Imagination as Infrastructure Curriculum| ReThink Citizen
Role: Research & Learning Designer
Dates: June – August 2025
Format: Virtual | National Youth Fellowship (ages 13–22)
Status: Completed (1st activation, ongoing development)
Quick Project Overview
Designed and facilitated a futures-thinking and imagination-building curriculum for the ReThink Citizen Youth Innovator Fellowship, equipping young changemakers with tools to move beyond dystopian defaults and toward protopian, care-centered futures. The program helped youth rehearse the futures they want to build — not through prediction, but through narrative, community, and embodied imagination practice.
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Young leaders today are coming of age in a world saturated by crisis, uncertainty, and dystopian narratives. ReThink Citizen sought to cultivate the next generation of civic innovators by strengthening creative confidence, futures literacy, and narrative agency.
The curriculum centered on imagination as a civic and emotional skill — not escapism, but a form of strategy, resilience, and responsibility for youth designing tomorrow's systems.
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Designed a fascilitation on imagination & futures literacy rooted in protopian narrative, trauma-informed facilitation, and systems thinking.
Facilitated a 60-minute virtual workshop for youth innovators focused on storytelling as a tool for collective future-building.
Created exercises including a “2040 Present-Future Archive” — guiding participants to imagine the seeds of a regenerative future being planted in 2025.
Integrated frameworks including:
Futures literacy
Protopian vs. dystopian narrative
Social imagination & civic belonging
Story of Self → Us → Now
Developed slides, facilitation guides, and storytelling prompts for fellows to use in their own community-based projects.
“You are not just designing solutions — you are rehearsing futures.”
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Pilot youth imagination fascilitation & slide deck (~15 slides)
Guided facilitation script & breakout exercises
Practice tools for protopian thinking and narrative prototyping
Resource guide on futures, belonging, and imagination practice
Evaluation forms, feedback tracking, and iterative approach
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Futures literacy frameworks
Narrative design & speculative storytelling
Miro / Canva / Google Docs collaborative story-building
Trauma-aware & youth-centered facilitation practices
Impact & Learning
This work reaffirmed that imagination is public infrastructure — and youth deserve access to the tools and permission to use it. In a generation often told to prepare for collapse, young people lit up when invited to build futures rooted in care, interdependence, and complexity.
Designing this curriculum deepened my belief that activism is a practice of imagination first — that movements begin with stories we allow ourselves to believe. It strengthened my approach to building civic imagination containers: spaces where young people rehearse agency, practice future-casting, and root hope in action, not naivety.
This will be an ongoing part of my portfolio that I hope to build on in other contexts.
