We are delighted to continue our new podcast series based on the Winners and honorable mentions from the APF 2023 IF Awards. Today we hear from Clarice Garcia and her toolkit called Values Driven Transitions for Fashion’s Imagined Futures and Steven Lichty and his work in Kenya breaking the cycle of Intergenerational trauma.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Clarice Garcia - Fashion Futuring
Publications:
Garcia, C.C. (2022)Fashion forecasting: an overview from material culture to industry, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Vol.26(3), pp.436-451 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-11-2020-0241
Garcia, C.C. (2022) Contemporary changes and challenges in the practice of trend forecasting, International Journal of Fashion Studies, Vol.10(1), pp.75-98, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00086_1
Garcia, C.C. (2023) Fashion futuring: Intertwining speculative design, foresight and material culture towards sustainable futures, Futures Volume 153, October 2023.
Steven Lichty - Healing Past Trauma
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Welcome to the FuturePod Spotlight Series on the APF IF awards for 2023. In 2022 the APF changed from the most Significant Futures Work Awards to the IF Awards. Let's hear from Maggie what the IF awards are all about.
Maggie Greyson: The awards served as an invaluable resource for pointing clients. and the future's curiosity towards understanding the nature of work.
If questions, What If X, then y, are central to what we do as curators, facilitators, and researchers in supporting communities, organizations, and institutions to explore the futures.
John Sweeney: In celebration of the APF 20th anniversary, MSFW was re imagined as the APF IF Awards to reflect the globality, diversity, transdisciplinarity of the organization and the futures and foresight field. The Reimagined IF Awards program recognizes the evolving excellence in futures and foresight work with an emphasis on key thematic areas such as impact, imagination, and Indigenous.
Peter Hayward: Those awards are done and dusted and now we are here to celebrate the winners and special mentions. So get ready to hear from people doing important futures and foresight work all over the globe that is innovative, inclusive, indigenous, and much, much more. So on with the show.
Okay, Maggie, who's next?
Clarice Garcia, who is a wonderful person and very fashionable herself, created a project called Values Driven Transitions for Fashion's Imagined Features. She won in the imaginative category, with her values driven methodology bridging fiction, design, and design. Culture, collaboration and foresight, and it comprises of a set of open ended tools and a four level conceptual framework.
Fashion Futuring invites forecasters and designers to adopt long range, values first, collaborative attitudes supporting fashion's ethical reset. The judges love it. Highly praised the sleek combination of futures tools and methods tailored specifically for the fashion industry. They commended the toolkits conceptual strength in centering values for visioning it's gorgeous award winning design to increase adoptability and it's clear linkages to existing fashion forecasting processes.
Focusing on one sector was seen as a key strength Rather than limitation given fashions, massive global scale and impact overall revolutionizing how an entire industry explores futures through this robust boundary pushing toolkit was lauded as an impressive and potentially high impact contribution with applicability across adjacent industries.
What I think is cool is that this is another project that is industry challenging at scale. It emerged from recognition, recognizing fashion's 10 percent contribution to global carbon emissions, and that there's a potential to be applied to sectors like furniture, vehicles, electronics, and beyond fashion.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Clarice.
Clarice Garcia: Thank you, Peter. My pleasure. It's really great to be here speaking to you at FuturePod.
Peter Hayward: Thank you. And I'll start with congratulations. So your work, the Fashion Futuring Toolkit, was a winner in the category of Imaginative in the IF Awards for 2023. Clarice, you have produced a piece of work that the peers of the APF have regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Futures work last year. How does that make you feel?
Clarice Garcia: Oh, this is absolutely awesome. It's fantastic. this work emerged from a very hard working process. So four years of a PhD trying to deep dive into Potential alternative for alternatives for futures thinking and yeah, and I had like collaboration with like my supervisors that really encouraged me during the process which was like very fabulous.
So yeah, so having this recognition is it's really delightful. It's amazing. And I hope like the project just takes off and reach to more people interested in this field of design futures.
