A Youth-Centered Humanities Initiative
Storying Just Futures
A Youth-Centered Initiative of Humanities for the Environment, Create the Change, and the UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub, at ASU’s Global Futures Laboratory
The future is often described as uncertain, inevitable, or beyond our control.
Storying Just Futures asks a simple question:
What if communities and young leaders were not only consulted about the future, but co-designed and built it?
Imagine differently
What futures become possible when imagination becomes a form of action?
Storying Just Futures envisions a world where emerging young leaders use speculative storytelling, futures literacy, research, data collection, and collective agency to reimagine more equitable and resilient futures.
Through workshops, lectures, creative storytelling, and futures-thinking methodologies, participants build an “anticipatory toolbox” for imagining scenarios and turning individual insight into tangible pathways for action.
Youth-Centered
Amplifying young voices as change leaders.
Global Collaboration
Partnering across communities and disciplines.
Story + Imagination
Using storytelling to shape just futures.
Action + Impact
Turning ideas into practical pathways for action.
Equity + Justice
Centering care, reciprocity, and community knowledge.
The Story of Storying Just Futures
From question to action. From uncertainty to possibility.
Storying Just Futures grew out of more than a decade of humanities and sustainability work at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Launched in Spring 2025 and inspired by Shalanda Baker’s call for imagination, justice, and transformative action during the Leveraging Decarbonization Symposium, Storying Just Futures extended those conversations into a broader exploration of how young people and communities can imagine and co-design the futures they want to inhabit.
Rather than retreat in the face of uncertainty, changing funding landscapes, and difficult questions about the future, the project chose another response: imagination.
The Fellowship
Thinking ahead.
Imagining the futures we want.
The fellowship began with a simple challenge: imagine a future you want to see and propose a way to help make it possible.
After a semester of workshops and lectures, Storying Just Futures launched a fellowship competition. Applicants were invited to imagine a future they wanted to see by 2070 and pitch a response to a grand challenge—as a social-change recommendation, policy recommendation, manifesto, or white paper.
Three visions for 2070
Fellowship Outcome
Fourteen voices.
One shared vision.
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Future Horizon
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Fellows
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Manifesto
Fourteen applicants were selected by consensus. Rather than choosing a single winning idea, the Fellows looked across all fourteen proposals and asked:
What becomes possible if our strongest ideas belong to all of us?
Their answer became a shared manifesto — and an adaptable toolkit for creating caring communities in real places.
The toolkit connects place, space, storytelling, care, reciprocity, community knowledge, and futures thinking to practical approaches for addressing issues that matter most to young people.
Shared Manifesto
Caring Communities Reimagining Futures through Places, Space, and Storytelling
Care is not an afterthought to development. It can be the foundation of development itself.
Caring Communities argues for a fundamental reimagining of development.
At a moment defined by growing inequality, climate change, rapid technological transformation, and profound uncertainty, the Fellows call for futures grounded in care, reciprocity, community knowledge, and shared responsibility.
Their vision challenges extractive models of development that overlook local voices and the lived realities of young people.
Instead, communities — especially young people — should become active partners in imagining and shaping the futures they will inherit.
Care
Recognizing that thriving communities depend upon relationships, dignity, and mutual support.
Reciprocity
Moving beyond one-way models of intervention toward relationships in which communities shape, contribute to, and benefit from the work.
Community Knowledge
Treating lived experience and local knowledge as essential to understanding challenges and designing solutions.
Shared Responsibility
Creating conditions in which young people and communities are active partners in shaping the decisions that affect their futures.
From manifesto to toolkit.
Futures thinking becomes powerful when people have practical ways to use it.
The Fellows co-created an adaptable toolkit for building caring communities in real places—rooted in local knowledge, lived experience, reciprocity, and care-centered decision-making. The Caring Communities / Storying Just Futures toolkit translates imagination into a process communities can adapt to their own places, priorities, and knowledge.
01 — Listen
Begin with lived experience. What are young people and communities already seeing, knowing, remembering, and imagining? Humanities approaches create space for stories, histories, place-based knowledge, and experiences that are often missing from conventional measures of progress.
02 — Imagine
Futures literacy invites participants to move beyond prediction. What could the world look like in 2050 or 2070? What would justice feel like? Who would make decisions? What would communities value?
03 — Story
Writing, performance, dance, drama, visual storytelling, speculative fiction, and other creative practices become tools for making possible futures visible and shareable.
04 — Co-Design
Ideas become collective. Fellows identify connections across projects, communities, disciplines, and places, transforming fourteen individual pitches into a shared vision for caring communities.
05 — Act
The Caring Communities toolkit becomes a living method. Workshops in Phoenix, Nepal, and UNESCO Global South and Climate Justice Pilot Sites test how futures thinking can become grounded in local knowledge and community priorities.
06 — Converge
Participants gather to share what they have learned, strengthen their methods, and prepare to bring their collective ideas into wider conversations about development, justice, sustainability, and the future.
From Manifesto to Method
Culture-Integrated Futures Scenario Workshop
To put those ideas into practice, the Fellows developed a one-day Culture-Integrated Futures Scenario Workshop for UNESCO Global South and Climate Justice Pilot Sites.
The workshop is an opportunity to test how storytelling, culture, futures thinking, and community knowledge can work together to transform the way communities plan for change.
Community Workshops
The future looks different from place to place.
Storying Just Futures Fellows are bringing their work into diverse communities, with workshops planned in Nepal and Phoenix. Each workshop is designed with multigenerational futures in mind.
The goal is not to arrive with a predetermined future. It is to create a space where people can imagine, question, listen, experiment, and design together.
A community-centered exploration of futures, place, knowledge, and resilience.
A Convergence
From ideas to convergence.
In September 2026, Storying Just Futures will gather Fellows, project co-designers, mentors, community partners, and Create the Change project teams for a Convergence.
The Convergence is more than a convening.
It is a dress rehearsal for the future.
Participants will share methods, test ideas, strengthen workshop models, refine policy tools, and explore how their work can travel across communities and contexts.
They will come together not because the answers are finished, but because the work of building just futures is inherently collective.
The Convergence will help prepare the SJF community for its next horizon:
The Extraordinary Session of the MOST Intergovernmental Council and the UNESCO MOST BRIDGES Forum at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, September 29–October 1, 2026.
Nepal
Phoenix
September
Paris
Next Horizon
From local places to Paris.
Fellows are imagining what it would mean to bring their manifesto and toolkit to the Extraordinary Session of the MOST Intergovernmental Council and the UNESCO MOST BRIDGES Forum at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.
The journey is deliberately not a straight line from university to institution. It moves through communities, stories, experiments, relationships, and shared learning.
Paris becomes one point in a much larger journey: taking ideas developed with communities into spaces where development futures are debated.
Community
Listen + Imagine
Convergence
Share + Strengthen
UNESCO · Paris
Present + Transform
Spring 2025
Forum4JET brings diverse voices together around environmental justice, sustainability, and equitable energy transitions.
2025–26
Co-developers expand those conversations into a youth-centered exploration of how emerging leaders can imagine and co-design the futures they want to see.
2026
Fourteen Fellows transform individual pitches into a shared manifesto and the Caring Communities / Storying Just Futures toolkit.
The future is a story we can change.
Storying Just Futures asks us to move from imagining better futures to practicing how we might build them — together, across generations, disciplines, and places.
What future can we imagine together—and what can we begin building today?
Storying
Just Futures
A youth-centered initiative of Humanities for the Environment, Create the Change, and the UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub at Arizona State University’s Global Futures Laboratory.
Developed through collaboration among emerging young leaders, scholars, artists, scientists, mentors, and community partners.