Story so far.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the Australian government was calling for the country to "bounce back", to return as fast as possible to an idealised version of how things were before. It seemed an odd ambition. The world had just stopped in order to protect and cocoon our most vulnerable people. For a moment, almost anything seemed possible.

Around the same time, Professor Chris Riedy, connected to a global narratives transformation lab, brought a different idea into the room: not bouncing back, but bouncing beyond.

That contrast became a question, read aloud to a small group gathered in the early months of lockdown: what do we actually want? Not what we're managing toward or settling for, but genuinely want.

This question became the FutureNow Project: a community storytelling platform and open-source visioning toolkit, built over 19 weeks of dialogue. Over its life, the project gathered and published 28 written futures from people across Australia, some of those visions were also published in Dumbo Feather: farmers, artists, academics, civic leaders. Each describing the world they wanted to live in. Cities that work with Nature, new ways of making decisions together, economies built around belonging.

The visions lived on the FutureNow Project website for three years, supported through the Coalition of Everyone. By the end of 2024, when the Coalition of Everyone wound down, the FutureNow Project closed with it.

The FutureNow Project was convened by Willow Berzin, and developed with enormous gratitude and thanks to: Professor Yin Paradies, Professor Chris Riedy, Pru Gell, Nathan Scolaro, Alvin Stone, Dr Sonia Randhawa, Dr Kimberley Crofts, Tim Hollo, Susan Porter, Matt Wicking, Max Lynam, Juan Aguirre, and Charlotte Doughty.

Much of what the FutureNow Project was reaching for is still alive. 3xTL carries that thread forward, in a new form.

Those visions didn't end with the project. They became foundations to keep building.

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