. Now, I began to learn the magic of design-thinking, the art of facilitation and client conversations, and the ecology-based, natural-pattern-filled design specialty known as permaculture design. All the while continuing to put literal seeds in the ground.

And so it was that I started designing edible gardens. I loved it. I still do! I help current and hopeful home gardeners design delicious edible gardens for their particular spaces, desires, and accessibility needs. I use analog sketching and hands-on design tools to create a beautiful, bespoke design for your garden, then deliver it digitally so you can access it easily, along with easy-start materials lists and first-steps guides to get you going.

I’m an artist and designer who has worked in sustainable farming and gardening for over a decade. I’ve completed several permaculture design certifications, trained in and taught regenerative and ecological agriculture, and helped map, plan, and install gardens in urban and rural settings, from front porches to multi-acre sites.

As a disabled and chronically ill gardener myself, I love innovating and designing for accessibility and adaptations in the garden. I also love a creative challenge - ancestral plants themed garden? Let’s do it! Plants from a particular beloved cookbook? Here we go! Reach out with your creative and weird garden ideas!

I offer gardening tutoring and client co-work-and-learn sessions, in which I teach you organic gardening skills and practices as we put your new garden design into the ground together. Or if you have an existing edible garden but feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, I’m here to help! If you’ve always wanted to garden, but feel intimidated or locked out of the “mystery,” or if you’ve got the beginnings of a garden but just can’t seem to get it thriving and want to learn more, I will help you get growing with a series of hands on lessons. I also work with experienced gardeners who want to dig down - folks who want to deepen an existing practice, and weave in deeper and wider homesteading and permaculture crafts and skills.

I’ve taught gardening and farming to all ages and skill levels, in rural and urban settings, across many different access needs, always with an eye on social justice, reparation and repair, and radical re-connection to our membership in our own ecology. I love the look on someone’s face the first time they hold a tomato in their hands that they grew from seed.

Supporting Groups Of Friends, Families, Colleagues & Collectives

I love creating garden learning experiences for small groups and teams - whether you and your family want to learn to garden together through once-a-week lessons, or you and your team are in search of a professional development workshop in permaculture design (an ecological design process that can be applied to everything from gardens to organizations themselves), or you’re a community collective who wants to learn to install and care for a shared garden space, I have something in my gardener’s bag for you. I’ll work with you to come up with a workshop or ongoing lesson design that meets your group’s needs. I particularly love training garden educators in specialty skills like permaculture design, fermentation and land-based crafts, designing for animals in the farm ecosystem, and accessible and adaptive gardening. I also love working with my fellow chronically ill “spoonie” and disabled community to build garden practices and skills that work for and nourish us, whatever our access needs may be.

Willow and the Sacredness of "Use"

If you're wondering if I stopped the car (with the dog in it) in the middle of a huge collection of hard-hatted and neon-vested tree workers to yell over the sound of the chainsaw "can I have that?" and then unabashedly jammed what I can only describe as a full-sized Willow tree (bound for the chipper!! ) into my luggage rack and slowly turned around to take it home, where I then dismantled it into pieces for a (hopefully living!) shade sail post in the yard and materials for basket making, and stuffed them all into a bucket of water next to the piano since it's fire season and we can't keep woody materials close the house outside...

...the answer is, obviously, yes. 

Pro tip: cute dog makes tree workers less annoyed with you for interrupting their streamlined work flow 

Willow is a sacred plant to me for the reason things are often sacred to me...it has so many "uses" which is a rather annoyingly English language way of saying that it's connected to so many ecosystem needs and offers so many "magical" options for interwoven thriving. I believe in the sacredness of "utility" - NOT productivity-burnout-capitalism, not extraction-disposaibility-objectification (objects are sacred everything is a subject and an object) - but rather, to feel so rightly in relationship, to be of use, to be used, to have a place to put my offerings and gifts so they don't pile up into pollution from not being shared.

So when I say I love Willow because of how useful it is, that is a statement of reverence, delight, wonder. Like this plant is asking me to be active, physical relationship with them. In like 47 different ways - Willow bark is an anti-inflammatory pain herb, willows re-root easily and love to have their feet wet and make great erosion-preventers along or even IN streams, willows make beautiful useful baskets, living fences, habitat, and aesthetic and auditory relief in this dry season.

I got home and onto the internet and discovered that of course it's also in my bloodline - a tree particularly sacred in Greece, known for, amongst many other things, both calling in the medicine of, and protecting us as we walk through, the underworld. As we do now.

August Check-In - Narrowing Futures, Growing Worlds

Hey Next-World Visionaries, Designers, and Dreamers…

Are you exhausted?

I'm going to be honest with you, I'm exhausted.

For delightful reasons - client work is so extremely fulfilling and I'm so excited that I'm getting to do more of it! I want to do more of it so badly! (Hop on a free call with me if you want to chat more!) And not-so-delightful reasons - Covid Deja-Vu, the climate report from this morning, my ongoing ups and downs with fatigue and feeling ill.

I know so many folks are feeling strapped and stressed in the present, and finding ourselves with narrowing visions of the future.

To me, in times where we feel this out of control, and it's hard to hold a vision of any kind of thriving future for people or planet, that's where small, tangible next-world designs come in. How are you imagining, designing, and building the worlds you do have creative influence on, the worlds that surround you every day? Whether it's your vocation or your morning routine, your next workshop or your organizational ecosystem, your garden or your accessibility plan, you are surrounded by small and significant worlds that you co-create every day. Everything around you can be re-imagined based on emerging or changing needs, values, desires, and dreams.

I am LOVING getting to co-create some of these worlds with some of you! I'm helping several clients one-on-one design their next vocational offerings or career moves. I'm working with organizations and groups to design their decision-making structures. And I'm building out offerings for sick and disabled folks to get design-thinking support adapting to a world that is often designed with an extremely able-bodied end-user in mind who is, basically, not us. I'm excited to be working with SpeakEasy to bring my first workshop on Disability & Design Thinking to life on Sept 1!

Meanwhile, Index For The Next World is pivoting to test out a cohort-based model for our publication and index - you can find out more about that in the video below, and keep an eye on the website and this newsletter for updates when the first cohort opens for applications!

Thinking of you all and the threads of community and landscape that connect us, near and far. Please reach out if you want to talk about anything - I would love to chat.

Sending safety and ease your way,
Rachel

A Letter to Our Members - And to YOU!

December 2020 / Solstice / Changes!

The following is my December letter to our Village Members - a Village you can become a part of! - as we close out the year and approach some exciting changes that will make our monthly Member Village content more accessible to all. Want to join in or learn more? Shoot me a line!

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Hello, dear I4NW Village Members!

As the roiling year of 2020 comes to a close, and we approach the Winter Solstice as well as the turning of the calendar year, I want to share some exciting upcoming changes here in the Member Village, as well as two videos that I feel might be particularly supportive to you in this time of sinking into darkness, green things in winter, and bright stars.

FIRST: Starting around February 2021, the I4NW Member Village will switch to being FREE! You will be able to subscribe, get the monthly members-only newsletter (with some added recs and resources), and watch 1-3 videos made by me, all for free. Please watch the update video below for more details about why this is happening, why it's so exciting for me, and why I hope you'll join me in that excitement and in the next iteration of the Village!

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW - TLDR;

- We're making a new Member Village - a one-stop place where you can subscribe, for FREE, to I4NW's monthly village content

- During January, you'll receive the link to switch over to the free subscription - please click it when you do! I don't want to drop anyone from the village through the cracks, so reach out to me if you have any trouble switching over at rachel.nextworld[AT]gmail.com

- The current (paid) Member Village subscription will stay live until the end of January, as will the Practice Patreon. At the end of January, I will cancel these paid subscriptions (you don't need to do anything to make that happen!)

- I won't add any new content during January, and subscriptions will continue to the end of the month, in order to give folks a chance to catch up on content during January. If you want to cancel your subscription earlier than the end of January, that's totally fine!

- This next, free version of the Member Village will include video captions, the ability to leave comments on videos and share them with your friends, and more topics in the videos!



SECOND: Submissions for the Winter Issue are Still Open!
We're accepting submissions through New Year's for our winter issue, themed "Edge," and we would love to receive submissions from village members and your friends! Please spread the word <3

THIRD: This month's videos are here to support both the grief and the creative re-design richness that can arise in winter, especially this year. They're linked below, with more info.

