Regenerative Futures Lab (rLab) empowers young visionaries to re-imagine new, regenerative realities and serve as paradigm shifters for a more just society. rLab is the place where students collectively try to figure out how to navigate paths to a re-imagined future that prioritizes the well-being of humans and the planet. Rather than learning how to be successful in the system as it currently exists, we seek to learn how to successfully influence change towards a regenerative future; a future centered around wellbeing, reciprocity, safety, and justice.
TRANSFORMATIVE Systems Project
The Transformative Systems Project (TSP) serves as an incubator for education, research, networking, community empowerment, and activism to create a society organized around social justice and human wellbeing within a healthy and resilient environment. We share a common sense that possible solutions to problems are only as good as our understanding of the causes. We explore, identify, and disseminate paths that may provide solutions moving forward.
In line with a growing number of business reformers, educational advocates, political activists, and students from around the world, we believe that the current system of extractive capitalism is no longer capable of reform. Instead, we aim to build a sustainable future from a fundamentally transformed operating logic, one that focuses on wellbeing of people and planet—prosperity and justice for all within the biophysical limits of our planet.
This course asks, “What are the systemic issues you care most about?” and then empowers you to courageously envision what structural change can look like for this issue, through connecting with and learning from community organizers, social movements, politicians, and changemakers who are working on these issues right now. Action oriented, we hope to use this house course as a catalyzer for you to identify ways (small and large) to plug into ongoing campaigns and projects that are moving towards structural change.
The Build a Better World Focus cluster investigates ways of thinking and being that both expose and move beyond the singular extractivist logic of modern societies. Working with a rich trove of historical and contemporary knowledge in the worlds of science, the arts, technology, and political economy, our rotating courses explore a wide range of alternative stories, experiences, and visions, ranging from Indigenous practices to the newest findings of post-growth care economies or the work of environmental and racial justice activism. Our courses are discussion-intensive and include deep readings, research opportunities, interactions with the larger community, and—most importantly—thinking in new and exciting ways about the most pressing problems facing our world.
In this Focus cluster, students will ask: what will it take to move the world away from dystopia and towards a future that foregrounds justice, ecological sustainability, and human flourishing?
Current Research Project
Unprecedented dangers—a heating planet, warring nations, dying species, people without home or safety or prospects, unabated oppression and exploitation–all connected, often mutually reinforcing each other.
Unprecedented opportunities—technologies that make possible a regenerating ecosystem, peaceful co-existence within economies focused on wellbeing rather than wealth accumulation, a safe home not just for people but for every species, prosperity for everyone—all part of a larger common good, all supporting each other.
The world could fill a thousand warehouses worth of books that speak to some aspect of the crisis. Yet books that imagine a radically different, far superior world—a "utopia for realists—” still fit into an average Ikea bookshelf.
Two ideologies dominate the reality of gloomy acceptance: the story of denial, and the story of inevitability. The denialists largely defend the relations of power and distribution that exist. From this point of view, despite a few persistent problems and setbacks, things still move in the right direction. With faith in things like property, free markets, and technological innovation, all will be well. The Inevitabilitists find some psychological refuge in fables about the selfish nature of humans, the inviolability of ownership, and the sheer complexity of contemporary global life.
The end result of both ideologies is the same. Both dismiss practical scenarios of a better future as the work of immature dreamers. Both seek the dreary-if-known comfort in assuming current realities as natural or God-given–and, in any case, inevitable. In denying the possible, they repress the desirable.
Both ideologies fail to mention one increasingly undeniable truth: the most unrealistic prospect for humanity is to continue on our current path. Both advocate, in effect, for the impossible.
Denialists and Inevitabilists largely ignore the lived realities of the vast majority of people around the world forging lives of creativity and care despite precarity, information overflow, and failing governance structures. Millions of people who create, form, and organize, wherever they can, against the deadening consequences of accepting the status quo.
This project builds on a wealth of accumulated knowledge from thousands of people—in business, in academia, in politics, and in social activism—envisioning a world that goes beyond colonial mindsets of extraction, domination, and destructive growth. We reignite the promise of a common future of dignity and wellbeing for people, while staying within planetary bounds.