Imagination Is A Radical Muscle - Defunding Police, Re-Imagining Public Safety, Uprooting White Supremacy

To build thriving and just systems, those systems first have to be imagined, in contrast to the current system. Imagination is a radical and essential muscle. ⁠
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We've been quiet online for the last few weeks, and we may be again for a bit, wanting to listen to and highlight Black creators, activists, and change-makers' messaging and leadership.⁠
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More clearly than ever, we hear, and stand-sit-lie with, calls for defunding the police, re-imagining public safety, and uprooting white supremacy. With these visions of abolition shared by generations of Black movement leaders and activists and artists and people. Visions created by people who have not had the option to accept and survive this system as it is, who have had to imagine something different. Who are offering visions and strategies for systems that are not only survivable, but are actually oriented towards care and thriving for all.⁠
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The core intent of the Index for the Next World publication is to house and highlight a diverse set of immersive visions of a world that thrives. The core intent of the I4NW member village is to offer skills for implementing re-imagined systems. Now more than ever, we are deeply and fiercely committed to this work, in service, solidarity, and collaboration with the larger I4NW community of creators and change-makers.⁠ ⁠Our inaugural publication and our member village will go live to the public in ~2 weeks, and we're so excited to share more with you leading up to and during the launch.⁠
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And, we're also a company run by a white cis woman. And so we're in discernment and conversation about what shifts we want and need to make in our online presence and content (and length of posts!), especially on social media, long-term to be in integrity with the work of highlighting and centering BIPOC voices, and de-centering whiteness.⁠ ⁠

Thank you for all that you imagine and create, re-imaginer community past and present. ⁠We're so grateful to be imagining with you. ⁠

- Rachel

To Build a Thriving World

Returning to watercolors, which I've thought I was bad at since I was a kid, and SURPRISED TO FIND I LOVE AND GET SO MUCH PLEASURE FROM THEM?!?!

To build a thriving world, we imagine a thriving world.


To imagine a thriving world, we touch, play, create, with things, people, plants, soil, paints that bring us pleasure, that help us remember in our bodies what thriving might feel like.


To do that, pleasure, not performance, becomes the guiding principal of whether or not to try something.


Pleasure and imagination are vilified by the status quo precisely because they are a threat to the status quo.


Every tiny act of imagination keeps a revolutionary muscle alive.


Every tiny act of pleasure keeps an embodied map of a thriving world alive.


Keep playing. Keep imagining. Keep pleasuring. Live the next world now.


What's bringing you pleasure today?

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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy