From Input to Interbeing
- APF Community
- 2 days ago
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Part 2: Composting What Is, Cultivating What Could Be
By amalia deloney
This is Part 2 of “From Input to Interbeing.” If you haven’t read Part 1—where I explore the shortcomings of extractive participation and introduce the concept of regenerative participation—you can find it here.
In Part 1, I explored how traditional public engagement often reinforces symbolic listening and extractive logics, and I introduced regenerative participation as a shift in how we relate to systems, time, and one another. Now, in Part 2, I turn toward the practices and provocations—both lived and speculative—that help bring this orientation to life.
Practices at the Edge: Composting What Is, Cultivating What Could Be
In my work, I often mix what’s real with what’s imagined—not to obscure the difference, but to blur the boundary between what’s currently possible and what could be. Some of the following practices have already been prototyped in community settings. Others are speculative provocations meant to stretch the field and soften our assumptions.
Together, they form a kind of design compost—where lived experience, cultural memory, and systemic experimentation break down and nourish the soil of future practice.
These aren’t proposals for scaling. They are seeds in incubation—playful, grounded, and offered as invitations:
Seasonal Planning as Civic RitualCivic planning cycles are aligned with natural rhythms: winter for reflection, spring for visioning, summer for prototyping, fall for harvesting and composting. Each season is marked with civic rituals—community fire circles, seed swaps, rest weeks—that create space for attunement, not just action.
Neighborhood Foresight StudiosLocal spaces (libraries, community centers, cultural hubs) are reimagined as foresight studios—equipped with materials for mapping, storytelling, collage, and sound design. Residents drop in to craft future narratives rooted in memory, place, and relationship. The futures aren’t just strategic—they’re sensory.
Letting-Go Ceremonies for Strategy WorkBefore beginning strategic planning, groups participate in a guided ritual of letting go. This might include composting physical artifacts, naming unspoken griefs, or creating offerings to the land or institution. Only after release do new visions emerge.
Decentralized Imagination LabsRather than relying on single, centralized planning processes, cities and organizations seed small imagination labs throughout neighborhoods—embedded in mutual aid hubs, school gardens, or community kitchens. These labs are relational, analog, and self-organizing. They act more like fungi than forums.
The Civic AlmanacInstead of a static strategic plan, a public agency collaborates with artists, community historians, and systems thinkers to co-create a seasonal Civic Almanac. It captures community rhythms, local lore, climate signals, and place-based wisdom—not as data points, but as orientation tools for governance.
Further Out: Practices Rooted in Lineage, Memory, and Repair
The next provocations live even further out. They draw from my personal lineage, lived experience, and the cultural memory carried through my practice. They are being actively explored and held at the edges of my work—not as fixed solutions, but as experimental patterns:
Ancestral Signal NetworksFutures Labs emerge in diasporic, dislocated, and displaced communities—spaces where people explore futures shaped by re-rooting, memory, and survival. Timelines spiral, not stretch linearly. Participants use ancestral storywork, migration maps, and speculative rituals to design worlds where dislocation becomes a site of reimagining.
Participation becomes ceremony.
Strategy becomes a remembering practice.
Futures emerge not just from aspiration—but from cultural repair.
Reciprocity Economies in Civic LifeIn this world, participation is governed by reciprocity, not extraction. Public life is built on the exchange of care, rest, grief, and giving—not just data or time. Participation might take place in shared kitchens, community gardens, public laundromats, or local libraries.
People track offerings made, not just hours served.
Planning happens after reciprocity is sensed.
Community meetings begin with food, song, or silence.
Metrics include rest cycles and trust, not just deliverables.
The civic field becomes a living body.
These prototypes and provocations are part of an ongoing incubation process—playful, place-based, and rooted in the understanding that regenerative futures require new tools, new metaphors, and new modes of participation. They are not answers. They are invitations.
And if we let them compost in the field of our collective imagination, they might just give rise to the kinds of futures we haven’t yet dared to fully name.
Principles for Regenerative Participation
While this work resists simplification, I’ve found myself returning to these design principles again and again:
Design for compost, not just harvestCreate space for collective shedding, grieving, and re-patterning—not just polished deliverables.
Sense the system, not just the symptomsSurface history, trauma, and power dynamics. Map what’s under the surface, not just what’s visible.
Use ritual to reorientOpen with slowness, presence, and care. Rituals remind us we are not just minds—we are bodies in systems.
Engage the deep codeAs Dark Matter Labs frames it, the work is not just about ideas—it’s about legal, financial, and cultural code. We have to engage the structures that shape what’s possible.
Invite the poetic and the possibleUse metaphor, myth, and imagination to stretch collective futures beyond the familiar.
Design like an ecosystemNested, diverse, feedback-rich. Let processes grow, adapt, and compost what’s no longer needed.
These principles are influenced by the work of many—Possibility Studies, Collective Transitions, Holoptic Foresight—and they are also shaped through field practice, intuition, and experimentation.
What This Means for the Futures Field
If regenerative participation is to become a meaningful part of foresight, we must expand our understanding of what foresight practitioners do—and how we show up.
We are not extractors of insights or deliverers of predetermined scenarios. We are gardeners, composters, and stewards of living processes. Our work is less about directing movement and more about cultivating the conditions for emergence, belonging, and transformation.
Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, reminds us that effective governance isn’t about issuing directives—it’s about nurturing the environments in which people and systems can grow. He emphasizes that the role of leadership—and by extension, futures practice—is to create the conditions for self-organization, collective learning, and systemic adaptability.
This perspective resonates deeply. It invites us to design less for control, and more for coherence. To stop facilitating futures as linear projects—and start hosting them as generative, relational fields.
If we take that seriously, it changes everything—from how we convene people, to how we measure success, to how we hold time itself.
This shift calls for more than new methods—it demands new mental models.It requires us to reshape our containers, our expectations, and our metrics. We must:
Trade efficiency for depth
Exchange speed for attunement
Let go of certainty in favor of complexity
It also means inviting institutions into the long game—investing in processes that unfold across seasons, not weeks. Measuring success not just in outcomes, but in trust, relationships, and transformation.
We must move:
From consultation → co-regeneration
From inclusive engagement → relational entanglement
From participation as performance → participation as practice
The Forest Floor
The forest floor doesn’t call attention to itself. But it is where the real work happens.
It’s where life decomposes, transforms, and begins again.
Where roots tangle, mycelium connects, and nutrients cycle.
Regenerative participation is our forest floor.
It doesn’t always yield neat outcomes. It doesn’t always “scale.”
But it holds the conditions for something vital—
Futures that are grown, not imposed.
Relationships that are tended, not managed.
Change that is composted, not manufactured.
Maybe the future isn’t something we plan.
Maybe it’s something we compost—together.
© amalia deloney, 2025
amalia deloney was bitten by the futures bug in fourth grade through Future Problem Solving, sparking a lifelong passion for foresight and systems change. As a strategic foresight practitioner, design strategist, and founder of point A studio, she helps organizations and communities navigate complexity and build regenerative futures. With a background in law, philanthropy, and human rights, amalia has spent decades working at the intersection of power, policy, and systemic transformation. She is particularly committed to participatory methods that empower neighborhood and community leaders, ensuring those closest to the challenges shape the futures they envision.