Creating the Future: Coming to Your Community!

Every few years, Creating the Future’s founders take our mission on the road, sharing Catalytic Thinking with communities within a specific region. Before the pandemic, they drove from the top to the bottom of California. In years past, they’ve gone as far from their home in Tucson, Arizona as the eastern US, visiting 20+ communities … Read more

What’s Next for Our Mission: Sharing the Implementation of our Plan

Creating the Future is at a crossroads. And we are so excited about stepping into what’s next! That’s because implementing our next steps will not be done by us – it will be done by, well, everyone! Moving beyond the organization-centric model that tells each organization to excel on its own, we will be doing … Read more

Next Steps for Our Mission: Integrity Team Meeting June 2023

Creating the Future’s Integrity Body (Board) Meeting: Monday, June 12, 2023 10am-12pm Pacific time / 1pm-3pm Eastern time / 6pm-8pm UK time Topic: Next Steps for Our Mission Watch the meeting LIVE at this post. Just scroll to the very bottom of the page. Details about how to participate are below. Next Steps for Our … Read more

Communications & Engagement: Choose Wisely (Summary: Mtg #4)

Last week, Creating the Future had its 4th meeting to create our communications / engagement strategy. For background, the following are discussion summaries from the meetings that led up to this one: Meeting #1: Who will see our messages (whether the intended audience or not)? What do we want those messages to make possible for … Read more

Community Engagement: 5 Tips

This post is the 4th in a series describing Creating the Future’s first “Road Tour,” a two-month community engagement effort that saw our founders connecting with people in communities across California and Nevada in late 2018. You can read these posts from the beginning here. Last fall, we set out for two months on the road, … Read more

Seeking Partners at Creating the Future: Meeting #2

The next meeting of our Sleuthing-for-Partners design effort will be Wednesday, February 14th from 1pm-4pm Pacific time. The meeting will happen right here. For details on how to participate, head to the bottom of the post. For a summary and the video / audio of the first meeting, head to this post. That first meeting … Read more

Catalytic Thinking: A Framework for Creating and Scaling Powerful Results

NOTE: This post is Part 2 of Creating the Future’s “Theory of Everything.” You will find Part 1 – the theory – at this post here. Catalytic Thinking is a set of practices that make explicit the simple factors that create positive results, so those results can be consistently replicated and scaled. The Back-Story In 1998, … Read more

Our Funding Approach to Build Out Our Mission

Ever since our founding, everything about Creating the Future has been an experiment to discover and share systems (i.e. “the way we do things”) that bring out the best in everyone. With that mandate, one of the systems that has repeatedly cried out for change has been the variety of systems for funding social change. … Read more

Partnerships Rooted in Shared Values

What does it take for true collaboration and partnership to succeed? What conditions would lead to that success? One thing is for certain: Those conditions will not be about the stuff (the product, the program, the money, the paperwork). They will be about the people. Because when things fall apart, it’s not about the stuff; … Read more