In an era defined by technological advancements and global challenges, our world is undergoing a transformative journey. As we navigate through these times of uncertainty, it’s crucial to understand that a better future is possible.
In this recording of the closing keynote at the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit, philanthropic futurist Trista Harris (FutureGood) and Melody Barnes (Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions) discuss where current trends are headed and how our organizations and collaboratives can build the future we want to see for ourselves, our sector, and our communities. This session was held on May 1, 2025.
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Transcript
Courtney W. Robertson: I get to introduce our distinguished guest for the conversation around now is the time to be a future-focused leader, Melody Barnes in conversation with Trista Harris. Melody Barnes is the chair of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. She is the executive director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy where she is also the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. Melody was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the administration of President Barack Obama. Prior to her tenure in the Obama administration she was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late senator, Edward M. Kennedy, on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Melody Barnes.
Trista Harris is a renowned philanthropic futurist who advocates for the use of futurism to address critical community challenges worldwide. Her groundbreaking work has been featured in Forbes, CNN, The New York Times, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and many social sector blogs. Trista is the president of FutureGood, a consultancy that helps visionaries create a better future. She has authored two books, not one but two. How to Become a Nonprofit Rock Star and FutureGood. Trista has dedicated her entire career to the social sector starting at the age of 15 as a summer parks assistant. Prior to her work at FutureGood she served as president of the Minnesota Council on Foundations, a thriving grantmaking community that awards over 1.5 billion annually. She was also the executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice and a program officer at Minnesota Philanthropy Partners. A strategic foresight expert certified by Oxford University, Trista holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts from Howard University. Go Bison. Trista is a board member of Tides, a philanthropic partner and nonprofit accelerator focused on creating a world of shared prosperity and social justice. She is also a corporate board member for Arts + Rec, a creative entertainment venue that showcases local creatives. Trista has served on the Minnesota Super Bowl Host Committee and the Governor’s Council on Law Enforcement and Community Relations, which was established following the police shooting of Philando Castile. We will begin with a presentation from Trista followed by a conversation between her and Melody.
Trista Harris: Thanks, Courtney. I appreciate it. Hi, everybody. So I am Trista Harris, and this code will take you to our website. You can get a free download of the FutureGood book. I started this futurism work during another time of crisis. So I was leading the Headwaters Foundation for Justice in 2008. The stock market collapsed, their endowment lost about half of its value and I was positive we were going to shut down.
Around that time I found a book that was about how to get a business advantage during times of crisis using the tools of futurism, and I was like, well, this is a crisis. So read the book from front to back and brought those tools to our grantees. And in the following couple of years our grantees that were doing community organizing work had 10 legislative wins which was the most in our organization’s history. They had wins on things like alternative teacher certification to diversify our state’s teaching force, first in its country homeowner’s bill of rights to deal with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and we got marriage equity in the state of Minnesota.
So it really lit the spark in me that the tools of futurism put in the hands of people that do good for a living is really powerful. Then, back in 2018 I launched FutureGood. We help foundations and nonprofits build a more beautiful and equitable future. We do that through a type of strategic planning called Strategic Visioning. We also teach people to use futurism in their work and I think that’s one of the most important skills that we need to have in this sector. So, first a little bit of context about this moment.
So there is a saying and it’s meant to be a curse, “May you live in interesting times.” So we live in a time of rapid change and decline, a time of really shaky democratic systems, the attempted outlawing of DEI, school shootings, passing the tipping point on climate change. We are definitely living in interesting times. This is also a really incredibly difficult time for folks that work in the nonprofit sector.
So I work closely with a number of foundations and nonprofits and what I hear from their staff is this is the hardest work of my career. So they are working on all the problems that I talked about but they’re often doing it with less resources and fewer staff, and it feels like the problems that they’re working on are getting worse and worse. It feels pretty bleak out there. But I deeply believe that another future is possible.
So what if instead we ask communities to describe their ideal future. It might start small and a little self-serving like the kid in the neighborhood asking for an ice cream shop that’s within walkable distance. But maybe those ideas grow and build as first dozens and then hundreds of neighbors radically imagine what a new future would look like for their community. And maybe some of them have never been asked before what the future of their community should look like. And those ideas create alignments and then action. Those ideas create a point on the horizon that a community is driving towards together. And suddenly, that ideal future become a reality. And then what if in that process we learn how to show up differently, not as gatekeepers or experts that are there to bring solutions to the community, but instead as resource mobilizers and connectors who can help a community’s vision of the future come true. Maybe instead for us of the work feeling draining and stuck it feels meaningful and regenerative. And suddenly we have a future where foundations and nonprofits are meeting their mission and everybody is focusing on the same future.
So this is what happened with one of FutureGood’s clients, Camdentown, which envisioned what a neighborhood in North Minneapolis would look like if it harnessed the strengths of the Black community that had lived there for generations but had been underinvested in. And so they asked us during National Night Out back in 2021 to ask community members what they wanted their future of the community to look like. And since that time there’s been millions of dollars of reinvestment in a couple of square block area based on what community members wrote on a chalkboard during that night.
I see time and time again when an organization or a policymaker uses a future frame for their work and develops a picture of 50 years in the future. If you are 100 percent successful, what does it look like? It doesn’t actually take 50 years to get there. For most of the organizations that we work with it’s five to seven years to get to that 50-year vision. So we need a long runway to envision transformative change. But once that vision is clear we have all of the incentive in the world to change and to move to make that future happen as quickly as possible.
So some context about futurism. Developing a picture of the future of predicting future trends is not something that is magic eight-ball work. It also isn’t something that only a professional futurist can do. It’s something that any of you can do. A recent study from BetterUp Labs found that the most important skill for leaders today are future thinking skills. Leaders that are strong in those leadership skills report 34 percent less anxiety and 35 percent less depression than their peers. They’re more optimistic about the future, they’re more productive. They’re more ready to create transformative change.
I think there’s another reason why futurism and future thinking skills are particularly important for us in the social sector. The purpose of our work is to change the trajectory of the future. Every time you launch a new program, every time you propose a new public policy it’s because you want the future to look different than the present. And so we may not call it futurism but it is the work that each of you is doing every single day. So there is a saying, “The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.” It’s giving you clues about tomorrow.
A lot of futurism work is paying attention to signals in the present that are showing you what the future is going to look like. So I’m going to share some of the trends that we’re paying attention to at FutureGood that I think are important to the future of your work. The first is our Future of Philanthropy model that we developed with the Institute for the Future. So what you see on the left-hand side is the present and the right-hand side is the future.
So this first curve of philanthropy starts with the way that it’s always worked, the way that Andrew Carnegie gave away dollars is what it looks like within many foundations. Top-down governance, very deliberate processes.
First there’s a letter of inquiry. Then there’s an application, that sort of thing. Small scale often supporting one organization at a time to create a specific type of change. Explicit metrics. So if we invest X, we know Y is going to happen. Incremental impact. So this is the frustration that I hear from foundation program officers often. We have invested all these dollars and we feel like change is not happening. And then tempered speed, which is a very nice way to say that foundations take a long time to make decisions.
At the same time we have the second curve of philanthropy that is building. And we have signals of the future of what the future of philanthropy is going to look like. An example of this is pandemic grantmaking practices.
So grantmaking during that time was fast, flexible, unrestricted. We learned in that process how to show up during times of crisis. During that time there was also the shift to the racial equity frame. So there has been a pushback obviously that has happened during this time, but each of our institutions know how important racial equity is for us actually meeting our missions.
And then there was social impact funds which were a unique sort of low-interest rate moment where a number of foundations led by the Ford Foundation took loans out against their endowments and invested those dollars to create sort of generational change. It was our reminder that there are more ways to create transformation and change outside of six percent of your endowment.
So what we have coming next in the Future of Philanthropy, philanthropy as a collaborator. I think philanthropy is going to deepen its role in civic engagement by supporting nonprofits that are solving community issues through advocacy and organizing. I think Michigan’s Governor’s Office of the Foundation Liaison is a good example of that. Regenerative philanthropy will take root just as funders have developed a really comprehensive model of what a transition from extractive to regenerative philanthropy could look like.
A few highlights that I think are important to the future of philanthropy. First is authentic partnerships with grantees where communities impacted by problems are developing solutions to those problems. And next less time on due diligence and more time on relationship building. I think AI is going to be a really important part of that story and I’ll talk a little bit about that more. Next is seeing past the grant. So one example of that is I think that we’re going to move to a future where foundations are a hundred percent mission- and program-related invested. Every single dollar that a foundation has should be moving its mission forward. This will create a new infusion of dollars into social purpose capital markets which will create new opportunities for developments for things like affordable housing, low interest rates for local entrepreneurs. I think there’s a lot of transformation and change coming in that part.
And then transformative impact. I think we are going to get very clear that we need to solve the problems that we’re working on instead of making things five percent less terrible. Now, often there are models where here is the old way of doing things and here’s the new way.
What I think is important is that philanthropy has existed since the beginning of humankind because a lot of things about it are amazing. So we need to bring those things with us into the future. It will be different in every single foundation but some of the common pieces that will move forward are donor intent, deep relationship-skilled staff that will move with us to the future of philanthropy. The challenge in this moment is that these two curves are intersecting.
So we have the pressure of the second curve of philanthropy but we have all the systems processes and tools of this first curve. So our work is how do we move system by system, process by process from that first curve of philanthropy to the second? The next trend that I’ll share with you today is about the future of education.
I know many of you are working on education directly or as a part of your collective impact efforts. If you took Laura Ingalls Wilder from The Little House on the Prairie book who was born in the 1800s, if you put her in a shopping mall she would lose her mind. There’s a million different stores. There’s fluorescent lighting, everything would be confusing. If you put her into a school, she would know exactly what to do. There is a teacher at the front of the room, books are sort of lined up. Their job is to listen in that process and sort of repeat back what they’ve learned.
