WHAT IS AN INDEX FOR THE NEXT WORLD?
A change-makers’ hub, a seed bank for the next world’s wild visions and resilience skills.
Index for the Next World (I4NW) is an online hub, where artists and change-makers share and source stories and skills that help bring to life just and thriving worlds.
We feature a seasonal publication and archive – our free-to-all Index – and a community learning platform – our subscription-based member Village - both of which help us to envision and enact the wildly pleasurable worlds we need, now.
WHAT WE DO
Envision a world that thrives. Then build it.
We help creators and change-makers fill their toolboxes with stories and skills that equip them to imagine and build the thriving worlds we need.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
…world shapes story shapes world shapes story shapes world…
1) Look to the edges, let them be the centers
We seek to center, look to/learn from, and pay for the work and wisdom of artists and activists who are practiced and skilled imaginers, especially POC, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled / chronically ill folks, women, immigrants, poor and working-class people, and other historically and currently marginalized creators and communities.
2) A thriving world for all
We work, play, and create towards the intertwined liberation, thriving, dignity, joy and pleasure of all peoples, creatures, plants, and land. We honor matter and its cycles.
3) Imagination is not a luxury
In order to create a next world, we have to imagine a next world
(Please see “Poetry is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde)
4) Resilience lives in re-storying
Our resilience- our capacity to create and respond to change- lives in our ability to re-story and re-build, rather than in our capacity to build one “perfect” story or system. We celebrate an abundance of stories (not one “correct” story), an abundance of worlds. We’re here to support capacity-building for resilience.
5) Access and collective self-determination are not optional.
Who’s in the room in this moment in this world (and how the conversation is held - in words and for bodies) corresponds to who gets to author and design the next worlds. Access and prefigurative practices are central and essential, not supplementary.
6) Live the next world now
“Utopia” means no-place- what happens when we dream the far off dream and then bring it into the body of the world here and now, not far but close close close, as best we can, messily and joyfully? Pleasure, prefigure, practice. Live, vision, act, like it’s already here.
7) Imperfectionism and non-duality
Absurdity, pleasure, and play as survival & resilience tools. Both / and / plus – many truths and visions play together here.
8) Feedback is sacred and essential
Mis-takes as sacred practice. Design-thinking, creative regeneration and re-design / failure as a sacred and generative practice / compost = completing the cycle. Accountability happens at the speed of mutual access. No false urgency that reiterates the speed of damage/domination and ableist white-supremacy. Feedback and adjustment (both re-design and repair) are gifts; they are ecologically and socially resilient practices. Got something you want to let us know about? Scroll down just a bit and you’ll reach our contact form!
9) Refuge matters to resilience
We need refuges. For stories, seeds, skills, people(s). Places of safety, nourishment, secret storage and storytelling, of generating and of planting out the next generation. So that these lineages of story, of seed, of skill, of peoples, evolve and survive into the future. So that our future generations exist, and so that they have maps to the next world. [Please see “A Map to the Next World” by Joy Harjo] Thank you to the story-, seed-,and skill-tenders, who have nourished and maintained these lines for generations.
On Reparations & The White-Supremacist Lineage Of Stolen Agricultural & Ecological Labor, Knowledge, & Land
We believe in reparations, ending white supremacy, and that we can never talk about land and gardening without talking about lineage and liberation. As a white-led, land-based and ecological-knowledge-based business operating on unceded Indigenous land that has been farmed and gardened via the non-consensual and unpaid labor of Black people, and as an educator(s) operating in traditions of ecological and agricultural knowledge that have often been repeatedly stolen from Indigenous, Black, and POC folks without credit or payment, Index For The Next World pays Shuumi Land Tax and donates to Lead To Life each year. We seek to increase the amount and methods of reparations paid as the business grows.