Dreaming Flourishing Futures: A Black Womxn's Manifesto for Designing the Worlds We Must Have to Be Well

Our manifesto is a luminous, living collection of declarations, visions, and artifacts that affirm the possibilities we want to bloom in every dimension of our lives. Breathing the future into the present, Dreaming Flourishing Futures is our testimony, designing what will be necessary for us to be well.

In 2020, we called on our wild dreaming and audacious leaps of imagination to propel us toward a future in which we are all free. We convened 40 Black womxn/women/femmes representing deep and wide Black diasporic identities and asked each other:

What is our flourishing future?
What do we need to affirm and declare to fully experience a flourishing future in which we are healing, joyful and well?
How would our lives, communities and worlds be transformed by a flourishing future designed by Black womxn?

Together, we celebrated our inherent, complex Black creativity and womxnhood that has been integral in shaping generations of healing, care, design and justice. During the gatherings, participants moved through a generative journey of somatic exploration and guided visualizations rooted in Black Imagination, collective collaging, affirmation writing, and the creation of artifacts from a Black womxn’s flourishing future from the chosen years of 2025 to 9262.

Now, our manifesto is complete and we're sharing it with communities across time and space where it can be fully alive, living, adaptable, and evolving.

Our manifesto takes the explorer on a journey of reflection, visioning, imagination, meditation, time travel, and self discovery. As you move through the luminous pages, you’ll experience:

Front Cover Design by Natalia Celina Arias

Introduction Statement capturing our two-year co-creation and design journey.

One of our "breath pages" that offer soft landings and moments of visual contemplation.

A look at one of four Thematic summaries that open the doors to our collective imaginative plane.

Affirmations and declarations from our 2020 gathering participants.

Each theme offering artifacts with recipes, rituals, and meditations.

Building/design pages that invite you into co-dreaming and creation.

Highlight pages that remind you of your validity, humanity, and sacredness.

Back Cover Design by Natalia Celina Arias

We recognize those who brought their true, abundant selves to make the first edition of the Dreaming Flourishing Futures Manifesto come alive. We are naming our collaborators who extended their time, energy, creativity, and love to bring our manifesto to fruition. 

• Precious Blake (she/her): Creative Synthesizer and Joy Cultivator supporting the manifesto through archival narrative building and illustration. 
• Denise Shanté Brown (she/her): Founding Director + Holistic Design Strategist supporting the manifesto through creative design direction and writing.
• N’Deye Diakhate (she/they): Intuitive Design Collaborator supporting the manifesto through emergent processes and graphic design.
• Teena Lewis (she/her): Healing Artist + Visual Facilitator who supported our 2020 visionary gatherings through a journey of Black Imagination.
• Aisha Shillingford (she/her): Artistic Director at Intelligent Mischief who supported our 2020 visionary gatherings through experience design and writing.
• Aki Younge (she/her): Racial Justice Advocate and Design Justice Practitioner who supported our manifesto through storytelling and writing.
• Nechari Riley (she/her): Multidisciplinary researcher who supported our manifesto through strategy, synthesis and writing.
• Alexandra Antoine (she/her): Visual Artist who supported our manifesto through nourish-based imagery and collage.

We're also extending love to every single person who showed up to our gatherings in 2020. We couldn’t have done it without y’all, and we are truly grateful!