The studio
The future needs a reframe.
A research and strategy studio for organizations navigating change with more clarity and imagination.
The future needs a reframe.
A research and strategy studio for organizations navigating change with more clarity and imagination.
Conscious Futures is a research and strategy studio for civic and nonprofit organizations working through change that doesn't come with a clear playbook. Most engagements draw on four connected capabilities.
Stakeholder interviews, landscape scans, and strategic insight development that surface what's actually happening, not just what's assumed.
Workshop and futures-lab design, program and fellowship architecture, and convening that turns a room of people into real collective thinking.
Narrative strategy, messaging architecture, and reports that carry an idea from insight into something people can act on.
Scenario planning, theory of change, and futures literacy work that helps an organization see past its next fiscal year.
The shape of an engagement follows the question — sometimes a focused sprint, sometimes an ongoing partnership.
Recent collaborators and partners include New_Public, AARP, New America, Made By Us, Democracy 2076, Georgetown's Red House, the Foundation for Social Connection, CoGenerate, and the National Conference on Citizenship.
Conscious Futures is grounded in Kate Barranco's independent practice, and it's also an evolving space — partnering with organizations, artists, and change agents across disciplines and geographies, always relationally, always with curiosity.
What connects each project isn't the client; it's the practice.
This work is grounded in a specific set of beliefs about what makes change possible — and a broader framework for how we think about imagination, systems, and repair.
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