Throughlines: What Emerged When I Wrote Toward the Future

APF Emerging Fellows Program — Final Reflection

By amalia deloney

Image created using DALL-E

Over the past two years as an APF Emerging Fellow, I found myself returning again and again to a simple question:

What futures do we make possible when we expand who gets to imagine them?

When I began the fellowship, I expected to write about governance, policy, and philanthropic innovation – my long-time home channels. Instead, my writing kept pulling me toward something deeper: toward questions of belonging, memory, relationship, and the architecture of participation. What emerged across these six essays wasn’t a series of discrete analyses, but a cohesive inquiry into the civic, cultural, and relational conditions needed to build futures that are not only strategic, but humane.

Across these essays, I found myself tracing the civic and relational conditions of futures thinking – from imagination in governance, to justice beyond fairness, to public-interest foresight, to participation as a living system.

In retrospect, the six essays read like a small Bildungsroman – a coming-of-age arc told through futures practice. Each piece captured a different episode in the evolution of my thinking: from system-level critique, to participatory design, to relational interdependence, to land-based imagination, to the re-centering of belonging as a futures principle. I didn’t realize it at the time, but together these writings trace the transformation of a practitioner sharpening her clarity – not through certainty, but through relationship, humility, and an insistence that futures work must evolve.

This retrospective is an attempt to trace that arc.

1. Imagination as Infrastructure

My first essays explored what the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) teaches us about public imagination. What began as a comparison between the USDAC and a possible Federal Office of Foresight became something more: a meditation on imagination as civic capacity.

Through conversations with USDAC leaders, I was reminded that government often defaults to incrementalism even when facing complexity. The USDAC models a different ethic – one that treats creativity as a structural part of public life. It showed me that imagination is not decoration. It is infrastructure.

The takeaway wasn’t that foresight needs more art, but that it needs more spaciousness; more room for creative method, embodied practice, and community voice.

2. Reframing Justice Beyond Fairness

“Beyond Fairness” examined the limits of intergenerational fairness as articulated at the UN Summit of the Future. Necessary, yes, but too narrow. Too transactional. Too focused on balancing harms rather than transforming systems.

What if we designed for flourishing, not merely fairness?

Drawing on narrative power mapping, Warm Data, popular education, and emerging scholarship in Possibility Studies, I explored how the frames we choose shape what becomes thinkable. Language is not neutral in futures work. It is strategic. It reveals what we value, and constrains or expands our collective imagination.

This essay marked an inflection point: I began writing not just about futures, but about the ethics that underlie them.

3. The Call for Public-Interest Foresight

Midway through the fellowship, my writing shifted more explicitly toward civic futures.

In “A Call to Action: Building a Public Interest Futures Brigade,” I mapped the absence of a public-interest pathway in foresight – a gap that feels increasingly dangerous in a time of democratic erosion, climate instability, and technological acceleration.

Inspired by models such as public-interest law and public health, I argued for foresight embedded in civic ecosystems, accessible far beyond corporate or elite policy contexts.

A central conviction emerged: If foresight is to serve the public good, communities must have meaningful access to its tools. Without that, futures remain unevenly distributed.

4. Participation as a Living System

My final essays, From Input to Interbeing, Parts 1 and 2,” brought many threads together. Here, I confronted the limits of extractive participation: performative listening, survey-driven processes, and linear engagement models that fail to hold complexity.

Influenced by Warm Data, Holoptic Foresight Dynamics, biomimicry, systems sensing, and cultural strategy, I offered an alternative orientation: regenerative participation.

This is not a new method but a new way of relating – one that understands participation as an ecosystem shaped by reciprocity, interdependence, and emergence. These essays were the most personal and experimental of the series, and they signaled the direction my practice is moving: toward relational, embodied, ecological forms of civic imagination.

5. What This Body of Work Reveals

Across all six essays, one conviction rose again and again:

Futures work is fundamentally about relationships. Our futures will rise or fall based on the quality of those relationships.

Three commitments emerged:

A. Futures must emerge from relationships, not abstraction.

Belonging, memory and interdependence – these themes surfaced uninvited because they are structural, not sentimental.

The systems we build will mirror the relationships we practice.

B. Futures must be co-created, not delivered.

The distance between institutional foresight and lived experience is too vast. Communities must be designers, not data sources.

A future that is not co-created cannot be collectively stewarded.

C. Futures must be regenerative — capable of restoring, not merely reforming.

Efficiency is not resilience. Prediction is not possibility.

We need futures that replenish the conditions for collective thriving.

Taken together, these insights form an implicit thesis:

The future is not primarily a timeline. It is a relationship ecosystem — and foresight must strengthen that ecosystem, not merely map it.

6. What the Field Needs Now

Read as a whole, these essays articulate a clear direction for the next evolution of foresight practice:

1. Build a public-interest infrastructure for foresight. Create pathways, funding mechanisms, and institutional homes for practitioners working in civic life.

2. Center relational participation. Replace extractive input with systems-sensing, cultural strategy, and participatory design grounded in interdependence.

3. Treat imagination as essential civic capacity. A society that cannot imagine alternatives cannot design them.

4. Reclaim language as strategy. Our metaphors shape our possibilities; naming is political work.

5. Redistribute epistemic power. Center communities with lived experience of structural harm.

6. Deepen relationship with land and the more-than-human world. The future is ecological; our methods must be too.

7. Shift from predictive to regenerative governance. Governance must tend to relationships, not just manage risk.

   
   

In short:

We cannot build regenerative futures with extractive tools.

We cannot build plural futures with singular narratives.

We cannot build democratic futures without democratizing foresight itself.

Closing Reflections

The APF Emerging Fellows fellowship invited me to think more boldly, more relationally, and more generously about what futures work can be. It also offered space for my writing to stretch into questions of belonging, relational ethics, and collective imagination.

I leave the Emerging Fellows Program with a clearer sense of the futures I hope to help cultivate: futures rooted in belonging, shaped by imagination, grounded in relationship, and designed with — and not merely for — communities.

For those who wish to continue following this work, I write regularly at Seed & Signal, and in January I begin graduate study in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston.

Thank you to the APF community for the rigor and companionship along the way — especially Patricia Lustig, Stephen Dupont, and Jawn Lim, and my 2024 cohort: Grace Okubo, Suneet Pansare, Wensupu Yang, Elena Kraft, and Rachel Magaji.