It’s year-end, and we are celebrating all we accomplished for our community in 2024. And what a year it was!!!
In 2024, we had one foot in Phase 1 of our mission – to teach and experiment with Catalytic Thinking in a variety of settings, to demonstrate what is possible when we change the questions we ask. The other foot was in the next phases of that mission, documenting and sharing all we learned from those projects, with the ultimate goal that the powerful questions of Catalytic Thinking become ubiquitous.
Back in 2022, we asked our community to determine the direction we will take in the next phase of our 10-year mission. If the goal of our work is to share the most effective questions for creating a more humane, loving world – to make those questions ubiquitous – what direction makes the most sense to accomplish that? And importantly, if our community members are the ones who will be affected by our work, shouldn’t it be up to you to decide what to prioritize and take action on?
The answer was overwhelming. Our community members want our work to create a global mind-shift:
- From reacting to what’s wrong, to creating what is possible
- From reacting to the worst in each other to bringing out the best in each other
- From going it alone to the power of Collective Enoughness, sharing and building upon each other’s strengths
You then told us what needs to be in place for that mind-shift to happen:
- Places to learn Catalytic Thinking
- Places to gather together with other Catalytic Thinking practitioners
- The inspiration to experiment with different ways of being in our work and in our lives
In 2023, we did the strategic work to determine what needed to be in place to turn your aspirations into reality, given our commitment to our work being a 10-year project vs. an ongoing program. What would make Catalytic Thinking ubiquitous if Creating the Future doesn’t exist?
The answer is to meet people where they physically are.
- People will be able to learn Catalytic Thinking where they are already learning. Perhaps a university class, or perhaps a nonprofit resource center or from a consultant.
- People will gather with other practitioners where they are already gathering. Again, that might be a university class or nonprofit resource center, or the many roundtables people already attend – coalitions, executive director circles, etc.
- And people will be inspired to experiment in the places they are already being inspired – whether that is academic journals, social change publications or mainstream publications.
Our work in 2024 was to begin putting that plan into motion. And as always, it was a year jam-packed with all sorts of activities in that direction!
Phase 1 is Winding Down
Phase 1 of our mission has been our focus since the beginning, even before we started our 10-year clock. Having opened our doors in 2011, we didn’t set the 10-year clock until 2017. That has given us a lot of time to learn from this first phase, which has been all about demonstrating the power of Catalytic Thinking. That has included our own demonstration projects, as well as providing a massive education program, where our students have then contributed their own demonstration projects into the mix.
In 2024, that work continued at quite a pace, even as this phase is winding down.
Demonstration projects
Several projects had our attention in 2024, all of them in Canada.
Moving Beyond the Status Quo in Social Change
Working with the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations (ECVO) has continued from prior years. ECVO is seeking to move beyond the status quo of how their community addresses social issues like poverty. Creating the Future has facilitated the conversations of the leadership of this effort, in in-person facilitation, and in coaching and supporting their own lead facilitator to move this effort forward. The group is currently planning a massive community gathering for 2025, to ensure it is their community members who are leading the direction of this effort. Talk about a mindset shift! It has been such an honor to be part of this ongoing project.
Creating a Bespoke Class on Catalytic Thinking
This year also included a major demonstration project with Columbia College in Vancouver. Columbia College wanted to create a class on Catalytic Thinking, tailored specifically to the needs of their students and faculty who are working on community projects, as well as their community partners in those projects. And of course, we applied Catalytic Thinking to how we developed the class in the first place. The result was a huge surprise to all of us: It wasn’t a class, at least not in the way one might picture a class. By reaching for the best possible outcome, and focusing intently on meeting people where they are, the team instead incorporated the lessons into the application process for participating in their program. The questions in that application are now the questions of Catalytic Thinking. And the support to help applicants answer those questions are now the educational materials that would have been part of the class! “Watch this 5 minute video, then answer Question 1…” We are so excited to share with you the process we went through to get there, and to see how this is received by the students and faculty.