Finally, I want to say a deep thank you to all of you. In the middle of a year of isolation, terrifying disease, increasing exposures of inequities, growing resistance to white-supremacist systems of violence, and ever growing evidence that we are more interconnected than our current systems can even fathom, you came here and helped begin this community. You shared your thoughts, queries, enthusiasms. You reached inward and outward to find tangible, actionable measures of hope, actual practices for imagining and building the worlds we need, now. You also helped me more than I can explain - feeling connected to you through making videos for you/in conversation with you cut through my own isolation and kept me from getting immobilized. Grief and creativity live side by side, and both need community to thrive, and to see the next world while caring for the current one and making repair for the past. It is exponentially easier for me to hold both when I am in connection with you, and I hope the same feels true in your direction to some extent. Wherever you are, however you're doing, you are always welcome here - you are the "us" of this village, and I'm so excited to venture into this next iteration together, and keep seeding the next world together.

Hoping this winter in the Member Village supports you and those around you, including the land and more-than-human, find rest, compost, ease in the darkness, and green things singing quietly about the coming spring.

With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW

Submissions are OPEN for the Winter 2020 Issue, "Edge" !

Some Big November News from I4NW

Submissions Open, Survey Goes Live, & More!

Hello Index For The Next World Community!

Whew, what a week it's been. I hope that some form of relief or reprieve or rejuvenation, whether it be news, or rain, or something sweet to eat, is finding its way to you.

Here at I4NW, we've got 3 important pieces of news, and they involve you!

1. Submissions for the Winter Issue are Open!
We've opened submissions for the next issue of the I4NW publication, themed "Edge," and we would love to receive submissions from you and your community! Please pass the word along! More below.

2. Our Survey For You Is Live! Click here!
We made I4NW for you, our community, and we want to adapt it to be more exciting, accessible, and engaging to you! Please share your feedback and input by filling out the survey - it's a fun one. Thank you!

3. We still have free 7-day trials of the member village available!
We've included links to recent Member Village content in this newsletter - read on to can get an idea of what we offer. If you click through, you'll be redirected to a sign-up form, where you can grab the free trial and watch all the classes for free to see if the village is for you! Link above also takes you directly to the free trial sign-up.

More on all that below. Hoping this month in the Member Village supports you as we build together to take care of ourselves, each other, and the land.


With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW

P.S.
Want to gift a village membership to a friend for a month, or a year? Reach out at indexforthenextworld.com/contact!

Submissions Are Open
Send Us Your Stuff!

Submissions are Open for the Winter 2020 Issue: Edge

Read the Full Call / Submit Here

From the submissions call:

"In this moment between worlds, we invite in visions from the edge.

Edge-walkers, rollers, slitherers, dancers, send us your next-world notes from the in-between.

With your paintbrush or body or pen, sing to us from the edges of stories - the operating stories that are the DNA of current dominant system, and the seed-stories, the surviving-stories, the germinating stories of the instead-world, of the next world as if it were already here, hiding in our pockets, in the forgotten sidewalk soil..."
 

Submit to "Edge"

Survey Time
Let's Re-Design Our Village To Meet Our Needs!

The I4NW Survey allows us to co-create and design the next iteration of the Member Village, and the business/ website in general, to meet our needs and desires together. This survey is for anyone who has any contact with Index For The Next World! That includes all our beloved newsletter community - you! We invite and welcome you to keep your voice in the conversation by filling out the survey here, or clicking on the button below. It truly is the heart of the design process to receive feedback, and we are grateful to collaborate with you in this way.

Fill Out the Survey Here

October's Village Video Classes
Check out what our members are watching in the village!

Check Out October in the Village

In our Out of the Garden Shed video this month, we're doing some Weeding! (No really, it's fun!) This month's learning thread is Dig Into Permaculture, and we are headed off on a Permaculture Principles Scavenger Hunt!The art download is a Bingo Board of Permaculture Principles to use in the scavenger hunt!

November in the Member Village
Every month, we publish 2 video classes and a PDF for village members

Check Out November in the Village

In our Out of the Garden Shed video this month, we're learning all about Cover Crops! What are they? How can we use them? How they are secretly an accessibility adaptation? This month's learning thread is Design Thinking For Change, and we are diving in to the design process by learning and practicing Needs & Values Mapping. Our art download is a Needs & Values Mapping Root System Worksheet for you to draw / write / brainstorm on!

Thank you all!

Here's to taking care of ourselves, each other, and the earth the best we can, and imagining and living the next world now.
xo,
Rachel

[A quick note: we are in beta (trying it out) mode, and are working to get captions and image descriptions integrated throughout the site. These are priorities for us, and just to be transparent, we are currently a one-spoonie-woman-run-biz, and it's taking a bit of time to get there.]

