Storying Just Futures

Vision

Storying Just Futures (SJF) is a global humanities initiative that 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. Developed through more than a decade of humanities and sustainability work at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, the initiative gives participants the tools, language, and confidence to claim agency in shaping a just, healthy, and resilient future.

Through workshops, lectures, creative storytelling, and futures-thinking methodologies co-developed with UNESCO BRIDGES, Storying Just Futures provides an “anticipatory toolbox” of practical skills for imagining future scenarios: from evaluating what justice looks like across communities to expressing those visions through creative forms, such as writing, performance, dance, and drama. By invoking a humanities approach, participants learn to connect personal experience to global challenges, turning individual insight into tangible pathways for action.

With the 2024 Summit of the Future’s focus on youth voices in mind, SJF asks a simple question: What if communities and young leaders were not only consulted about the future, but co-designed and built it?

Across all its efforts, Storying Just Futures advances one central goal: to equip young people with the tools, knowledge, and confidence to take agency over the future they desire and deserve.

The Storying Just Futures Fellowship

At the conclusion of our program of workshops and lectures, SJF  launched a competition for a cohort of Fellows. Applicants were asked to imagine a future they wished to see by the year 2070, and concisely pitch a solution to a grand challenge (in the form of a social change recommendation, policy recommendation, manifesto or white paper).

At the pitch session, three applicants invited the audience to visualize complex challenges:

“Imagine a child racing the sunset to finish their homework. Imagine their pencil trembling as the light fades faster than their dreams. Imagine knowing that once the sun slips away, learning ends — not because you lack curiosity, but because you lack electricity. Imagine a world where darkness decides who succeeds.”(Gad)

“A young person leaves detention carrying the weight of a mistake but never having been shown a different future. They have learned how to survive the system, but not how to imagine a life beyond it. What if rehabilitation began not with punishment, but with hope, trusted relationships, and the belief that every young person deserves the opportunity to build a future they can see themselves in?”(Trev)

“How do you plan for the futures you want when the only thing that’s certain is uncertainty? Uncertainty often pushes decision-makers towards narrow cost-benefit calculations,short-time horizons, and growth-metrics that hide true costs. Advanced planning with storytelling as a key pillar tackles the uncertainty and by 2070, story functions as infrastructure: recurring civic narrative cycles feed directly into budgets, rules, and oversight, strengthening legitimacy and trust”(Neha)

Fourteen fellows were chosen by consensus of all the applicants.  Rather than selecting a single winning pitch, the fellows worked together to identify the strongest ideas across all fourteen pitches and weave them into one shared statement or manifesto. They also  decided to undergird their manifesto with an adaptable toolkit for how to  create caring communities in real places that would address the issues that young people care about and help them to imagine a future where young people could design practical solutions for  solving the issues most important in their own communities. As they worked together, fellows  challenged themselves to imagine presenting their manifesto and toolkit at The Extraordinary Session of the MOST Intergovernmental Council and the UNESCO MOST BRIDGES Forum at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France, September 29 – October 1, 2026.  

The manifesto is  titled, Caring Communities: Reimagining Futures through Places, Space, and Storytelling. It is a strong statement about what Fellows care about and how their ideas  could be of use to UNESCO MOST nations.   Caring Communities argues that care, reciprocity, interdependence, and community knowledge offer alternatives to development approaches that often overlook local voices and the lived realities of the world’s youth and young leaders. The manifesto calls for a fundamental reimagining of development. At a time when growing inequality, climate change, and rapid technological change are reshaping societies, the fellows argue that there has never been a greater need to move beyond extractive models toward futures grounded in care, reciprocity, community knowledge, and shared responsibility. It calls on UNESCO MOST Member States to create the conditions for communities, especially young people, to become active partners in imagining and shaping the futures they will inherit and offers their own toolkit as an option for catalyzing this work.

Building on the manifesto, fellows co-designed  a Caring Communities / Storying Just Futures workshop model rooted in the local knowledges, lived experiences, and care-centered approaches to decision-making that they imagined supporting in the diverse communities around the world that they were planning to work with. As a first step, the Fellows created a one-day Culture-Integrated Futures Scenario Workshop Method for UNESCO Global South and Climate Justice Pilot Sites.

A Short History

SJF grew out of an earlier Humanities for the Environment project, Forum4JET (Forum for a Just Energy Transition), created to bring together diverse voices around questions of environmental justice, sustainability, and equitable energy transitions. 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.

At a time when uncertainty around a changing funding landscape could easily have led to retreat from pursuit of careers in environmental justice and equity, the leadership for SJF Storying Just Futures chose instead to converge around hope, imagination, and agency.

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Fellows

• Neha Chhetri
• Kimia Lavasani
• Trevor Morris
• Arina Melkozernova
• Mohadeseh Mousazadeh Miandehi
• Jillian Coronato
• Gad Sezirahiga
• In Soo Kim
• Golda Marlesa Elgavia Sooai
• Ema Santos Quiroz
• Laura Randall
• Courtney J Reed
• Margaret Chilinda
• Alexis Reed
• Zhiqiang Liu