Collaboratively Imagining and Designing the Future— Understanding Relational Engagement
Note: This article is part of my ongoing series exploring relational community engagement — a people-centered approach that prioritizes authentic relationships with residents and neighbors. You can find an overview of relational community engagement (and why organizations should develop relational engagement strategies) here.
In a previous article, I began to break down the components of a relational engagement strategy, identifying what makes it relational instead of merely transactional. In my view, an authentic relational engagement strategy attends to ten key areas:
Cultivates Commitments to Shared Values
Maps Community Assets and Identifies Flows of Power
Prioritize Desires, Not Problems or Needs
Collaboratively Imagines and Designs the Future
Fosters Shared Governance and Relational Accountability
Preserves Transparent & Accessible Communication Pathways
Builds Collective Capacity
Integrates Participatory Evaluation & Learning
Defines (and Questions) Sustainability and Legacy
Centers Gratitude, Hope, and Joy
Before moving on, a caveat: I’m interested in practices that consider people’s desires, talents, and social currencies as assets. These practices aren’t just human-powered but also human-centered, helping us understand the ongoing project of being in community with others. The focus is on relationships as much as outcomes. Others may be interested in similar approaches to community work but use different terms to describe their practices. That’s okay — “relational engagement” isn’t the only way to think about this. It’s just one way I find helpful.
I’ve already explored the first three features of relational engagement, and in this article, I want to focus on the fourth: collaboratively imagining and designing the future. I write from an organizational development standpoint, but much of this can be adapted to other contexts. Maybe you’re becoming more active in your neighborhood association or rethinking a community-engaged learning project. Maybe you lead an organization and are searching for humanizing leadership practices. In all of these situations, relational engagement can offer something valuable.
Collaboratively Imagining and Designing the Future: The Practice of Futurity
I love talking about imagining and creating the future because I believe the future can be intentionally built. The first step to creating alternative futures is teaching others how to imagine them.
Think about this: we’re living in a future imagined by people in the past. Their actions — whether a few days or centuries ago — shaped the world we experience today. If we want to create new, more just futures, we need to start now. This process of working toward a future we desire is what Indigenous researcher Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua calls “futurity”: how groups imagine and produce knowledge about the future.
Relational engagement is concerned not just with the present but with shared futures. It asks us to think not only about the “now” but also how we shape the future through what we do together today. Futurity isn’t about individual, future-oriented benefits. It’s communal, emphasizing how groups and cultures can shape the future rather than the future simply “happening” to people.
The Immediacy of Now
I learned a lot about the importance of futurity as a college professor. Like many college professors, I taught at a predominantly white institution located in an urban, predominantly Black neighborhood. One of my classes invited students to explore longstanding urban issues — like hunger, housing insecurity, and inequality — and develop research proposals that would address these root causes.
Toward the end of the semester, I asked my students if they could imagine a world where these social issues no longer existed. Could they envision a world without childhood poverty or hunger? Could they imagine a world where racial and gender inequality were no longer problems?
The answer was almost always “no.”
These were students who cared deeply about making a difference. They wanted to be social workers, teachers, and lawyers to help build a better world. But they struggled to imagine what that world could look like. This experience made me question whether we were genuinely equipping people to see the future as something they could help shape — something that could be better than the world we live in now.
Futures Built Together
Futurity is not about ignoring the difficulties of today or indulging in magical thinking. It’s about recognizing that while creating the future we want is hard work, it is urgent work that begins now. We aren’t the only ones shaping the future — many others are working toward futures that may not align with values of justice and equality.
Relational engagement encourages us to act now, to help communities imagine and shape futures that align with their desires. Just as today was shaped by the past, our future will be determined by what we choose to do now. No one person or group can build the future alone, but through relational engagement, we can cultivate a collective capacity to work toward thoughtful, deliberate change.