Community Care - Election Day

View this post on Instagram

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to the All Hallows' Eve retreat! It was lovely to create with you all. If you missed it, don't worry- we're hoping to offer a Design Thinking as Ritual Practice retreat on the winter solstice! Keep an eye/ear/palm out for more details soon (and DM if you already know you're interested!) . On this strange and urgent day, in this strange and urgent year and world, we want to offer the prayer that our bodies, communities, and ecosystems know a lot about how to take care of each other, in decentralized and diverse ways, and that we can sink into and call on this trust and knowing today and in days to come as we also face fear and unknowns, not because it is enough or replaces or fixes drastic systemic harm-it doesn't, but because it is alive within the cracks of the systems that don't take care of us, and we are committed to tenaciously fighting to keep it and each other alive. We're here with and for you. Thank you for fighting and collaborating. Thank you for voting. Thank you for taking care of yourselves and each other. Love, An Index For The Next World . [Image of Rachel, a white person with chin length honey hair, in bright red lipstick, ochre yellow hand knitted sweater, and black witches hat with star shaped holes in it that the light shines through] . #vote #communitycare

A post shared by Index For The Next World I4NW (@index_for_the_next_world) on Nov 3, 2020 at 11:27am PST

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to the All Hallows' Eve retreat! It was lovely to create with you all. If you missed it, don't worry- we're hoping to offer a Design Thinking as Ritual Practice retreat on the winter solstice! Keep an eye/ear/palm out for more details soon (and DM if you already know you're interested!)
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On this strange and urgent day, in this strange and urgent year and world, we want to offer the prayer that our bodies, communities, and ecosystems know a lot about how to take care of each other, in decentralized and diverse ways, and that we can sink into and call on this trust and knowing today and in days to come as we also face fear and unknowns, not because it is enough or replaces or fixes drastic systemic harm-it doesn't, but because it is alive within the cracks of the systems that don't take care of us, and we are committed to tenaciously fighting to keep it and each other alive. We're here with and for you. Thank you for fighting and collaborating. Thank you for voting. Thank you for taking care of yourselves and each other.

Love,
An Index For The Next World
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[Image of Rachel, a white person with chin length honey hair, in bright red lipstick, ochre yellow hand knitted sweater, and black witches hat with star shaped holes in it that the light shines through]

All Hallows' Eve Re-Treat!

Please join I4NW and Rachel Economy for an
All Hallows' Eve Mini Re-Treat for Writers & Creators of all kinds!

1-3:30 pm EST (10-12:30 PST) on Zoom
$55-25 sliding scale OR free to all I4NW Practice Patrons & Village Members
Theme: Edge-Walkers. 
COSTUMES ENCOURAGED!

Re-Treat Description: Join us for a delicious dive into writing and creating together on All Hallows' Eve. Our intention here is to come together in this many-layered moment and get real cozy with ourselves, our creative edges, and all the edges we find ourselves in and on, at a time when the veil grows thin, and the edges between the worlds blur. I like to hold my facilitation with a strong time container, a little bit of ritual, lots of prompts and time to generate work/play, and absolute freedom r.e. your medium of choice, whether you share anything, and whether you follow the prompts! Safety to generate / play / get messy = priority. "Edge" is also the theme of the next Index For The Next World issue, which will open to submissions this fall, so this could also be a great way to generate pieces to submit for that!

How To Reserve Your Spot: Send an email to rachel.nextworld@gmail.com letting us know how you'd like to register - 

- By becoming / Already being a Practice Patron
- By becoming / Already being a Village Member
- By paying the one-time retreat registration on the sliding scale ($55-25)

We'll then send you an email with your registration details and final steps!

FAQs:

Can I invite my friends? Yes! Please! Do itttttt!!!
Will there be CC- Not this time around, we're working on it for next time.
Will it be recorded? No! It's confidential!
Do I have to write? No! Use whatever creative medium you want!

Can't wait to play and create with you as the leaves fall!

Morning Routines & Rituals - A Design Process Life Hack For Your Days

Desgin Thinking for Morning Routine - The Video!

