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Prefiguring Futures Lab

Cultivating Power for Liberation

A New Set of Offerings From Change Elemental!

“I am feeling resourced because of the Prefiguring Futures Lab, which was hands down the best retreat and facilitation in my 20 years of nonprofit work.”

– Lab Participant (June 2024)

Leaders and organizations have been managing conflict and discord across various areas, including leadership, culture, operations, and frontline efforts, born of the challenges of enduring oppressive systems while attempting to create new ones. It is resulting in burnout and many leaders, particularly women of color, stepping away from leadership. With burgeoning authoritarianism, racialized violence, and climate catastrophe, social justice leaders and organizations need to evolve both what we do and how we be while doing it.

The Prefiguring Futures Lab is designed to meet this moment. It is a generator for power within, power with, power for, and power over that leads toward the world we want. Through experiences, experiments, and practice, as well as engaging resources and tools, the Lab supports us in tending to the being and doing of prefiguring liberation. The Lab aims to transform leaders, organizations, and our movements by:

  • Deepening understanding and practice of liberating leadership that can advance complex systems change
  • Co-creating a shared analysis and understanding of the internal practices required to move visions of liberation
  • Building connections and growing networks among movement leaders such that we can better meet and transform moments as they come, together
  • Catalyzing a bigger we to be well and move well amidst the challenges of our movements and world together

Specifically, the Prefiguring Futures Lab deepens practice in the five elements of liberatory transformation that advance change across our movements.

Our movements, whether focused on voting rights, reproductive freedom, environmental justice, or something else, are meant to advance deep equity and liberation. This requires understanding, embodying, strategizing, and acting interdependently and independently. This is complex systems change. The way forward is both planful and emergent, requiring us to define, understand, and share leadership and power differently. This takes inner work and embracing multiple ways of knowing. The Lab allows movement leaders to grow their practice with these interwoven elements. Read more about the five elements and our connected theory of transformation.

Who This Is For

With our movement spaces experiencing discord and dis-ease from coping in toxic, racist systems, a crucial part of our work is supporting a big we to be well and move well in it all together. We believe that deepening practices of the elements is essential for transforming the being and doing necessary for thriving, liberatory movements. We are thrilled to be launching the Prefiguring Futures Lab as an ongoing set of offerings to learn and to be in practice together. The Lab is for all of us concerned with leading liberatory transformation and how that leadership is defined, cultivated, exercised, and supported. This includes movement leaders, movement consultants, coaches, and funders. We hope you’ll join us.

The Lab Experience

“I really appreciated the depth of practice in helping us deepen into multiple ways of knowing. Living into and practicing frameworks has expanded my body’s capacity for possibilities and honestly has me feeling unstuck.”

– Lab Participant (February 2024)

The Lab is for all of us concerned with leading transformational liberation and how that leadership is defined, cultivated, exercised, and supported, including movement leaders, consultants, coaches, and funders. The relationships and connections are creating an ecosystem of leaders rooted in liberating practice, strengthening their organizations and networks, and building power toward love, dignity, and justice.

February 2024 Lab Participants at Closing Ceremony

The Lab Experience

Whether it is a five-day workshop or a 16-month fellowship, the Lab’s design is emergent, co-created, rigorous, and creative as we deepen our capacity and practice with the interdependent elements of liberatory transformation.

Areas of Inquiry & Practice

  • A Theory of Transformation: Connecting to and deepening our pathways and portals to the next world now
  • LANDS (Liberation AND Sovereignty): Unlearning and learning, reclaiming and reconnecting
  • Complexity: Sense-making and strategy in the emergent and chaotic
  • Shared Leadership and Power: Engaging with power over, with, and within, embracing generative conflict and mutual accountability
  • Multiple Ways of Knowing: Leveraging creativity, intuition, energy, soma, and the natural world as guides
  • Inner Work: Moving with purpose, source, and the sacred
  • Hands-On: Experimenting our way forward, application, and reflection

We work together to create a transformative learning and practice space grounded in practicing liberation 

(influenced by the work of Monica Dennis) by connecting, engaging, embracing, and reweaving with:

  • Body: Physical practice (Dance, 10-Step, Breath, Neurosomatic practices)
  • Source: Nature walks, meditation/prayer, quiet time,…..
  • Emotions: Learning and moving from and with our emotions
  • Story: Storytelling, orally, in pictures, in song

Through our learning and unlearning, we seed and nourish the relational roots necessary for interdependent, thriving movements.

June 2024 Lab participants

“How might we explore the intersections between the wants and needs of the individual with the project of collective liberation?”

– Lab Participant (February 2024)

 A Few Tools & Resources

Below, we share some invocations, inquiries, and offerings from previous Prefiguring Futures Labs to give you a feel for the experience. 

Invocations, Principles, Ingredients, and Recipes for Nourishing Social Justice Practitioners and Networks

From 2017-2019, Change Elemental, in partnership with CompassPoint, co-created and co-led the Network Weaver Learning Lab. This Lab was a space for leaders to deepen their thinking and practice on what it takes to advance liberatory transformation and to explore and experiment together on ways to advance the movement to end relationship-based violence. 


Check out the medicine deck and healing recipe book from the Network Weaver Learning Lab here.

Inner Work & Multiple Ways of Knowing: A Five Elements Lab Anthology

In the winter of 2023, the Change Elemental team held a Lab prototype where our staff team and some close-in co-creators came together to deepen our practices of multiple ways of knowing and inner work. 

Explore the anthology here to learn more about the experience and engage in some of the practices we tried on. 

The Team


For more information on the Prefiguring Futures Lab, including how to apply to an upcoming offering, please email Leslie Cao at PrefiguringFutures@ChangeElemental.org.