The Deep Work of Imagination for Social Impact Organizations
By Allison Murphy & Paul Sternberg, Founder of Me&Paul
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” —Ursula K Le Guin
More than ten years after Le Guin spoke these words at the National Book Foundation Awards, one thing seems clear: the hard times are no longer coming, they’re here. In the U.S. in particular, we’re living amid overlapping, increasingly horrifying crises of runaway hate, profit, power, and extraction that a single sentence hardly feels sufficient to properly sum them up.
But there’s something else in Le Guin’s quote worth exploring—her invitation to see alternatives to how we live now, and imagine real grounds for hope. She was speaking then to writers, but every day, we see nonprofits and social impact organizations mobilizing their imaginations in innovative and exciting ways. This is a development worth celebrating and encouraging. Given the state of our world, we can’t afford to rest our imaginations.
The Two Worlds of Nonprofit Work
Nonprofits by their very nature occupy two worlds. On one hand, there’s the world of facts and figures that anchor their mission in reality and quantify their impact. And on the other, there’s the visionary world—the one they exist to create, to point our hearts and minds toward, and to help us imagine as a new, potential future.
One world isn’t more important than the other; they reinforce each other. And while it can feel tempting to over-rely on facts to counteract misinformation, the nonprofit sector has an incredible role to play in helping people imagine alternatives to how we live now. A role that is grounded in the realm of imagination alongside the facts.
In the podcast The Living Myth (episode 412, “Living in Two Worlds”), storyteller and scholar of mythology, Michael Meade, puts it this way, “imagination is the primary faculty of the human soul and its greatest power for making changes that lead to genuine transformation."
Nonprofits know the numbers by heart, but the point remains: facts only describe what is. And nonprofits exist to create what could be and show us what that new world will look like. That’s vision. They’re selling the future. And developing a meaningful nonprofit vision requires imagination and creativity.
When facts and imagination work together, magic happens. The Environmental Defense Fund discovered this two decades ago when they recognized that saving tropical forests was essential to the fight against climate change. They asked: "What if a tree was worth more alive than dead?" With this imaginative reframing, forests become carbon banks. Marshlands become hurricane shields. Markets and nature become collaborators.
The Rights of Nature Movement: From Imagined Reality to Legal Precedent
Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination. - Bhavani Raman
It started in 1971, in a USC law school classroom. Facing a room of tired and disengaged students, then professor Christopher Stone asked an intentionally bizarre question from his own imagination: “What would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like? A consciousness in which Nature had rights?”
The question worked as intended. The disengaged class erupted in debate about the absurdity, the potential, and the legal ripple effects of the idea. For Stone, this question, which he admits seemingly emerged out of thin air, prompted entirely new lines of imaginative thought. What would it actually look like for Nature to have rights? For nature to be considered a person under the law? Grounded in his legal expertise, he allowed himself to imagine what such a vision of the future might look like, and began to share this vision—a vision of interconnectedness that, though new to Stone and to the legal system, was an inherent part of many Indigenous belief systems around the world.
Now, nearly five decades since Stone allowed himself to imagine the potential of this question, natural ecosystems in at least 14 countries around the world have gained legal rights and in some cases, legal personhood—the Los Cedros Cloud Forest in Ecuador and the Whanganui River in New Zealand to name a few. These protected rivers not only have the right to flow, unobstructed and unpolluted, but they also offer a growing body of legal precedent for bringing suit against new extractive projects that would threaten their rights.
The Whanganui River in New Zealand, which gained legal personhood in 2017 thanks to Indigenous Māori advocacy.
The original question that birthed the Rights of Nature Movement necessitated the asking of other questions, like “who will speak for Nature?” The answer to which sparked the idea of creating Indigenous-led councils who give voice to these newly protected ecosystems. Imagination begets more imagination.
This movement is a perfect example of taking possibility and turning it into reality, a movement with imaginative roots and, now, a backing in facts and figures. Ideas like this do more than advance innovative approaches to complicated problems—they begin to create new, collective visions of what a better future actually might look like. For the Rights of Nature Movement, it presents an exciting image of the future in which human flourishing exists side-by-side with the flourishing of ecosystems.
When social impact organizations can do this for their audiences—helping them imagine a future that they want to inhabit—they create meaningful grounds for hope, and unlock new avenues of support.
The Potential of Imagination
Michael Meade elevates the need for imagination and creativity in “Living in Two Worlds” to an even higher, global level. He says: “…finding ways out of all the current oppositions and stalemates requires that we see what can feel like utter polarization as also being the tension of opposites that has always been the precondition for any act of creation.” Nature and business are polar opposites in ways while also having the capacity to help each other thrive. We’ve also seen this happen with video games and education, art and science, and urban farming.
In other words: Not only do we live in two worlds, but our political polarization and climate crises will be able to inspire new beginnings and new ideas when we use our imagination. It will inspire us to give rights to nature, to see the Earth as a collaborator, or to even greater ideas. We need facts to know the scope of the challenges in front of us. We need imagination to design the solution. And we need both to create lasting change.
Meade reminds us that the problems we face now can't be solved at the same level where they were created. We can’t think our way out of the current state. Solutions emerge when someone imagines new possibilities.
Being stranded in the facts can make it challenging to explore your imagination. Designers try to “get out of the building,” which encourages them to leave controlled environments and see what’s happening in the real world. Getting out in nature, embodiment practices like meditation and breathwork, following curiosity and allowing it to lead us to new places and create unexpected connections, exploring prompts which allow us to articulate a vision for how the world will be different, writing fiction, or simply getting free of distractions and technology are all ways of turning off our rational mind and exercising our imagination and exploring new solutions and new possibilities.
Prompts for Imaginative Exploration
Give yourself—and your whole organization—permission to imagine. To think about your work and your vision for the world in ways that genuinely spark your curiosity and enliven your hope.
We invite you to explore these prompts with the full extent of your curiosity. Reflect on them individually or as a focused team. It helps to be outside for these exercises, or in a space that feels separate from your everyday workspace.
Remember to let your creative brain lead the way. There’s no room for judgment in the imaginative world. Really explore these prompts to their most hopeful end. There will always be time for practical, fact-driven thinking to follow.
Call to mind a specific challenge you or your organization is facing. Then:
Look laterally, how do other industries (even those vastly different from your own) approach similar challenges?
Look inward, follow your own compass of curiosity and experience to envision the challenge in new ways. What new narrative can exist that will teach others about this particular challenge?
Look outward, to nature and to mythology. How do non-human systems and beings handle similar challenges? What do ancient myths have to say about this challenge?
If no challenge comes to mind, try a visioning exercise, fully exploring the following prompts as they relate to your work or your organization’s:
What does the world you’re building toward look like?
What does it feel like to live in that world?
What could be done today to get us one step closer to this world? (Use the prompts above to more creatively explore this question)
Paul Sternberg is the principal strategist, designer, and advisor at Me&Paul, working to help nonprofits and social entrepreneurs communicate their visions for the future. His work is focused on developing brand, communication, and digital strategies and websites made to engage people through data and story. As an entrepreneur, Paul has received two Atlanta Pacesetter Awards and placed on the Inc. 5000 twice, making the top 500 in 2015 as the co-founder of a rapidly growing full-service digital agency. His teams’ work has been recognized with awards from W3, Anthem, Indigo, and Travel Weekly.