Planning for Family Literacy
This project is exciting in large part because it is being led by one of our fellows, the executive director of the Centre for Family Literacy in Edmonton, Kim Chung. Kim has been leading her team and her community members through the questions of Catalytic Thinking, and the effect has been energizing. The group began by spending months engaging their community members in conversation to determine what is most important to them – the radical inclusion of that first question, “Who will be affected by whatever we decide, and what would it take for them to lead the direction we take?” From there, Kim’s team crafted a vision statement that is all about everyone having the opportunity to thrive. Now all their work is heading in that direction. From that first Catalytic Thinking question through to the last (resourcing via Collective Enoughness), the Centre is stepping into some of the most exciting work we have seen. Creating the Future has been providing support to Kim as her team leads the charge on all the work that lies ahead, and we can’t wait to see what happens next.
Education
During this stage of transition from Phase 1 to Phases 2 and 3, we are continuing to teach webinars and to facilitate communities of practice. There are many benefits to this approach. First, the content developed for those sessions adds to the content that will be in the library. In addition, the communities of practice are building the Catalytic Thinking muscles in teachers and facilitators in their own realms – which is exactly what we want to see as we transition from doing that teaching ourselves. The more that folks are teaching in their own domains, the more these questions can become ubiquitous.
In 2024, we taught 3 sessions that applied Catalytic Thinking to the work of nonprofit boards of directors. These sessions were co-taught by our fellows, and one was presented by one of our long-term partners, the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Organizations (PANO). The content produced for these webinars will be turned into a self-paced class on this topic in early 2025.
We also partnered with the National Council of Nonprofits, producing two webinars for their partners. Those webinars focused Catalytic Thinking on key issues NCN’s partners are facing, including community engagement and workforce development. NCN and Creating the Future are continuing to seek ways to work together in the year ahead.
One of our board members, Vu Le, hosted a webinar for his community as well. This session introduced Catalytic Thinking to folks who were not familiar with the framework at all. 1,800 people attended that one webinar, with many of those individuals continuing to participate in other Creating the Future programs. One has even started volunteering in our work on Phase 2 – thank you, Sakshi Jain!
Lastly, we facilitated two communities of practice in 2024, one through Creating the Future’s community, the other via our partnership with ECVO in Edmonton. The focus of both those communities has been applying Catalytic Thinking to the everyday issues that arise in the work of social change. These conversations have been exhilarating. (Let us know if you’d like to join a community of practice or if you’d like help starting one in your community!)
Phases 2 and 3 of Our Mission
As Phase 1 of our work has been winding down, our primary focus now is stepping into what’s next for our mission. And as big as our Phase 1 work was in 2024, it pales in comparison to the work we did on these final two phases. We are excited about where these efforts are taking us!
Phase 3 of our mission will include building the library of resources that will be our legacy. Those resources will cover the theory (What is Catalytic Thinking?), the case studies (What does the framework look like in practice?), and the pedagogy (What have we learned about teaching this framework?) That phase will include research-based papers for academic journals. It will include engaging people who are already teaching subjects related to social change, to include Catalytic Thinking in their curricula. And it will include a publicist, to share the framework broadly with mainstream publications.
That will be the final phase of our work. Leading up to that, Phase 2 will focus on developing resource materials, documenting the learnings from the +30 demonstration projects we did in Phase 1. Those resource documents will become the basis for the recorded classes and other materials in the library.
In 2024, we began work on both those phases simultaneously.
Phase 2: Documenting what we’ve learned
The work in this phase will include hiring interviewers and writers, to gather information from the people who participated in all our demonstration projects over the years, and to write resource documents describing the work and the results of each project.
In 2024, we laid the groundwork for this phase. That included…
- Hiring practices: Creating the Future’s Integrity Body (aka our board) applied Catalytic Thinking to design hiring and general employment practices, to be ready to hire once we’ve raised the money to do so. While some of those individuals” will not be employees but contractors, the same values will undergird all those processes. You can see summaries of those discussions here.
