Host a Food Futures
Dream Labs

Food Futures Dream Labs are hosted community gatherings designed to help spark visions of a food future rooted in joy, care, and reciprocity.

2-hour virtual or in-person community gatherings featuring a story from the Radical Nourishment podcast + a visioning session

Facilitated by hosts within their own communities with toolkits from Food Culture Collective

Designed to spark visions of a future where our relationships with food, land and people who nourish us are rooted in care.

Part of a collective art project fed by visions of the future from the community

Food Futures Dream Labs are spaces where you can be inspired by stories of food sovereignty and self-determination, where dreamers across Turtle Island are bringing their dreams to life. Engage with provocative prompts, informed by the Radical Nourishment stories, that spark imagination of a liberatory food future. This creative process is designed to help us get specific on what we want to create, to grow our collective capacity to bring these dreams into reality. 

  • This is about the radical and transformative power of dreaming in community.

    Rather than continuously replicating cycles of extraction, we believe that envisioning futures rooted in joy, care, and mutual belonging in community is a first step toward breaking out of harmful cycles and creating an irresistible future.

    If we can see it, we can move towards it.

  • Whether your community meets in person or virtually, Dream Labs are designed to be spaces where people come together to root in stories of food communities that are reclaiming sovereignty today as a jumping off point for envisioning a future that is rooted in joy, care, and mutual belonging.

    As a host, you’ll be reaching out and gathering folx who are hungry to dream and seed that future together, and guide them through a collective visioning process.

    To host your own Food Futures Dream Lab, you’ll need to:

    • Fill out our registration form so that we can send you resources to support you to gather meaningfully and unearth community dreams.

    • Review and use the Food Futures Dream Lab Toolkit to host and facilitate a virtual or in-person gathering with your communty. These include:

      • A workbook to think through the details of your gathering, including how to ground in purpose & logistics

      • Sample agendas and invitations

      • Story audio to share and listen to with your community

      • Prompts to spark imagination

      • Ways to share feedback and see how the collective day dreams are taking shape

  • Dreams from the lab will live on a public, digital page on Food Culture Collective’s website, to affirm our collective power to grow the futures we long for.

    Artists will also be commissioned to produce artistic expressions of dreams from labs, to reflect back our collective dreams and celebrate the multitude of creative expressions inspired by community visions of a future of care.

This is about the power of dreaming in community.

 Stories are seeds

Each Food Futures Dream Lab will ground in a story of food community reclaiming self-determination and sovereignty from the Radical Nourishment podcast. Each Dream Lab will listen to a story together then immerse in a guided collective visioning session to capture glimpses of a future where our relationships to food, land, and each other are rooted in joy, care, and reciprocity. Glimpse the story seeds here:

  • Producer: Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer

    The history of indigo and its dye, and how the cultivation of this plant weaves with the history of enslavement and colonization in the Americas and Black land stewardship today.

    Listen to Seeding the Blues

  • Producer: Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer and host of the excellent Queers at the End of the World podcast

    An interview in the field that travels, with an extraordinary Black land steward in Ohio growing a community garden created by her mother, an 88 year old powerhouse, community organizer and accomplished gardener.

    Listen to Nourishing Black Food -Sovereignty in Bronzeville, OH with Julialynn Walker

  • Release date: 10/30/23

    Producer: Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED

    The story of how the Black-led and POC-staffed BK Rot -- a community- centered composting organization that's changing how New York city composts -- came to be, and its vision for transformation.

    Listen to Rot and Renewal

  • Producer: Shephali, farmer/land steward & first-time producer

    Seed sovereignty and land stewardship access rights in Seattle's Black and Indigenous communities, rooted in the long arc of movement history and rich archival tape from protests

    Listen to Other Futures Are Possible

  • Producer: Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer and host of the excellent Queers at the End of the World podcast

    Food as more than nourishment - food as love, as queer and trans community care after top surgery. Featuring the voices of folks with varying experiences of nourishment after surgery, interwoven with Nino's moving personal narrative of their own experience

    Listen to After Surgery, Food is Gender Affirming Care

  • Producer: Shephali Patel, farmer/land steward & first-time producer

    Indigenous efforts to protect the River Duwamish, formerly declared a superfund site in Seattle. Spiritual ties to water, a narrative centering the river as a sovereign being with profound lessons to teach us.

    Listen to The Rivers Running Through Us

  • Producer: Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer

    Grief gardens as an act of radical self-determination and community healing

    Listen to A Lesson From the Leaves

  • Producer: Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED

    A deep dive into composting as sovereignty that delves into Pakistani, Colombian and traditional western ways of composting. The story centers Earth matter, a community org that composts over 7000 tons of food in Long Island and grows multicultural heritage gardens

    Listen to Growing Community from Compost

Prompts for dreaming into the future

Imagine the place you call home, 7 generations in the future… The values that you heard about in this story about mutuality have flourished and spread… The places we live have been completely reshaped so that all of our infrastructure, homes, and systems now support mutuality. We’ve recognized that we all belong to the land, and that together we have what we need to flourish.

In this future, how are we living? What supports our mutuality?  

How is this community governed to support the processes and cycles of the earth? 

What is our relationship to labor?

A taste of Dream Lab prompts to spark imagination…

A taste of Dream Lab prompts to spark imagination…

Art by Aisha Shillingford

Lineages & Gratitude

  • Anti-disciplinary artist; Intelligent Mischief’s Futures Design Lab has inspired the format and questions in our toolkit.

  • Such as Octavia Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Walidah Imarisha, for being leaders in building worlds where we are all free.

  • The group of folx who produced the audio stories that serve as the seeds for this project.

    Donelle Wedderburn, freelance producer; Nino McQuown, farmer/land steward, community organizer; Alejandra Salazar, producer & story editor at TED; Shephali Patel, farmer/land steward & first-time producer; gratitude to fellows for illuminating stories to nourish our dreams; Natasha Mmonatau, Narrative Strategist and Zak Rosen, Story maker for supporting the story and audio production.

  • Zen Priest & Movement Strategist, teaches Long-Arc strategy honoring our relationships across generations.

  • A cross-movement learning and strategy network convened by Movement Strategy Center to engage social justice movements in Just Transition; especially the founding team: Jovida Ross, Julie Quiroz, Kristen Zimmerman, Mimi Ho, and Taj James. The Transitions Labs blended futuring practices, cultural immersion, design thinking methodology, and embodied wisdom practices.