By typical accounting standards, Creating the Future looks like a tiny organization. But the revenue and expenses on our 990 do not come near to telling our story. That story started at the beginning, during our formative years.
Because we did not intend for Creating the Future to live on in perpetuity – but to instead be a project with a limited lifespan – we knew we had a choice when it came to funding.
We could seek operating funds from the start, doing the typical grant-funding that most startups attempt. Given the breadth of experience of our founders and our founding board members, we knew this posed several problems.
First, startups are not generally funded with lots of money, as funders feel more comfortable once a track record has been established. Second, this wasn’t a direct service startup, but an experiment – a budding think tank rooted in social science theory and practical experimentation. While many foundations in 2026 are more forward-thinking about such experimenting, in 2011 this was less common.
Grant funding for this start-up think tank would therefore be a massive task, as the best we were likely to receive would have been small grants, perhaps $5,000 or $10,000 at a time. This would have meant an inordinate amount of time trying to raise enough money to fund this effort in the typical way.
Given the short-term nature of this project, we didn’t have that time to spare.
We therefore chose the alternative. We would simply get to work, raising funds through our education programs, demonstration projects, and through the donations of our community members. On the expense side, the founders would self-fund, receiving only small stipends for their more-than-full-time work.
In other words, Creating the Future chose to operate from a place of mutual aid / Collective Enoughness, that together we have everything we need. Seeing our work as a project in support of the larger social justice movement, this approach best mirrors how movements are supported. Instead of building a huge organization, we created a loose network of networks. This approach has allowed us to be agile, and to bring more and more people into this movement, rather than constantly feeling like we have to support the financial burden of a large organization.
As a result, in our short existence, we have…
- Taught over 1,000 people in our classes.
- Reached tens of thousands of people around the globe with education in our weekly newsletters.
- And we have completed over 30 demonstration projects, showing the power of Catalytic Thinking to create more inclusive, transformational change.
All of this has been accomplished because of thousands of volunteer hours and thousands of dollars of shared resources, with fellows around the world spreading the mission in their own way.
None of that is reflected in our cash budget or our IRS 990 filings.
Standard accounting practices do not provide a simple way to show such non-cash resources. As a result, describing our work in dollars alone does our work a significant disservice, as the community resources we are activating to do that work are far more applicable to accomplishing our mission within our 10-year timeframe. In addition, doing our work via all those shared resources both demonstrates our mission in action (Collective Enoughness, that together we have everything we need), and spreads the mission via all those ambassadors.
As we step into the last couple of years of Creating the Future’s mission, the work ahead of us will be significantly different than the short-term project work of the earlier phase of this effort. It will instead be one intensive project that will require our team’s full-time attention and then some. Documenting the story of over 30 demonstration projects. Creating the library of resources that will outlive our work. Generating a massive community engagement effort to get those resources into the hands of folks who can share Catalytic Thinking in their own realms.
For the first time in Creating the Future’s history, therefore, we will be seeking funding for that work.
Creating the Future is no longer a start-up. Here in 2026, we are a seasoned organization, ready to tell the story of over 30 demonstration projects. And we are excited for you to join us as we continue to build radical inclusion, radical possibility, and radical strength into this final phase of our work.