Peter Hayward: So you've worked in the fashion industry as a trend spotter, and I'm sure most of our listeners will know the way that trend spotters work. Your PhD work and the fashion futures toolkit, I see as an attempt, to reform and develop the fashion trendspotting industry. Is that right?
Clarice Garcia: Yeah, it's perfect. So actually over the past 10 years, like I, my role as a trend forecaster was actually to capture and interpret emerging social changes to guide companies through uncertainty and to actually provide them some guidance to, any recommendations both in terms of products, communication, brand positioning, to avoid financial risks and to illuminate some paths for decision making. And in doing so, I was very fortunate to, to work not only in the fashion field, but also with all the industries like electronics, cars and like tech. companies, entertainment, beverage, and food, et cetera.
And what I understood from my practice was actually that instead of embracing uncertainties, like as a point of departure for any futures thinking or any possibility around futures as a plural form, my practice was actually like aimed to decrease the
unpredictability. It was like around to frame the future accordingly to a certain kind of mindset to orchestrate productive systems around concise information. So I guess in being a trend forecaster was actually what made me realize that my role was actually to provide these guidance.
But at the same time when I was working for fashion for the fashion industry I was pushing novelty ahead and provoking, triggering consumerism through the predictions that we were doing and creating, and stimulating like the short term trend cycles that fashion is based on.
from this kind of critical thinking about my own practice, I started to think how could I expand or shift or propose an alternative for futures thinking in the fashion industry, that is the worst case scenario in terms of trends and consumerism that we could imagine. how could I propose something new or something that is an alternative that, instead of being
Profit centered, could be a values driven or sustainability driven practice towards futures thinking. So thatwas the starting point.
Peter Hayward: Looking at the toolkit and looking at your methodology, you have the process of what you call the Known, then you have the Unknown. Let's talk about the unknown. I think the known would be understood. Most people would say that trendspotting works in the world of the known. So what color, what fabric, what style, whatever else. What was the unknown? And how did you get people's, as you say, their mindset? How did you get people to explore the unknown?
Clarice Garcia: Absolutely. what I understood like by running workshops during my PhD and engaging people in the process was like that we had to help people to imagine Completely different possibilities.
people that are not experts futures, when you ask them about what the future of fashion looks like, they tend to answer things that are like the trends that are around. they tend to say I imagine the future of fashion being sustainable, being organic, being, digital, et cetera, et cetera.
And I was like, not satisfied with these answers because I was like, if we need to change the paradigm of fashion, actually, that's what I believe we need is to imagine Further alternatives. We need to go deeper into what else can we propose? So, instead of Guiding people through interviews or through, words and verbal communicationI started to think instead what if we use images as prompts for imagination? Because when we use imagery what happens is that the images, they are an open text. So they allow our participants to unfold things that they don't have even words to say.
It's more a sort of intuition It's more about a feeling. It's about a sentiment rather than the rational part of, I think that fashion will be this and that, or might be this and that in that timeframe. Another thing that I abandoned during the process was the timeframes.
It's not about What fashion might look like into 2050 or to 2080. It doesn't matter. The time is flexible. It is what we can imagine. And so when we take out these fixed times what happens is that people stop trying to find an answer or to give you an answer about what they think it should be. and they just jump into these fictional stories where they don't know where they are about to end. .
Peter Hayward: And I guess when you move to the values element, and what are the values that people personally have for fashion and they can be people who regard fashion as a waste of time, waste of resources, as a process that is done to control women and keep them poor and keep them passive. So those are equally values to bring to the future of fashion, along with fashion as a liberator, fashion as an empowerer.
Clarice Garcia: Absolutely, after creating fictional stories and fictional scenarios through imagery and also through open ended questions
They end up uncovering values through the process of co not like fashion and sustainability or fashion as digital form, whatever, but then instead of getting these answers, what they find as values for the future of fashion, for example, some groups said like fashion as care, fashion as protection.
