I have just met someone who is making an original building near his parents old stone home and barn. With the bakery’s support, many of its employees have launched other successful businesses across the city. Adopted nationally ten years ago, the three-day work week, together with the introduction of Universal Basic Income, has resulted in measurably lower levels of anxiety and stress across all income classes. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. In From What Is to What If, Rob Hopkins spotlights dozens of individuals and organizations around the world who are actually, defiantly doing work to make the world a friendlier, happier, more imaginative, playful, and sustainable place.

Transition: Bounce Forward - What If · What Next? Transition: Bounce Forward - What If · What Next?

But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different. What if the answers were to be found not in the bleak solitude of survivalism and isolation, in the tweaking of ruthless commercialism, or in the dream that some electable saviour will come riding to our rescue, but rather in reconnection to community? All of these are described with a real sense of curiosity and discovery, as if Hopkins is delighted to have found all these examples of imagination and can’t wait to share them.Where once there were societies that served as models for a better future, grand plans, utopias, now there is distrust and dissatisfaction with any form of politics, a sense of powerlessness edging into nihilism. I pass what used to be one of the district’s supermarkets, most of which closed down about ten years ago.

From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagin…

The effort he is making needs plugging into the Transition movement as it’s clearly aligned with their principles but lacks funds and physical workers. Launched fifteen years ago on the premise that ‘baking is the new Prozac’, the bakery’s mission is to provide meaningful work opportunities for people who lack housing and job security, and who struggle with mental health. I’m sure the right volunteers could make his house get built better and quicker, it has potential to be a community arts hub in Gressingham. My kids and I approach the school through intensive food gardens, planted and managed by the students, and walk into a building where we are greeted by the smell of baking bread and the sound of happy chatter. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioninOur thanks to National Lottery Players, and The National Lottery Community Fund for enabling us to Bounce Forward! In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. We’ll launch the guide at our upcoming webinar on 11th November in which we will introduce the ‘What If’ components of our Transition: Bounce Forward project in Great Britain in more detail. It’s given him a rich pool of examples and people to draw on for his latest book, From what is to what if – Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want.

From What Is to What If (Audiobook) - Chelsea Green Publishing From What Is to What If (Audiobook) - Chelsea Green Publishing

Transitioners are well placed to help get this message across through our own activities and our alliance with the many organisations, petition sites and social and political movements which are working for fundamental social and economic change. What Next is an online summit being developed with CTRLshift that will bring all this thinking together. The streets are quiet, due to sparse motorised traffic, and they are lined with fruit and nut trees in early blossom. I’ve seen this with my own eyes, thanks to an experiment a few friends and I initiated more than a decade ago in our hometown of Totnes in Devon, England (population 8,500).

With more bicycles and fewer cars on the road, air quality has improved, and public health along with it. For a long time we tended to look the other way, but now, being on the edge of the cliff forces us to understand that we must act urgently.