We're excited to share some of the resilience skills we teach in free, easy-to-put-to-use ways that you can immediately apply to daily life right now. We're here to support you in imagining and building the worlds you need where you are- the kitchen, the container garden, the morning, each is a little world. Watch this video for a quick-n-dirty design process to support you in creating a morning routine that meets your needs, is pleasurable, and that you can actually implement!

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A post shared by Index For The Next World I4NW (@index_for_the_next_world) on Apr 29, 2020 at 3:42am PDT

Lineages of World - Builders

When we work, play, dance, fight, design, collaborate to build next worlds that serve thriving and justice, we're building on and with, and in service to, the foundations and wisdom of generations of creators and change-makers. People and groups whose work and creations taught us, caused our bodies to sing out in recognition and longing for the worlds they built towards, enabled current and future work and creation. Enabled the gritty, practical experience of hope when we were in despair.
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Who emerges in your personal world-building lineage? Who lights you up?🌿

Our Sacred & Necessary Work - August Letter to the Community

Dearest community,

Whether you are beyond weary, feeling well-resourced, or both/ and/ more, we're here with you this month. I feel my own grief and despair as a dusty animal curled in my ribs, alert to, and alarmed by, the out-of-season storms and coming fires where I am, the ongoing political situation full of racist oppression and suppression taking place in the US and beyond, and the continuing and devastating global pandemic.

I long for gentle rain, to embrace a friend, to feel a tangible scope and space of hope, to gather in a place with others and plant seeds. And I long deeply, sharply, for drastic systemic change, for a future for people and planet. 

It's at moments like this when I can find myself asking, what is the point of world-building? Why work and play to build skills, stories, systems in ourselves and our communities that embody the world we need? Are we even going to make it to the point, as a planet, where these things will have the chance to germinate and grow on a large scale? Is there even going to be a future? Should all of our effort go solely towards resisting the current systems?

And then I remember two things, things I learned from people who have been doing the simultaneous work of repairing, resisting, and re-imagining / replacing, for generations.

First, I remember that the time is now. We need these skills, stories, and systems now, not just at some far-off future point. We need them in our homes, our relationships, our communities of resistance and repair. We need them because they can foster access, resilience, pleasure, and co-care, and those aren't luxuries, they are urgent necessities for people now.

We're not waiting around until the next world seems globally possible to start figuring out how we'd like to live in that world - how we behave and design now affects who makes it through, alive and resilient, through the present moment and into a future. I am reminded of the arrogance of my own despair- that I don't actually know what futures will come, apocalyptic or otherwise. This moment is what's here. How are we co-creating with this moment itself to live the next world now, in this world, in the worlds that we touch every day?

This is our sacred and necessary work: to care for each other and the land, now. 

And the second thing I remember is that seeds can be stored. In the right conditions, some can be stored for generations. In others, seeds need to be grown out each year to keep the genome, the genetic design magic of that lineage of seed, continuing on.

So too do stories and skills require refuge. We carry these seeds in our pockets, we pass them on to one another to plant, grow again, save more seeds. We are maintaining lineages and diversities of stories, skills, ways of living on the earth that run counter to the systems that dominate. We keep them alive through the generations, inside of, or in the margins of, systems that would like to destroy them. We must, we must keep these lineages alive, these practices in practice, and then pass them on. If you want a particular crop's genome to remain through the generations, you don't hoard the seeds: you share them out. We are the story tenders, the skills teachers. This is how we maintain the viability of the future we long for.

This is our sacred and necessary work: to carry thriving-world stories and skills safely through the generations, to pass them around and on.

Simultaneously, we collaborate and co-create with this moment, and share and carry seeds for the next. Thank you for being in this sacred work together. 

With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW

Imagination Is A Radical Muscle - Defunding Police, Re-Imagining Public Safety, Uprooting White Supremacy