And of course, I think that one of the barriers when we think about values is that they are not unique. They are not the same for everyone. They are not universal. And this is something that is a challenge for a practice like this, that is, like, how can we also test and develop these tools with people that are not from Western cultures, that have completely different points of view this is something that still has to be developedThe discussion around values through design is a very interesting process and true fiction, of course.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, and of course the values can be in conflict. And you say that the conflict is part of the fashion. In other words, you don't remove the conflict in order to get the fashion. You use the conflict.
Clarice Garcia: Absolutely. And this is something that, for all of us, I think, foresight practitioners, it is like, how can we actually embrace conflict and embrace how can we expandfrom four archetypes of alternative scenarios to, I don't know, a hundred archetypes. How can we be fluctuating in between what is known versus what is unknown? How can we assume this floating state that is something that is curious in this process of working with values because they are not fixed, they are not universal?
And they can be conflictual and and they might change. if you run the same session with the same people in a second day with new cards, they might unfold a new value. It is a process that is endless in the sense of like the multiplicity of opportunities that it entails,
Peter Hayward: You spoke about a mindset and I've read the testimonials on your website, that people are saying they loved being pushed outside their comfort zone, they loved the creativity. I wonder, Clarice, whether you observe situations where people themselves were excited to work this way, however they felt that their organizations were not so excited to allow them to work this way.
Clarice Garcia: Absolutely. there is a barrier that is like, when I look at my company, I don't know how exactly it might fitWithin that company. at the same time, this is the role of this work that is, to put together everyone that want to try them and to invite stakeholders to just think differently.
I don't think that this is a process that changes systems from one day to the next. I think this is a process of building a new cultural form of looking at the future within the companies. it might be just a small step. It might have no effect directly speaking in how they roadmap the strategies for the future in the companies themselves.
But when we get stakeholders involved in the process and if they Go out of the session just thinking like, Oh, what is this? I, or I haven't never thought about that. It is already a result because it is like the initial seed of a transformation. I guess when you talk about culture and worldviews, it is something that is built over time.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, one thing I always say, Clarice, when I was teaching was that organizations don't have futures. People have futures. And we often act as if organizations have their own will and purpose and future they want to create. And then, of course, we have to remember that no such thing as an organization. It's people that create the will, it's people that shape the future of an organization. And therefore, if you change the minds of people, they'll change their organizations.
Clarice Garcia: AbsolutelyAnd sometimes it could affect one personThat is touched by this new form of thinking or this new form of, playing with the futures that we might have in playing with our worldviews and like centering worldviews in this process rather than profit.
what Fashion Futuring proposes is actually like the dislocation of profit from the center to another point in that system and placing worldviews and values at the center. It also comes of course with the acknowledgement that the fashion industry ,they have made big efforts in transforming the systems, the materials and all their process into more sustainable processes, et cetera.
However, they’re not thinking about the role culture plays in this system of sustainability. They are just ignoring it and they are still with the same mindset that is: new collections, the newer, the better, the novelty, the new color, the new whatever. And I guess this process can just help them to think, that maybe we have to frame sustainability differently.
Peter Hayward: So Where is the toolkit going in the future and where is Claris going in the future with it?
Clarice Garcia: I guess one thing is there is a need to test the tools within the organizational setting exactly to understand the potential and the barriers to use this for transformation rather than just as a tool for imagination or as a tool to have fun and play with futures.
This is the first step. The secondone is to also to test and include more voices in this process. Fashion Futuring is a collaborative process. It also aims to include more people in futures thinking and design has this power because it turns things easier to manipulate, to think, to imagine, it's a different process. as it is about values, like we have to include more voices. We have to include more perspectives. Unfortunately, during my PhD, I didn't have the chance to test with with all the groups or all the potential groups of people, cultures, to understand also all the possibilities around.
And the third thing is I believe that Fashion Futuring has is this big potential to be adapted to other sectors, such as architecture. For example, I did like a session with architect when I was in Brazil last year and it was fabulous.
So it's been now adapted by me for architecture. It could be adapted to anything because, if we look at the framework that is Unknown, Values and Transitions, it could be applied to any sector and I think there is a huge potential in that. And finally, of course, I think that I need to scale the project that's why I'm looking for partners, and so listeners of Futurepod, if you have any leads, please let me know.
Peter Hayward: And just before you go, I'm just going to ask you to unpack Clarice's view on what fashion means to you. Yes, it's an industry, and yes, fashion can be things we put on our body and everything else, but I suspect for you, Clarice, fashion is a lot of things. So what is fashion for you?
Clarice Garcia: I think fashion for me is an expression of culture. that's why it is so powerful and it is still engaging. Everyone engages with fashion in a different way, doesn't matter. But I guess it is like this because it is this process of a cultural expression. It is a way that we materialize our beliefs on clothes, on artifacts, and on the way we socialize with others, the way we are seen and By others and that we see ourselves.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it's a beautiful notion of materializing our sense of self. Yeah, lovely. Clarice its been great to catch up again Congratulations again for winning the IF Award for your work on Fashion Futuring. And thanks for spending some time with the FuturePod community.
Clarice Garcia: Thank you so much Peter. It was a pleasure. Pleasure. And yeah, just for the listeners Peter was the first futurist that dedicated his time to talk with me about my project. that conversation was very helpful in 2020. So thank you for that. And thank you for today.
Peter Hayward: Pleasure, Clarice. Thanks.
Thank you.
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Okay, John, who's my next guest?
Peter, I'm really thrilled to share that Steven Lichty has won an honorable mention for his project Healing Past Trauma to Unlock Flourishing Futures. This was actually Steven's master's thesis that he conducted at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town. And it delves into the crucial connection between trauma informed mental health and psychosocial trainings.
It's really about how to create the space for different communities and of course people to ultimately envision flourishing futures. Now, Steven actually collaborated with the Green String Network and ultimately tried to bring forward the opportunity to increase futures consciousness in marginalized communities in Kenya.
And, of course, they're facing intergenerational trauma, so this project is really critical from the perspective of how to break the cycles and ensure that different futures can be possible. By grounding Futures Consciousness in neurobiology and the need to reconcile traumatic pasts, the project really lays the groundwork for a long term longitudinal study that could track the impacts of trauma healing on Futures thinking.
And overall, Steven's work really blazes an important new trail by deeply integrating trauma awareness into Futures work, especially within marginalized populations facing identity struggles and really encountering the power of trauma. Of used features narratives, this work really has significant potential and ultimately could be more significant within the context of global development and peace building efforts.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Steven.
Steven Lichty: Thank you, Peter. Nice to be here.
Peter Hayward: Congratulations on your special nomination in the IF Awards for your work called Healing Past Trauma to Unlock Flourishing Futures. I wonder if you could just explain just quickly to the listeners what your work is about.
Steven Lichty: So it's essentially a working with, in my case, marginalized youth here in Kenya that have come from traumatic sort of backgrounds, either escaping Al Shabaab or coming out of gangs, or just coming from pretty horrendous sort of life situations.
And then they have been working through a 12-week trauma healing journey that was organized and led by a partner organization. So, I was soaking and poking amongst these youth just seeing how that neuroplasticity and how they are engaging with some of those inner healing processes. How does this change their views of the future and their ability to engage with the future?
And in short, finding that trauma healing journey resulted in these youth reporting very significant sort of increases in the using the University of Turku's Futures Consciousness Scale, kind of five areas, and so that's that, in a nutshell, is the really positive signs that we're seeing from this work.
Peter Hayward: I love that phrase soaking and poking. That's one of the best descriptions of the work we do.
Steven Lichty: It is. And it was my PhD supervisor that taught me all about how to soak and poke.
Peter Hayward: So, let's just get under the bonnet a bit more. Your research with these youth found that their future consciousness expanded. So why did it make a difference and what happened after it had made a difference to these youth?
Steven Lichty: It goes even to the origin of why I was focused on this. So I was working with Green String Network. This is the organization with this healing centred sort of approach.
And I was looking at some of their impact studies and they were showing that there was empowerment. Youth were more concerned for each other. They had increased agency beliefs and. And so, I'm looking at these results, and I'm looking at the five, dimensions of futures consciousness. And it's oh, my word, these two really align with each other.
What happens if we, dive in a little bit deeper and specifically ask about these five elements? And yeah, that's when you really begin to see that in that healing journey process, you do end up with some really strong foundational components of this, concept of futures consciousness.
So Tom Lombardo is the one that really, I think, has talked about this the most in some degree. But then, the group at Turku has developed and validated their approach, although Turku, qualifies that we've really not done this in non-Western settings. So that's, another element that I contribute is that I was doing it with Kenyan youth in a very different sort of context than I think when we think of futures consciousness, we don't necessarily think of youth working in these sort of spaces.
Peter Hayward: We're talking about an approach which is not just helpful for youth that are suffering trauma, but this kind of stuff you would imagine would be helpful for youth period.
Steven Lichty: For youth period, Peter, and for most of, the billion people on the continent that have encountered any form of colonialism and the long-term structural and mental violence that colonialism has wrought on, not just even African societies, but anyone under those sort of regimes.
And so. We've also done work with the National Police Service here in Kenya, and the NPS is one of the most traumatized entities of, a major sort of just a structural pillar in society, and I've actually had some really good pushback saying, look, this isn't just marginalized youth. This is across the board. In various forms of what that trauma was, or is.
Peter Hayward: Is this a hard sell or an easy sell for as an idea for institutions with responsibilities to actually try some of these things out and embrace them.
Steven Lichty: What we're seeing here in the Kenya perspective is it's actually a hard sell because we're encroaching upon, say, the mental health and psychosocial support ecosystems. And then from a mental health sort of and health facilitation and health services everything in Kenya still is attracted to a biomedical sort of approach. So, let's send you to a shrink. Let's send you to a psychologist, and you know if we can get you some good Prozac and some good Wellbutrin and whatever else we need that, because that is viewed as, oh, that's how the West does it.
The West does it immensely wrong. And so, this actually is more cutting edge and more fruitful and more beneficial because it's really all the programming that we've done is from the grassroots up we've worked with these communities for 10 or 15 years. We understand the communal elements of this mental health is still viewed as individualistic, one on one private thing that needs to happen behind closed counseling doors.
This is put under the mango tree. You're using sticks, rocks, and leaves to tell your story. Rocks are the hard places, leaves are the places of life, and the sticks are the things that connect the hard places with the hopeful, joyful sort of places. And each of these youth is telling their own story with those three very elementary sort of principles, but yeah, you don't need, Lego Serious Play or, all these fancy sort of things.
And so it has a very communal and a very grassroots and a very local sort of feel to it that these youth jump into this. And they go with it and they, yeah, they're soaring after this kind of 12-week sort of program,
Peter Hayward: I'm a podcast and I love the notion of narrative and storytelling is obviously a big part of your process of moving from trauma. I'm going to ask you again to put your PhD hat on and just restate why the story we tell ourselves about who we are matters.
Steven Lichty: I think something that is maybe a wave that we have not seen come crashing into the shore yet, but I think it, it resides among the youth. It's just authenticity. You're being real. And we come from cultures where there's all these things telling us who we need to be, but this true authenticity comes from really understanding yourself and to really understand yourself, you have to also understand your shadow self.
And that shadow self has often been informed by traumatic sort of events and it has multiple guises and multiple hats of how it wants to act out in certain situations. So yeah, I just see that where we're going both at the individual level, but even at the global level can be an amazing. Armchair psychiatrist watching Donald Trump give a speech or something like it, it's this poor man. It's sad that all you know, all these sort of things are like popping up. In these, in these speeches and just his projection and so forth. And when you read about his childhood. Putin is very similar. I think Xi Jinping had a very similar sort of experience as well.
So, I don't want to move it to that great of a geopolitical level. But, just in short, the global consequences of not wrestling with these sort of things is immense. And yeah, so the more that this can happen at the grassroots and empowering more and more sort of people at a grassroots sort of level, I think it gives the balance to be able to counter the narratives that are going to be coming down, that are going to be attracting people actually to act out from their shadow self. If that made sense.
