What is a Prosocial Futures Praxis?
The hope of prosocial futures praxis is that small posture shifts in how we orient ourselves, how we do our work, and how we encounter the future can accumulate into bigger and better systems. By integrating hope, authenticity, and agency into daily practice, we can align ourselves with the belief that change toward better is possible. From that alignment, we can activate our own agency and help others find their self-shaped hole, or the unique contribution only they can make to a preferred future.
This is not a framework for fixing everything. It is a practice for staying oriented toward equity and collective flourishing even and especially when the present feels hostile to both.
About Me
Every futurist has an origin story.
Mine started at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in Galveston, Texas. I’d been working with nonprofit service providers on the Island for over a decade, and the covid crisis presented an opportunity for organizations to work together to meet the most pressing needs. The Galveston Diaper Bank, the Galveston County Food Bank, and Galveston Central Church came together to deliver food and diapers to families who weren’t eligible for the federal stimulus check or who were struggling because their wage-earners worked in hospitality. The work was urgent and the need was real, but somewhere in the middle of it I had a clarifying and somewhat crushing realization: none of this was a COVID problem. It was a system problem. And I was not equipped to fix the system, which meant I also couldn’t sustain the pace required just to keep people supplied with the basics.
Around that time I read Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable, and experienced a real-time paradigm shift. System change was possible, but it required a fundamentally different plan of attack than addressing needs on the ground. Foresight and futures thinking provided a way to help people think about and change the dysfunctional systems that stymie efforts toward equity and human thriving.
I enrolled in the graduate program in Foresight at the University of Houston, and now serve as the program’s Research Director. I guide student teams through Framework Foresight methodology and lead client research projects across government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. My own research centers on prosocial futures praxis, a framework I’ve been developing that integrates hope, authenticity, and agency into foresight practice, with the goal of helping practitioners and participants orient toward equity and activate their own capacity for change.
I present this work at conferences, collaborate with researchers and practitioners who share the conviction that futures work can be a vehicle for collective flourishing, and am building toward a PhD focused on the same questions that have driven this work from the beginning.
I live and work on Galveston Island, Texas.