I think what we need is kids to have the ability to partner with technology in new ways. Education futurists say that students need to be able to partner with technology, remix two technologies together to create something new and have global competency. I think that the most marginalized students are actually best prepared for this future. They have these skillsets already and they are ready for the volatility that is coming towards us. So I think that since they are not well served by current systems, they’re willing to jump into the new and there’s a lot of potential in that moment.
Next is artificial intelligence as a partner. So AI has passed the Turing Test which is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. And in many, many cases the current performance of AI is actually much better than human beings. And this is the worst that AI will ever be. Google AI gives significantly better diagnoses than human doctors and that isn’t a surprise because medical knowledge used to double every 50 years and now it doubles every 73 days. There is no way that a human doctor can keep up with that pace of change and pace of innovation.
So AI is an obvious partner. Now what we would say is yes, cool. Use AI to help with diagnoses but we need a human doctor. If we’re getting bad news what we need is a person that is sort of caring for us in that moment. There was a recent study that said that ChatGPT scored 21 percent higher than physicians for quality of responses to patients and it was 41 percent more empathetic which is a very depressing stat. So I think that the challenge in this moment is that doctors are strained in every direction. They don’t have the time and energy to be empathetic. They don’t have the time and energy to really dig in with you as patients. And so we need to be able to partner with those tools.
Now there are a lot of studies that show that AI will not take your job but it may take your professional identity. So for these doctors who have gone through many, many years of schooling, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, when they end that process there is an app that is better at their job than they are and that really takes a piece away from us.
So I think that this has vast impacts for nonprofits, foundations, and for society as a whole. We are going to need to upgrade as human beings. We need to transform what it means to be a human being outside of just your job as your identity. What does it mean to be a person in this new future? I think that we’re going to have the ability to partner with AI teams to get smarter about the work that we do. These sort of super teams will make each of us 10 to a hundred times more effective and in that I think we’re going to move to a future where in the industrial revolution we moved from an 80-hour work week to a 40-hour work week. I think with the AI revolution we can move from a 40-hour work week to a 20-hour work week and that we utilize AI tools to make us more productive during those 20 hours a week of work. What that’s going to transform is our ability to raise children and take care of elders, engage in our democracy, create art, develop relationships and develop new solutions.
So AI cannot create anything new. It can only repeat what already exists and what we need is new solutions to big problems and we need human beings focused on that. So the way that we’re going to get there are things like AI and robotics taxes that pay for things like universal basic income. We need guiderails on these systems to deal with the bias that exists and to ensure that everybody financially benefits from these tools, not just a handful of people.
And so we really are in an important time of transformation change and I think the social sector is the center of reimagining what it means to be a human being in this moment, and reimagining what the future of our society looks like if these tools are a benefit and not to our detriment.
The last piece that I’ll leave you with is this pace of change is exhausting. I know you are all feeling it. We’re living in a time of exponential change where change is getting faster and more intense. I know it feels like a lot of that change is coming from the White House. That is definitely a piece of it in this moment but it’s not the only change and we are not going to go back to a time where it feels like things are calm. This just happens to be the time in humanity that we are living and we need to change the ways that we operate within our organizations.
The idea of a five-year strategic plan where we know exactly what the next five years is going to look like is laughable. What we need is very long-term visions of the future, that 30- to 50-year vision of the future so that we know what total success looks like and ensure that we’re all aligned around that picture of success. I think many of us within our institutions are all working very hard but on a slightly different vision of the future, and so our efforts are diffused. We need to align that vision of the future and then we need to create very flexible rolling three-year plans where every quarter we are looking at the work that we’ve just accomplished and we’re looking at what’s coming around the corner and we’re harnessing that volatility to help us get to our ideal future faster.
I know that this is difficult because we have felt like I know how to do this work and I know how to lead and this is exactly what it should look like. What the future is calling is for us to upgrade our skills and to do work in the ways that we haven’t done previously, and if we do that, we will actually be able to harness this volatility and get us where we want to go a lot faster than we’ve ever anticipated. I know that there is a lot of stress and strain in the sector in this moment but I think we can’t let a good crisis go to waste and that our responsibility in this moment is to do a better job as we’re each meeting our missions.
So what I’ll leave you with is the future doesn’t just happen to you. You create it with the decisions that you make today. The future is not a scary thing coming our direction. It really is these decisions that we’re making in this moment that ensure that we get a beautiful future that we can be excited about. I’ll stop there and really excited about my conversation with Melody, stop sharing.
Melody Barnes: Thank you so much, Trista. As I have said to you and others many times, I was really excited about your presentation today and to dive into this and to hear someone with your expertise walk us through the things that you talked about. I want to jump into the conversation because we’ll have time for some audience Q&A in a little bit, and I have some questions that I am eager to ask you. I want to start with the fact that you were talking about the fact that people are—we’re all feeling like there’s so much going on right now. People are head down, trying to do the work, trying to identify good outcomes as they’re working to collectively and to work through really urgent needs. I’m curious what you would say to someone that’s focused there given the trends that you just talked about, given the work that you do. The world is burning, why am I going to focus on this right now?