Peter Hayward: It does. I want to pivot and look at the notion of action because again, in my experience people can often go through an internal narrative journey of what they need to do, and they find it can be difficult for them to actually translate those intentions into actions. That people can hold intentions to do something and then often act in a way that's contrary to their intention. I wonder in your process how do you integrate the intentional aspect to the things we do?
Steven Lichty: Yeah. The cognitive dissonance and, the connection between the head, heart and hand. I, so I think like you were just talking about, I think there's three and the dissonance between what you think, what you believe and what you do can be key.
Can be very can be very different. Yeah, I think, getting that integration is I, so let me back up, I think every person of the head, heart and hand, we all have personal characteristics that we favor one of those we know the busy body that always wants to be doing things and it's you just stop and feel for change.
Sorry. Or the person who is nerdy and just broods around and things all the time. And it's can you please get up and do something? So there yeah, I, so I think that this, there isn't, a set sort of standard, you have to really learn and understand your own sort of. Attributes and where, what are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses? And then figure out, really how to manage. I don't think you can really turn a lot of your weaknesses into strengths. I've been taught that you just manage those, get those into a good place where you can, they're manageable. And then work from your strengths.
And just being aware of what those weaknesses are. But yeah, that, that combination of the head, heart and hand, I'm actually working this, is slightly related to it because the trauma and the mental health is there. I'm working on a large project right now on global freedom, religion, Global freedom of religion and belief.
So this is Hindus, Muslim, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, everybody in kind of that religious space, as well as those who have no belief or agnostic or whatever, and just seeing some of this religious hatred that can be there. Really driven by just I think immense brokenness between the head, heart and hand.
And I think it, it emulates The role that trauma, can exacerbate situations because no one is really thinking about this. And I think this is the power of kind of trauma informed approaches is that it underlies so many different things that we're trying to possibly change In the world because no one sees it.
It's not if it's not in the development world. Look, if it's not measurable, it doesn't count. And that sounds very snarky and cynical, but it's the truth for USAID and the Australian Development Agency and anybody that if we can't measure it, it really doesn't count. So if we're talking about this internal mushy mental health space and we can't measure it, then it Ah, we don't really know what to do with it.
Peter Hayward: Steve given that funding problem, which is not going to go away, and given that the funding organisations are always going to fund what is measurable what are you going to do? Because this work is needed and you know it's effective.
Steven Lichty: Yeah, so Green String Network has managed to get some funding, actually, to play around in this space from Global Challenge Canada this is GCC, and I think they're a little bit more open to looking at alternative forms of evidence and so forth.
So, one of the things we're working on right now is just developing I think this funding is a year and a half and developing some really strong research methodologies, maybe doing some randomized control trials, trying to work into that space where we can provide. The evidence that maybe sells better in some of these circles.
So that's one area. Another area is this relates heavily to the world health organization's concept of the Triple Dividend, which is embedded in foresight, whether they know it or not. But there are the Triple Dividend, in short, is if we invest in the current generation, current adolescents, current children, youth, we get an immediate dividend, they do better in school, they stay out of crime and so forth.
So, invest in youth, invest in adolescents, but then in 20 years, they're adults. We're going to get another dividend when they're taking that maturity and that responsibility and living healthy, responsible lives as adults. Second dividend. Third dividend is when they marry and start having children and start passing that down.
So, where the World Health Organization is almost taking a three generational sort of perspective. What we would be contributing is if you do not bring trauma healing at some point in that journey, you're just going to perpetuate generation after generation of passing that on. So, we need an intervention point.
And the faster we can do that with more people that we can do that with the better off future generations are going to be. So yeah, it's taking it. So that's maybe the head using these analogies again. Action is action. Let's get some small examples of communities really utilizing this and really turning around, not just individual lives, but the community, the county is really flourishing.
So, this group that we, have been working with in, in Kwale County, they've been asked by, the county government, can you please, please take this curriculum into our prisons? Because our, that incarcerated population, would benefit immensely from this. So that it is that ripple effect that is happening there.