To build thriving and just systems, those systems first have to be imagined, in contrast to the current system. Imagination is a radical and essential muscle. ⁠
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We've been quiet online for the last few weeks, and we may be again for a bit, wanting to listen to and highlight Black creators, activists, and change-makers' messaging and leadership.⁠
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More clearly than ever, we hear, and stand-sit-lie with, calls for defunding the police, re-imagining public safety, and uprooting white supremacy. With these visions of abolition shared by generations of Black movement leaders and activists and artists and people. Visions created by people who have not had the option to accept and survive this system as it is, who have had to imagine something different. Who are offering visions and strategies for systems that are not only survivable, but are actually oriented towards care and thriving for all.⁠
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The core intent of the Index for the Next World publication is to house and highlight a diverse set of immersive visions of a world that thrives. The core intent of the I4NW member village is to offer skills for implementing re-imagined systems. Now more than ever, we are deeply and fiercely committed to this work, in service, solidarity, and collaboration with the larger I4NW community of creators and change-makers.⁠ ⁠Our inaugural publication and our member village will go live to the public in ~2 weeks, and we're so excited to share more with you leading up to and during the launch.⁠
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And, we're also a company run by a white cis woman. And so we're in discernment and conversation about what shifts we want and need to make in our online presence and content (and length of posts!), especially on social media, long-term to be in integrity with the work of highlighting and centering BIPOC voices, and de-centering whiteness.⁠ ⁠

Thank you for all that you imagine and create, re-imaginer community past and present. ⁠We're so grateful to be imagining with you. ⁠

- Rachel

To Build a Thriving World

Returning to watercolors, which I've thought I was bad at since I was a kid, and SURPRISED TO FIND I LOVE AND GET SO MUCH PLEASURE FROM THEM?!?!

To build a thriving world, we imagine a thriving world.


To imagine a thriving world, we touch, play, create, with things, people, plants, soil, paints that bring us pleasure, that help us remember in our bodies what thriving might feel like.


To do that, pleasure, not performance, becomes the guiding principal of whether or not to try something.


Pleasure and imagination are vilified by the status quo precisely because they are a threat to the status quo.


Every tiny act of imagination keeps a revolutionary muscle alive.


Every tiny act of pleasure keeps an embodied map of a thriving world alive.


Keep playing. Keep imagining. Keep pleasuring. Live the next world now.


What's bringing you pleasure today?

************
Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy

Live the Next World Now

Live the next world now

One of our core driving values here at I4NW is "live the next world now." But rather than focusing on any attempts to perfectionistically "get it right," we center the questions:


How can we, imperfectly and messily and incompletely and playfully, with dedication, in little bits and fragments and temporary moments, co-create and live the world(s) we need right now?


How can we live these next world(s) in our interactions and interconnections with each other, ourselves, land?


What are we going to do instead of business-as-usual?


How are we already doing that "instead," those next worlds, individually, and collectively?


Who is tending and carrying on, seed-banking and protecting against onslaught and erasure, our knowledge and practices and systems of thriving and justice, of the next world now?


How can we listen respectfully to, center, and reciprocate / compensate these teachers (human and beyond) and their wisdoms? .


AND SO IN THIS MOMENT OF GLOBAL PANDEMIC, UNCERTAINTY, AND CONTINUED HARM TO THOSE ALREADY MOST MARGINALIZED... .


Instead of adding one more "should" to our list, we seek to return to the question, "How are we already living it?" Across the globe, across our communities and so many others, amidst the chaos and the harm, the ways in which we're already creating and building the worlds we need are coming through loud and clear. As chronically ill and disabled people, we know that we can't wait to create the worlds we need to survive. As queer people, we know that in order to exist and thrive in the world we have to imagine a world in which we exist and thrive. And on and on, through our specific community lenses and lineages.


This is what we aim to do and house here at Index for the Next World: skills and stories of "what we do instead," of how we "live the next world now" and in the future.


Video call game nights. Coordinated grocery runs. Sharing and trading skills virtually. Mapping resources and needs and sharing them. Checking in on each other. Mutual aid spreadsheets. Humor text threads. Read-alouds across time zones. Practitioners offering accessible rates and trades online. These are just a few seemingly small spaces where living the world we need, doing the "what are we going to do instead," are showing up already for us. It doesn’t erase the harm. It does give us something tangible to hold onto, to live into in little moments and pockets, to grow half-hopes in, to tend and keep alive, to keep our imaginations rippling with possibility in the face of the narrowing we face.


What is one way that a next, pleasurable, just, thriving world, showed up in your life this week? What’s a way it didn’t, that you’re longing for, drawing us towards?

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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy

What is "design?"

If you search the internet, you’ll find a wide array of people and sites defining design and design-thinking in different but overlapping ways. To me, at its most delicious and accessible, the verb design refers to a four-step process that anyone can use as a tool to problem-solve or create change.


I call the four steps:

1. ASSESS
2. PLAN
3. DO
4. OBSERVE.


Now, these aren’t my favorite words for the steps - in my client work, I like to use longer phrases that get at the rich creativity and community-based attention I believe is inherent in each - but they are very clear and easy to get your head around.