Trista Harris: We can’t afford to be reactive so it is too late when a problem has landed on our doorstep. We need to prepare for those challenges and opportunities before they show up. It isn’t luxurious to think about the future. What it does is it transforms what you do in this moment and I saw it time and time again during the pandemic where organizations that had a very clear picture of the future that they wanted to create harnessed that volatility and got themselves there a lot faster, and those that didn’t spiraled because there were so many needs and there were so many things that you could do, that they try a little bit of this and they jump over here and they try that, and maybe we should do a research report and maybe we should think about it a little bit longer. I’m seeing a lot of that kind of navel gazing happening in the field right now. Be super clear about what success looks like and use this moment to get you there as quickly as possible.
Melody Barnes: Can you give us, based on what you just said, are there two or three practices, something that we can all take home so that we can focus in the way that you described? And I’m also curious, you were talking about examples of individuals, organizations that you saw during the pandemic. Can you give us an example of what you saw working well, someone or organization that harnessed that moment?
Trista Harris: Yeah, on the skills piece I encourage people to set aside five percent of the time for the future. I know that you cannot be radically imaging a new future all the time, that you have work to do but setting aside a couple hours a week. I encourage Friday afternoons, do it one two-hour block of time, and during that time set Google alerts for yourself, Future Of whatever you are interested in, future of early childhood, future of your city, ,future of philanthropy, whatever your core issue is, and during that two-hour block, read those articles that are coming with that future of frame and notice what people are saying about what’s coming next. There’s something uniquely positive about future of often where it’s people thinking about what we want it to look like moving forward. We did have somebody that was in our FutureGood studio cohort where we teach futurism and we set these Google alerts and they said, you said they’re positive but all the ones that I get are so negative and I was like what is your issue? And she said future of climate, and I was like, OK, for that one you have to say future of climate innovation. You have to do something a little different because there is a lot of negative things written about—
Melody Barnes: Give yourself a fighting chance.
Trista Harris: You’ve got to give yourself a nice little frame around that one but for most issues, you can just do Future Of. So read those articles. I keep an electronic notebook, an Evernote notebook, and I clip the article there and I write some comments for myself about what I think that’s going to mean for my clients or for my organization or for myself and my family. Within your organizations you can do this as well. We have some organizations that we work with that use Slack and they have a channel that’s called Future Trends and people share articles there, and lots of folks on the team read the articles and then give their perspective about what that means and what’s next so engaging with future ideas allows you to notice patterns and it allows you to notice opportunities that you might miss otherwise. The last piece is to have that long-term future vision. I think that is the most important thing that any organization can have. It’s a shared picture of what absolute success looks like if money is not an issue, if policy is not an issue.
There’s a saying we can send a man to the moon, how come we can’t solve poverty. Well, we know if the man is on the moon but when you say solve poverty, do you mean in the U.S.? Do you mean globally? Do you mean for families? Do you mean for individuals? Do you mean the federal poverty line? Do you mean a living wage? What is it that you mean? And within your organizations people may have very different pictures of what that success means, what that means which means they’re making different decisions in the present and they’re diffusing their efforts because they’re not pushing towards that future.
When you ask for the pandemic example, I had the opportunity to be the futurist in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and I started before the pandemic but stayed on during the pandemic, and the ideas for an equitable future team, their responsibility is to invest in things that will be important to the foundation in eight to 15 years so they are the sort of future-focused team within the foundation. I wish every foundation had a team like this.
This is my pitch for the foundations in the audience. It’s important that you have a group of people that are paying attention to the future. What the ideas for an equitable future team did, at the beginning of the pandemic they said what have we funded previously that might be important in this moment. So they had funded a lot of work around disease tracking around STDs probably 10 years previously. Those are the same organizations that know how to do that for COVID tracking as we were doing that. They also had a body of work that was about misinformation, and there was and still is a lot of misinformation about COVID, and so they were able to reinvest in those grantees. So when you have a team that is paying attention to what’s coming next when the worst happens, you are able to sort of lean on that expertise to move you forward to the future.
Melody Barnes: I love that. You know when you were talking about setting time aside, reading articles, I confess I was thinking about the fact that often at home, you know, and I’m running around like crazy going through my list and my husband is kind of sitting on the bed and he’s reading and I’m thinking, you know, like shouldn’t you be folding some clothes or something? But what he is doing is constantly—he’s got that practice embedded even though he may not have articulated it that way. I’m the one that needs to do something different and do something better.
Trista Harris: I think that we’re taught, especially in the social sector, go, go, go, and there’s a ton of research that says that new ideas and insights only come when you’re bored. That’s why we have great ideas in the shower, that you have these multiple ideas around, it’s their opportunity to connect within your brain and we are bored so rarely. We’re standing in line and we’re scrolling on our phones. Before we go to sleep we’re scrolling on our phone, and so we’re constantly taking in information but we’re not giving ourselves the opportunity to process that into something useful, and so I build boredom into my schedule and have a little tech tool called Brick which is this little device that I touch the top of my phone on and it shuts off most of the things on my phone besides my camera and my map and the telephone piece of it, and I can’t turn it back on until I touch the Brick thing again, and so I leave it at home and I go for a walk and during that time I’m allowing myself to, one, enjoy what’s happening around me and my best insights come in those moments so giving yourself some of those space. Now if I had better self-control I could just stay off my phone but I do not so we have to figure out what are the tools that help us do that.
Melody Barnes: Yeah, it’s being intentional about it. I remember once reading an article about MacArthur Genius Award winners who talked about the importance of daydreaming. When I do it, I find the same but you’re telling us to be very intentional about that.
Trista Harris: And make time for daydreaming in your organizations. Make time for your grantees to daydream. That is where transformative solutions happen and if we don’t invest in that purposely, we’re not going to get it.
Melody Barnes: I’m wondering, you’ve spoke about philanthropy when you were talking about trends. I’m wondering in this instance if you could talk to us about how you think philanthropy can be most effective in this moment as well. You also talked about the work at RWJ, at Robert Wood Johnson, and their team but for those in the audience who are at foundations, who are working in philanthropy in different ways, what do you suggest?
Trista Harris: Yeah, I just saw a recent report. It was from the Center for Effective Philanthropy about disappointment that nonprofits had in this moment about the ways that foundations were sort of silent in this moment of crisis and how different that was than the pandemic where very quickly there was a plan and here’s how we’re going to show up for you, and it feels like that is not happening in this moment.
Talking to foundations, that is not happening because foundations are not used to being under attack, and they are definitely under attack in this moment and so they’re trying to get their sea legs about how they need to respond in this moment. What I’ll say to the foundations in the audience is this is the moment to be brave. This is not an opportunity to sort of sit back and think you’ll be under the radar. Maybe if we change a couple things on our website and we take DEI down, we won’t be a target. I will very gently say that the line will always move so first it is that you can’t have DEI on your website, and then it’s you can’t be funding programs that support immigrant communities, and then it’s that you can’t have your headquarters in a blue state, and then it’s that you can’t employ women.
There is no end to where this goes, and this is our time to hold the line, and we need to ensure that we’re a united force in the sector, that we are visible, and we are connected, and we don’t give an inch. The social sector is the underpinning of our democracy. It is what makes this country amazing, and we can’t give up any of this in this moment. If anything, we need to double down.
Melody Barnes: Yeah, and you used the word democracy and this is an area that I think quite a bit about given my work, and certainly if we look at history, whether it is our own or we look internationally, what you just described is absolutely the case. There’s no satiating the desires of those who would crack down on or are cracking down on the social sector. I’m curious for us just to pick up this democracy theme and topic a little bit more because I know it’s an area that is of interest to both of us, and I’m interested in hearing what you’re seeing through your lens and in your work as a futurist when it comes to democracy.
Trista Harris: Yeah, for the last 10 years I’ve been watching sort of future of democracy and I’ve had this frame that I think that our current democratic systems are not made for a population this large and this diverse. It is difficult to serve the complexity of the United States with the systems that we have in place. Those systems are also built on slavery and patriarchy and all of those other things so there were challenges that obviously have existed for a very long time. I think the future of democracy is going to feel much more hyperlocal and I think that there will be a lot more connection at that local level.
What I’m noticing in this moment, we have this FutureProof program and I was talking to a democracy funder about sending their grantees through to build their capacity, and she said my grantees are in such an unusual position where most of their work has been about trying to transform the systems of democracy, and in this moment they’re trying to uphold them as they’re getting broken apart, and so how is this to become their responsibility to hold up systems that have not been working for us, and she said I think it’s going to break either way but I think we have to let it break, and I think we have to let our energy be used to radically imagine what the new is and to have an alternative available. This is not how I would do systems change.
Let me just put that on the record. I think this is the worst possible way to do it but this is the timeline that we’re in, and so how do we ensure that we’re not using all of our energy to try to stop bad things from happening but instead use it to build our highest hopes. What is our best version of democracy look like moving forward? I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about what’s coming next. You’ve spent a lot of time in this space and I know you’re thinking about it.
Melody Barnes: In many ways it aligns with what you just said. I mean, one, I am seeing greater interest and focus on democracy and there certainly has been a lot of work around the platform of democracy but greater interest and a desire to dig into the culture, the institutions, the practices, and a whole host of things democracy related. I’m also watching—this goes to your point, the fact that, you know, again if we look over history, the long, long, long arc of history, democracies are organic. It’s the reason why we talk about a body politic, and so they’re born, they live, and they die at different, on different timelines. Given where we are, the importance of envisioning what happens next and giving ourselves the space and the time to pull back and ask the question what is it that we want and how do we go about building that, and really blue sky around those ideas, and examining what has and hasn’t worked and why, and what is it that we want to keep and what is it that we want to build new. I feel like I’m certainly seeing more of that and that is exciting. It is the kind of work that I am asking of my team, and also, and we’re aligned on this too, the focus on the local. I think for good reason there’s been a great deal of interest on the federal because those Supreme Court cases and those laws over time have provided freedoms in this long, long, long battle to expand human freedom in the United States though not enough, and now what I am beginning to see and what I am very interested in is the marriage of the two with a real focus on what is happening locally and what’s happening in communities. That’s been an area of focus for a lot of the work that we’re building out as well.
Trista Harris: That makes total sense.
Melody Barnes: Well, there’s clearly more that we could talk about there but in a minute I’m going to open the floor to ask some questions that are coming in from the audience but I’m curious because you were talking about trends and I found that really fascinating. I’m sure many in our audience did as well and I’m curious though, again talking about trends but really focusing on those that are doing place-based collaborative work, what you’re seeing in that context.
Trista Harris: I think it’s interesting. There’s a lot of changes sort of happening at the hyperlocal level. Some of it is about working from home and so people being engaged in local communities in a different way than they have been previously but also some of the challenges that local communities face. Young people cannot afford to purchase homes. Many cannot afford to rent apartments. There are challenges with the infrastructure of our cities so it is built around a time that we don’t live in in this moment so how do we reimagine what’s needed and what’s next.
I now live in Santa Monica and we just had the wildfires which decimated the town next door to me and Altadena as well, and so we have to reimagine what community looks like moving forward. The challenge of that is that if I’m somebody whose house has burned down, what I want is for it to look and feel exactly like what it did before. I miss that and that is a human need but what we need to do is to envision what do we need next. What is different about the ways that we build homes? What does it look like to have a wildfire-resistant neighborhood? What does it look like to have a community that doesn’t rely so much on cars? How do we transform the natural environment around us so that it’s more resilient to climate change and to many other things?
So it’s an opportunity to dream differently but we have to understand that as humans we are resistant to change, and so we have to help people see the picture of possibility and our highest hopes of what it could look like so that it is making that jump to something new because you know that it’s going to be better than what you had before. The other thing that is really important is human connection in this moment.
I talked before about the need for us to sort of upgrade as humans as AI sort of transforms what everything looks like. We’re going to want to be connected with each other. We’re going to want to be in places together. We’re going to want to have real community that does not just exist in virtual spaces, and so how do we build spaces where people are allowed to be there freely and to connect, and how do we program those spaces in a way that draws human connection?
I moved from Minnesota a couple years ago and it’s been really beautiful to see how in Los Angeles there are events that are just about connection. So one of the state parks hosted a read-in where we all brought blankets and there were food trucks, and you brought a book to read. They were playing jazz music and then they played Octavia Butler’s audio book for two chapters, you know, that sort of thing, and it was amazing. I connected with lovely people and learned about a neighborhood that I hadn’t been to previously. We need more opportunities where we’re programming space in a way that’s about connections and relationships.
Melody Barnes: You know, it’s interesting. We have a group of practitioner fellows at the institute that I run and one of them has been focused on work with local community leaders and building a network to support their work as they work with individuals in their neighborhoods across the country. One of the things that we did here was to provide microgrants for individuals in their communities to just gather, battling the sense of isolation, recognizing how important that is if you’re building a healthy democratic culture. One of the things Sam said was I don’t know if anybody’s going to apply for this, and over 70 different applications came in for people who wanted to start to build those kinds of connections just to your point about the places to gather and to engage.
Trista Harris: Mia Birdsong has a beautiful book called How We Show Up that’s about the innate need for humanity and connection, and I think we’re moving into a time where we’ve got to really build those lessons. We’ve lost them over time and America is such an independent place where I can do it on my own, and we’ve seen what you lose in that process and so what does it look like to purposely create deep connections with a community. We see it after disasters where folks show up for each other in a way that is beautiful to see but how do we do that on a regular basis.
Melody Barnes: Well, related to that and this is a question that is coming from our audience, we talk about that and talking about the future of AI, and folks would love to hear you talk a little bit more about your vision for the future of AI and weighing the cost benefits of the use of AI. Some of the things people mention are obviously the environmental impacts. We know, you know, water, energy, etc., and also the concerns about the ethics of generative AI when so much of it is trained on data for people who are not consenting so we were just talking about the importance of human connection, human gathering, and interested in hearing about your thoughts on AI.
Trista Harris: I share the same, both concerns. On the environmental piece I’ve been really impressed in changes in algorithm that have decreased energy uses by 10 times or 100 times. I think that is the next frontier of AI, is transforming the way that it’s processing information. On a side note there is also a lot of work that’s happening on what does unlimited energy look like so how do we transform the way that we create energy on this planet, and there’s a lot of scientists and folks that are working in that space.
So sometimes we have constraints that exist in this moment that transform over time and so what does unlimited clean energy look like and how do we use it to power these sort of tools moving forward? Had a really great breakfast conversation this morning with somebody where we were talking about, I think web 3.0 was the conversation maybe 10 years or so ago as Blockchain was growing with the idea that we were moving towards a future where each of us as individuals are creating things that go online and how do we create microtransactions for each of those things.
So if I do an Instagram post that’s very useful and lots of people find use, that dollars come to me as a creator in the broader sort of blockchain systems, and that could be as me selling my health data. Maybe I want health companies and researchers to have access to data but I should own that and I should make decisions about that, and so the promise of Blockchain was we have this system where we can do these very small, easy transactions through and all the brilliance that people put on the web can then be transformed into dollars that go to those individuals.
You know, we see that through some platforms of, you know, influencers and that sort of thing that are getting paid through that but the idea that everyday people and the ways that we are interacting in the web, there would be a financial benefit for those individuals.
I find it very interesting that as AI grew and needed to be trained on all of our thoughts that I have heard no more conversation about payment to individuals, that that nobody is interested in that anymore, and so I think we need to push back on these systems. I think the challenge is that we have elected officials that do not understand how these systems work, and so the legislation around them is completely lacking.
So we need to make sure that we have expertise at the government level that is not self-interested expertise which is the other challenge so if somebody can become a billionaire by starting one of these things or if somebody can become a bureaucrat and not get paid as much to be able to build the systems around it, folks may be making that billionaire choice so how do we ensure that we’re really transforming who is making decisions about these tools moving forward. The other ethical concerns are how AI has been created. So ChatGPT was trained using Kenyan workers making a couple dollars an hour reading the most disgusting things that are on the internet to train ChatGPT not to use it, and that is the only reason that we have a usable system right now, and so I think we often do not talk about the human cost of these tools and our responsibility to the people that have made them useful for all of us.
Melody Barnes: Another question. There is a lot I would love to delve into there but I want to be faithful to questions that are coming in. One question is about the possibility of a futurist in an organization. I’m curious what you think about that. Do you think it makes sense for that kind of position to live as an executive leadership of an organization or should we build this in as a separate team in our organization or a skill that’s held across the staff or is there a combination of both?
Trista Harris: I think it’s a skill that every staff member should build. So how do you ensure that you are staying on top of the future of your responsibility? Future of convening, future of grantmaking, future of whatever, we should all have that skillset. I think it’s one of the core competencies that we need to have in the field, and then I think it is useful to have either a team like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation does or a futurist in residence that’s helping you pay attention to those trends that are coming your direction and making meaning out of it and building some of the systems that you need within your organization. So before I talked about trend sensing within organizations, how are you creating spaces where people are paying attention to the future together? What are the questions that you ask at staff meetings about the future and that you’re constantly engaging in that, and who is helping make sure that that engagement happens? I’m working with a lot more sort of chief strategy officers that are starting to take the futurism banner and say I think this is the other thing that I have to know how to do. How do I do that? I think that’s totally fair so I really think it’s a both/and, how do we all build that skillset? It is often when you talk to professional futurists they say it’s actually really complicated to understand the future, I’ll just do it for you, and that’s because they get paid a lot of money to tell you what is happening next. It is not that complicated. The FutureGood book is really intended to teach you how to use these tools on a weekly basis within your organization. It is not a difficult skillset to build and I think it’s innate with many people that work in the field do. You already look at the future in that way. it’s just building scenario planning tools or trend sensing tools on top of that so that you are able to be more effective as you’re using that future frame.
Melody Barnes: I love this. I am really intending to bring this to my own organization as well. This is terrific. I’m seeing another question here of how do we make sure that our futurist predictions are not laden with discriminatory bias? How do we make sure that the futurists we rely on are not leading us toward further erasure of non-White, non-cis, non-queer, non-Christian, etc., people?
Trista Harris: That’s my biggest concern. So when I first started my futurism journey, I would be in spaces where I was the only person of color. There’s hundreds of people in the room and I’m the only person of color, and there are five women. So my question is future for who? Who is benefiting from this future and who’s shaping it? So I think it’s important that we are in those spaces and that we are influencing those spaces. It transforms what the future looks like, and then I think it is important that if you use futurism, you have to use an equity lens. Otherwise you exacerbate the disparities of today, and so I’ve talked to a number of organizations that have started to use futurism tools and they’re like, what’s, it feel like things are getting worse faster because you weren’t smart about the equity piece. You have to build that on top and who are you asking to design and shape the future? So when we are asking an organization to develop their 50-year vision of the future, we’re not asking just their senior leadership team to do it, we are asking community members. We’re asking partners. We’re asking people impacted by the problem to design their ideal future. With the state of California we talked to hundreds of low-income Californians to reenvision the future of the Medicare system in California, and from many of those folks what they said is nobody has ever asked me what I want the future to look like, and envisioning a multibillion-dollar program looking different also makes me wonder what is the future of my family’s housing situation or my employment situation. These are tools that people then can use in their own lives, and I think there’s a lot of power in that. So when you’re dreaming about the future, who do you have around the table? Who do you feel like is ready to dream, and the answer should be everybody.
Melody Barnes: Yeah, it’s interesting. Now you’re sparking different ideas thinking about citizens and how this work also might sit alongside that. I love this question as well as someone who lives with an historian and thinks a lot about history. How do we honor the past and the wisdom and work of those who came before within and alongside conversations about the future?
Trista Harris: There is a futurist that has this frame about prophetic innovation that Black people have always told the story of the future, the I Have a Dream speech as a futurist speech, the speech as a futurist speech, that there has always been a future focus, and we need to not lose that so how do we pay attention to the dreams of our ancestors? What has come true and what hasn’t? And what have we learned from the past? And then what is different in the future? So sometimes we allow past constraints to stop what we think can happen moving forward. My daughter hates when I give this example but I’m going to give it anyways. There was a convening of city planners that happened in New York City in the late 1800s, and they said New York City cannot get bigger than 100,000 people because the horse poop will be too deep so we’ll lose the first story of every building if there’s that many people here and start trying to get around the city. They hadn’t envisioned the car and so they didn’t know that a different future was around the corner, and I think sometimes when we are anchoring in the past, especially in strategic planning in organizations, we look back at what we’ve accomplished over the last five years and we use that as the limit of what we can accomplish in the next five years, and I think that’s dangerous. I think it stops us from reaching our full potential. It stops us for harnessing future trends and new innovations, to try different ways of sort of jumping forward and skipping the problem, and so, yes, know the future, know repeating patterns and how those show up but be open to possibilities that exist beyond our current understanding.
Melody Barnes: One more question I think, time for one more. The individual said I’ve heard critiques that a future orientation can be inherently financially risky or is that a myth. Wondering how the fields of social services and philanthropy can demonstrate responsible stewardship of funds while making radical big strides.
Trista Harris: I think it can be risky if you are only making big bets. So I think it’s a balance between what is tried and true and what is the stretch look like for us. I think what I’ve heard from a lot of futurists that focus on sort of exponential change in organizations, that many organizations that have been successful over time are the ones that are most likely to be disrupted, very big nonprofits, big foundations, that that past success does not guarantee future success, and that you have to be willing to constantly experiment and to try new things and to invest dollars in those experiments to figure out is there a new and better way to move forward. So being sort of conservative on the dollar side will serve you for a little bit, and then there’s going to be a cliff so when big transformative change happens, you’re not going to be ready to be able to move and to change with that. That’s why we saw so many organizations shut down during the pandemic. We will obviously see another huge wage with all of these federal cuts for organizations that can’t be flexible and transform in these moments because they haven’t invested in that flexibility. It’s going to be a world of hurt and so we need to do both.
Melody Barnes: It’s interesting looking at this with companies as well. There’s a reason why, you know, there was the Polaroid camera, they had a lot of tech, access to a lot of technology to transform their business but, you know, held on, held on, held on, and, you know, it’s now a relic.
Trista Harris: And Kodak invented the digital camera and they shelved it, and they sold it, and then the company doesn’t exist anymore, and Blockbuster could have bought Netflix and they didn’t so I think there are many times where if you are not paying attention to that next wave and just focusing on your profitability or your success over time, that ends when that next innovation comes and then you’re least ready to jump to it.
Melody Barnes: Well, the last question that I have for you before we wrap up is what is giving you hope and energy that we can create the future we all wish for?
Trista Harris: I am always optimistic about the future even some days when that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I think we’re on the precipice of our ideal future. Our highest hopes are right here beyond this current time of crisis. Big systems change does not happen when things are smooth. I lived in Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered and as I said in the intro, I did a lot of work around police reform after Philando Castile was murdered by a police officer. George Floyd was murdered by a police trainer as he was training officers so I really in that moment felt like we have done so much work and here we are but what came out of that moment is global transformation that is continuing to have ripple effects, so much so that there is an effort to outlaw DEI in this moment because—specifically because it has been so successful. So that does not come when times are easy. That does not come when there isn’t a crisis, and so in this opportunity, what is our gigantic leap forward that we are making in the sector as we are under attack, as our resources are being pulled back? What are we dreaming about that’s different and new because our old systems and old ways of doing work—we all had lots of complaints about those things and so how do we take this opportunity to transform to the next best version?
Melody Barnes: Beautifully said and I think I speak for everyone, deeply appreciate your knowledge and your expertise and your sharing that with us this morning. I ask everyone and I can see the hearts and the claps coming up but to thank you so much, Trista, for spending this time with us today.
Trista Harris: Thank you so much for having me, Melody. It was so great to be in conversation with you today. You’re doing so much to build that beautiful and equitable future so thank you for doing that.
Melody Barnes: Thank you.