And then the heart, maybe it's how do we do this with song, dance, music, video, all of those other things that kind of speak to another. Another part of our part as human beings. So multi-pronged sort of approach, start small. And then I guess this sounds cheesy, you throw it up to the universe to really hopefully bring traction to this in places around the world that will, adopt it and use it and see fit.
And it's we're not the only ones doing this, but if we can get. A larger group, formed and then Peter, just on that note in the last week, there's about, I don't know, 10 to 15 of us that have created a trauma informed foresight and futures practitioner group. So, this is primarily people in the foresight future sort of spaces that Jose Ramos and John Sweeney, Cecily Summers. J. T. Mudge just trying to think of Juli Rush. A bunch of us are in this space of just formulating what does this look like, both and it's fascinating when you get into these brainstorming conversations with other, foresight experts. A lot of them are saying, look, we need to be looking at the mental health of the foresight profession.
Just a lot of us work in some really tight sort of spaces and the burden on us can be immense. How do we foster mental health for the foresight community? But then also, how do we assist the foresight community with understanding the trauma informed sort of approaches as they work with, more and more communities around the world that maybe aren't in the Boeing, Airbus, General Motors, BP, that, that corporate sort of space where, there is a lot of work and a lot of work in the UN, but that work down in the grassroots, down in the trenches and the front lines I think that's where some really important work needs to happen.
Peter Hayward: That's great stuff. So last thing, just for the listeners who are interested in following up, With the stuff you're talking about where should they go? How did they reach out to you?
Steven Lichty: Yeah. I've created a link tree profile that will provide, a lot of, all these resources that I've talked about in some of the research that I've done.
Just putting that publicly out there on Linktree. You can find it there. And then just recently launched more of initiative. I think to this trauma, trauma informed foresight practitioners group, as we build more of an internal sort of structure, there'll be maybe more of a launch for that. So maybe just, find me on LinkedIn and just follow what happens there, but we will post something there.
And then I've really, I've launched a new entity called Frontline Futures, where I really want to have a focus on those fault lines that we see in society and where that trauma is going to be a strong undercurrent and how do we work in those sort of frontline sort of spaces. Yeah, you'll find my web link to Frontline Futures as well.
Peter Hayward: Great. It's been fantastic to catch up, Steve, and I've thoroughly enjoyed our chat. Congratulations on both the work you're doing and the nomination in the APF awards. More strength to you more strength to your arms. Thanks for taking some time out to have a chat to the FuturePod community.
Steven Lichty: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Peter. And maybe just give you a nod. I know that you've written a book called Developing Wisdom, how foresight developed in individuals and groups. And so, I have not read that. But I'm like I wonder what Peter found, in 2008, because it sounds like it really aligns with what some of what these youth were saying.
And just maybe let me close with this, because I think this is maybe one of the most profound narratives arising out of this, Work with the youth. When I did the, the five dimensions by default on my flip chart, the middle was blank. And I said what, how would you describe that middle section for you? As youth? What sits in that middle that. Brings all five of these dimensions together. It was dead silence until this very shy 18-year-old Muslim girl says under her breath, she says wisdom. And I'm like, what did you say? And she says “wisdom” and everyone agreed with her. And so, wisdom and youth in Kenya are not synonymous, and so it was like they acknowledge that they had learned immense insight about themselves, their family, their community, and they were wise. And it was almost like a new power that they really are still trying to figure out in some ways what to do with.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Mate.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with Clarice and Steven. It was great to hear where Clarice has ended up after our chat all those years ago, before she started her PhD. And Steven's work with trauma and youth in very challenging circumstances is amazing. I will let Maggie close this podcast out and I will see you next time.
Maggie Greyson: Hi, everyone. Keep an eye out for the Association of Professional Futurists call for submissions for the IF Awards come August.
If you have a futures project you're working on or considering, this is a fantastic opportunity to share it with the APF and the broader futures and foresight community. The IFF Awards recognize excellence in futures and foresight work across nine themes, such as impact, imagination, and indigenous. Stay tuned for insights from past winners published in Compass, And the upcoming APF membership events.