However you name the steps, the key point is that they’re in an ongoing loop or cycle - after you observe, you’ve got to start again at “assess.” In more depth, the design process is the cycle of mapping and assessing needs and desires, generating ideas and a plan of strategies to meet those needs and desires, implementing / testing / trying out a first version of that plan (often called “prototyping” or “rapid prototyping” if you’re somewhere that needs to make change or money fast), observing and obtaining feedback on that tryout, and then re-assessing and re-doing the loop.

Theoretically, we could loop forever, and in some ways we need to, if we want to build resilient systems for land and people as we continue to experience escalating and extreme changes in the eco- and human- systems around us.

Design-thinking is one version of resilience - to be able to notice change (and notice which lenses we’re noting through ,and who’s in the room and who’s not), map changing needs, make a plan to meet those needs, try it out, and then re-loop the cycle . We re-loop both to hone in on a design that truly serves the constituents (the people and organisms and land you’re collaborating with), and to deal with continuing shifts and changes that emerge both internally and from the outside.


Design looks a little different depending on what discipline or perspective you approach from - interaction design, permaculture design, interior design, and so many more. I myself have come to know design from many angles, from years as a visual artist, to training as a permaculture gardener, designer and educator, to experiences in democratic pedagogy and inquiry-based curriculum design, to time spent teaching design-thinking and tinkering to kids of all ages (some of whom had large power tools in their hands!)


I also spent my graduate school years developing a framework called Re-Storyation Design, which unites design-thinking with narrative-based practices, to help re-design the stories underneath our systems, as well as the systems themselves . You can see the Re-Storyation Design framework laid out, and learn some ways to apply it in your life and communities, in our member village video series, Imagination as a Radical Muscle.


But throughout all my experiences, almost every single type of design - and in my opinion, all of the ones that are doing their due diligence to avoid rushing/ skipping steps and causing harm - include some version of those four steps mentioned above: assess, plan, do, observe, and cycle through to repeat.


This design process, along with design thinking (the capacity to use the process in everyday endeavors), are key tools in the toolbox of anyone working to re-story their inner or outer world. It can be used almost anywhere, from therapy, to agriculture, to organizational behavior, to curriculum planning, and beyond. It balances deep presence, inquiry, creativity/ideation, and action, and creates a flow pattern for how to move between them. And, I might be biased here, but it’s really, really empowering and fun. 

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Want to learn more about our collaborations with clients, where we use design thinking to co-create everything from gardens, to career-path next steps, to rituals, to meetings, and beyond? Reach out to us on our contact form on the About page - we’d love to chat more, or discuss the possibility of working together.

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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy

Everything Gardens

"Everything Gardens"

This is a permaculture principle that sometimes seems confusing at first. What does it really mean to garden?

According to this principle, one definition is that to garden is to change the environment right around you. This redwood tree has changed its environment wildly - creating habitat, shade, impacts on the soil beneath it, sound absorption with its bark. A spot for a swing. And once, a climbing spot for a high school student who, while us teachers had turned our backs for a moment, managed to clamor all the way up to the top of the tree, and then laughed at us from way up there when we couldn't find him 😏 .


What would it mean to think of every living thing as a gardener? In other words, to acknowledge that every living thing modifies its environment? To understand gardening not as dominion or control, as it has been twisted and deployed in dominant colonial exploitation of people and land, but rather as intentional interaction, conscious impact/modification in a web of relationships with other, non-human gardeners who are also interacting and changing the space around them? What if we humans aren't actually unique as gardeners- what if we belong to a much bigger world of them?


As permaculture designer and educator Lisa DePiano said in a permaculture teacher training course, "Permaculture is bringing back into relationship what has been separated."

Domination and control separate and exploit. Trying to have no impact also separates us- from the ecosystem, and from the reality of our belonging in, and constant impact on, that ecosystem. This separation then makes it hard to take responsibility (response-ability) for our interaction or impact .


The truth is, we always have an impact. Can we do so intentionally and iteratively? Humbly and collaboratively, with the environment around us, towards mutual benefit? How can gardening, in concert with other human and beyond-human gardeners, integrate, reconnect?


The more interconnections in a web, the more resilience remains even if one of them breaks. Everything gardens. What/who do you notice "gardening" near you today?

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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy