Community-Based Futuring Virtual Workshop with FLOX Studio

💫 About the Workshop

In social impact organizations, we aim not just to react to the future but to catalyze it.

But for most nonprofits, futuring is limited to strategic planning: an expensive, time-intensive process that only happens every few years (if at all). Meanwhile, our communities are in deep need of a different future now.

What if the future wasn’t something you visit once every four years during a retreat? What if it became part of your everyday practice?

This 2-hour participatory workshop introduces Community-Based Futuring, a collective visioning approach that helps teams and cohorts align on where they’re going—and imagine the pathways to get there.

🌍 What Is Community-Based Futuring?

At FLOX Studio, we believe imagination is infrastructure. Rather than forecasting the future, we help organizations and communities co-create it. 

Community-based futuring brings people together to imagine alternative futures—and build strategy toward them. It is a participatory practice that draws from:

• Strategic foresight (e.g., scenario planning, adaptive campaign strategy and program design)
• Community planning and design justice
• The cultural traditions of Afrofuturism, queer utopias, and solidarity economies

This approach asks: What does the future demand of us? What possibilities can we design together—across sectors, roles, and identities?

Futuring isn’t just about visioning. It’s about building the capacity to act from a place of shared purpose. 

👥 Who This Is For

A community-based futuring approach is especially useful in moments of transition or fragmentation—ideal for organizations navigating complexity and change. It creates space for teams to reconnect, realign, and move forward together with clarity and care.

This workshop is designed for:

• Philanthropic practitioners and program officers looking to strengthen cohort alignment and deepen learning within their portfolios
• Grantee cohorts working to define clear strategic goals, values, and pathways forward
• Community foundation teams seeking tools to support long-term thinking and community-rooted planning
• Facilitators, strategists, and community organizers working in networks or coalitions

We recommend attending with members of your grantee cohort or team to maximize peer learning and strategic alignment.

💡 What You’ll Gain

Participants will walk away with:

• A working understanding of Community-Based Futuring—and how to apply it as a tool for moving through change
• Frameworks for shared goal-setting and long-term thinking, designed to support strategy that is adaptable and grounded in your values
• Approaches to strategy as a collaborative, living, and iterative practice—so you can pivot in real time, not once every few years
• Tighter feedback loops with your community, allowing you to respond quickly and meaningfully to emerging needs
• Ways to apply futuring to cohort building, funding strategy, and community-led planning, so your work is rooted in relationships
• A practice of learning fast—not failing fast—with time to reflect, imagine, and act with purpose
• Stronger relationships and shared context between funders and grantees, built through peer learning, storytelling, and shared imagination

✨ Hosted by FLOX Studio

FLOX Studio is a community design and strategy consultancy advancing justice through facilitation, participatory planning, and systems transformation. We work with movements, funders, and institutions to co-create strategies rooted in equity, imagination, and interdependence.

How do we build toward futures grounded in mutuality, shared power, and care? 

Join us in September to see what we can make possible.