- Gathering a fundraising team: This team has begun to assist with raising the approximately $300,000 needed to fund this phase. They are advising on funding strategy, assisting with the development of items like a case for support and other key pieces necessary to apply for grants. They are also assisting with funder research, to determine who to approach. This assistance is critical, as Creating the Future has not sought grant funding to date, a new endeavor for us. You can listen to our first resource planning discussion at this link.
- We also spent a good chunk of the year connecting with folks to identify potential funders. Those conversations have led to all sorts of opportunities to share our work more broadly, far beyond just introductions to potential funding sources.
Phase 3: Building the Library and Engaging Instructors
While we are waiting for funding to hire writers for Phase 2, we are getting a jump on the work of building the library itself, and engaging people in sharing the questions of Catalytic Thinking.
- One of the members of our Integrity Body is Professor Angie Eikenberry, chair of the Department of Public Administration at the University of Connecticut. Angie and Hildy penned an article for the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, on the future of nonprofit university education. That article will be published in early 2025, and will be a key piece in connecting Catalytic Thinking to the academic world.
- Through an introduction by one of our supporters, we have been working with the director of the Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change program at Lund University in Sweden, to incorporate Catalytic Thinking into their curriculum.
- We drafted a master list of all the resources we currently have to share in the library, as well as resources we are planning to develop as part of this phase. The 12 single-spaced pages of that document include articles, video classes, podcast conversations, and other resources that will provide the basis of the library. It was energizing to see all that we have already developed in the 10+ years of our work.
- We revived the podcast that Hildy hosted over a decade ago. The podcast’s focus is the question, “What actually creates change?” We did a soft launch with our first 4 guests in 2024, and will be doing an official kick-off in early 2025. You can find the podcast here. These conversations will be an integral part of the library, adding to and bringing current the 40+ interviews Hildy did for the first iteration of this podcast from 2010-2014.
- We designed a program that we will be offering to nonprofit educational groups with broad reach (nonprofit resource centers, capacity builders, statewide / province-wide associations of nonprofits), to train their teams in Catalytic Thinking. The purpose is to start the process of sharing resources now, rather than waiting until the library is complete. This program will serve as a case study for others to follow suit, and will provide our partners with the opportunity to serve as trainers for other communities seeking to do the same. The program will provide access to all our current and future resources, for our partners to add to their own website with their own branding. The program will then train their team members in the thinking, and then in what it takes to facilitate Catalytic Thinking conversations. We are excited to offer this program in 2025.
All this, and Phase 3 hasn’t even officially begun! We are looking forward to seeing this all come together.
Advocacy
Lastly, a new endeavor for Creating the Future, dictated by the times we are living in.
Towards the end of 2024, it became obvious that Creating the Future is in the position to add our voices to the growing group of nonprofit sector advocates, as current legislative agendas in the US have the potential to threaten the ability of organizations to do the work they do.
Given that our role since our inception has been to help social change groups accomplish more significant change, we see our advocacy role as educating and encouraging our community members regarding issues that could threaten that work. As part of those efforts, we will be applying Catalytic Thinking to any legislation that passes, to help our community members create what is possible in those circumstances (vs. feeling whipsawed by circumstances that are out of their control, which can lead to “obeying in advance” when draconian measures are announced).
In 2024, this took the form of educating our community members about the hazards of proposed legislation that would give the executive branch the unilateral authority – with no due process – to strip the tax exemption from any organization they declare to be “supporting terrorism.” We anticipate this may just be the beginning, and we are committing to do what it takes to support the changemaker community to whom we are ultimately accountable.
We are grateful to organizations like the National Council of Nonprofits and the ACLU, who are leading the legislative charge on these issues.
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As we head into 2025, our primary focus will be Phase 2 of our mission – doing what it takes to document all we have learned from our years of demonstrating the power of Catalytic Thinking. If you would like to be involved in this effort in any way, please let us know!
We are so grateful to everyone who has been part of making all this great stuff happen in 2024. And we look forward to your being part of what it takes to create the future of this work.