Where Imagination Meets Practice.
Our initiatives are not programs. They are experiments—ongoing, iterative, and alive.
Each one begins with a question we couldn’t stop asking, a gap we kept running into, or a community that deserved more than what already existed. They are how we practice what we believe: that the futures we need have to be lived into, not just designed.
Some initiatives are years in the making. Some are still becoming. All of them are invitations.
Core Initiatives
These are the bodies of work we keep returning to. Not because they’re finished, but because they’re not.
These initiatives are where our values become tangible. They are how we learn what we actually believe—not in theory, but in the mess and beauty of doing it alongside real people, in real communities, with real stakes.
Each one began with a question we couldn’t let go of. They’ve grown through relationships, experiments, failures, and breakthroughs and they continue to evolve. None of them are finished. That’s the point.
Invitations to Better Worlds
Every gathering, installation, and practice space we facilitate is an invitation to better worlds. IBW is the container for our most experimental work—the processes, artifacts, and gatherings we design to help communities pause, imagine, and practice the futures they want to inhabit together.
The Stories of Us
Canada’s first library of stories by Newcomers, for Newcomers. The Stories of Us began with a belief that the people most impacted by migration deserved to tell their own stories—on their own terms, in their own languages. It remains one of our most enduring practices of truth-telling and narrative power.
F(un)dable Futures
This project examines the Canadian funding landscape by surfacing the gap between what gets funded in the social impact sector and what doesn’t — bringing funders and funded communities into honest, practice-based conversations about the power, beliefs, and mental models that shape where resources flow.
Insights
Our initiatives are generative. They produce not just projects and programs, but thinking—essays, reflections, and honest post-project learnings that we share openly because we believe knowledge is a collective resource.
Hopeful Speculations – Session 4
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler Session recap, July 23, 2026 Something unusual happened…
On Eight Years of Returning to the DIA
As of late, a lot of my writing has happened within the context of writing…
The Practice Within the Practice
#thisisimaginationatwork #33 Five years is a long time to be quiet in a space that…
Hopeful Speculations – Session 3
The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern A story that refuses to be either utopia…
Hopeful Speculations – Session 2
1984 by George Orwell About the Session We had our second session of the Hopeful…
Hopeful Speculations – Session 1
Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers Some books stay with you because they unsettle…
White Noise and Broken Promises #thisisimaginationatwork #32
Last year in late February, I was leading a co-design project at North York Community…
Why I have needed superhero hair #thisisimaginationatwork #31
This month’s blog is one that is long overdue. Starting in April, I have started…
Practice: Holding Multiple Truths
And you, Ma – so fair you would “pass” for white, like the time we…
Care | Past, Present, Future
How we care for each other, for ourselves and how we let others care for…
Practice: The Gratitude Balm
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a sector that often operates project to project, grant to grant, one of the…
Me and White Supremacy #thisisimaginationatwork – Instalment #24 – August 2020
Disclaimer: This is HELLA long! There is so much I wanted to cover and then…
#thisisimaginationatwork – Instalment #23 – July 2020
I am a cisgendered, gay, white male.I live and grew up in Toronto, a city…
#thisisimaginationatwork – Installment #22 – June 2020
Collins Dictionary has an uncharacteristically conversational definition of “day of reckoning”: If someone talks about…
#thisisimaginationatwork – Instalment #21 May 2020
The start of the summer brings the start of a new chapter in my time…
#thisisimaginationatwork – Instalment #20 April 2020
Exhale.I have been using a lot of deep breathing lately. Sometimes it is a sigh….
A Note on How We Work
We don’t launch initiatives and walk away. We stay in them—learning, adjusting, and sharing what we find. If something we’re working on resonates with you, or if you’re sitting with a question that feels related, we want to hear from you.
There is space for you here.