Watch the Social Imagination Speaker Series
ThirdStory and the Centre for Public Impact ANZ invite you to the Social Imagination Speaker Series
With complex and compounding crises, finding hope and possibility is both more difficult and more necessary than ever. We need to find ways to move beyond piecemeal reform and create space to imagine together how things could be radically different and better.
That is why ThirdStory and the Centre for Public Impact (ANZ) are hosting a three part speaker series exploring the concepts, practices, politics and enabling environments for Social Imagination, a growing global creative practice that helps changemakers to rethink how we live, work, and collectively create change.
Social Imagination is an invitation to explore different possibilities for how we live with each other in the world. It gives us a much more optimistic and expansive set of tools and approaches with which to move forward and to shape the future together.
Session one: How can Social Imagination help us find hope and move into action?
The first event of our three part speaker series was held on Thursday 3rd June 2025.
Our special guests:
Ruth Kennedy (ThePublicOffice, UK)
Hannah McDowell (Canopy, UK)
“I believe that to create sustained and authentic change we can’t tinker around the edges. We need to be prepared to challenge our old ways of thinking (the paradigms) and old ways of doing (the methods and approaches).
I find that the language & practice of social imagination does this in extraordinary and exciting ways.”
Session two: How can we enable and support Social Imagination at scale?
In this session we explored how Social Imagination projects can be funded and supported, and contribute to the work of system change.
Our special guests:
Constance Agyeman, Co-founder of Partnership Bureau (Ghana)
Shamal Dass, Executive at JB Were, (Australia)
Kaj Löfgren, CEO of Regen Melbourne (Australia)
Session three: whose imagination are we living in?
Recording coming soon!
How can we tune into disruptive imaginaries that could bring about more equitable futures?
ThirdStory and CPI held the third session of our Social Imagination Speaker series on Thursday 17th July.
In this session we heard from three brilliant speakers who are creating space for imagination in their lives and work, and revealing, challenging and changing the collective imagination that holds current inequities in place:
Morgan Cataldo, Founder of morgan&co (Australia)
Tasha Ritchie, CEO at Accountable Futures Collective (Australia)
Alba Villamil, Partner at HmntyCntrd (USA)
Contact
Dr Perrie Ballantyne, Director, Collaboration and Systems Change, ThirdStory
Allison Edwards Senior Manager, Centre for Public Impact