Prefiguring Futures Lab

Cultivating Power for Liberation

“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.”

– Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum

Across the country, powerful work to advance visions of liberation is being threatened by relational, structural, and institutional destruction. We need to respond to this moment in ways that deepen solidarity, interdependence, and mutual thriving, ways that tend seeds and lay groundwork and provide experiential glimpses of a better future. The Prefiguring Futures Lab is designed to do just that—catalyze and strengthen a vibrant ecosystem of liberatory power builders to advance a present and future where people and planet can flourish in equity and interdependence.

In it, leaders deepen shared analysis of and practice in five interwoven elements of liberatory transformation, leaving better equipped to meet each moment as it arises, resourced by deeper strategic connection, and shared practice in:

Advancing liberation and sovereignty
Sharing leadership and power
Valuing multiple ways of knowing
Practicing inner work
Creating & transforming in chaos and complexity

Our movements, whether focused on democracy and voting rights, reproductive freedom, or climate justice, are meant to advance liberation and sovereignty. This requires understanding, embodying, strategizing, and acting both independently and interdependently. This is systems change, where the way forward is both planful and emergent, requiring us to seed clarity in complexity, respond from vision in chaos, and define and share leadership and power differently. This takes creating space for our individual and collective inner work practices and valuing multiple ways of knowing.

Read more about the five elements and the accompanying theory of transformation, as well as our strategic reflections on this moment.

Who This Lab Is For

“Change Elemental’s Prefiguring Futures Lab was a sacred container where we stepped into the future we all long for. I have been trying…to offer moments that might feel for folks how the Lab felt for me—safe yet challenging, serious yet playful, loving without coddling, and so profoundly nourishing.”

– Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum

The Prefiguring Futures Lab is focused on transformational change and the necessary leadership to advance it, and is for all of us concerned with leading liberatory transformation and how that leadership is defined, cultivated, exercised, and supported.

Many movement builders and supporters feel torn between defending and protecting communities and hard-won gains, building a vision for the future, and tending to relationships and long-term partnerships. This feeling of being torn is a function of fascism meant to root us in scarcity, competition, and chaos rather than in the fertile soil of our wisdom, creativity, and imagination. We don’t all need to be (nor can we be) doing everything. We need to do the one or two things we are well-positioned to do in coordination with others.

February 2024 Lab Participants at Closing Ceremony

The Lab creates the conditions for each of us to bring our brilliance and gifts, so that we can collaboratively advance the necessary strategies and approaches and move boldly ahead together. This includes grassroots organizers, movement accompanists, artists, and funders. Through creative, rigorous, and liberatory learning and practice spaces that bring together leaders across issue areas, roles, and geographies, it is building a growing network of people who are engaging in meaningful and strategic connections in service of strong leadership, organizations, and movements for justice.

The Lab Experience

“The lab set the stage and modeled what it’s like to experience Liberation and Sovereignty from an individual experience and growing collective experience so that we could use play and creativity to open ourselves up to new solutions.”

– Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum

The Prefiguring Futures Lab generates individual and collective power to create a just future now. Whether it is a 5-day workshop, a 16-month fellowship, or a kinship gathering that deepens solidarity among Black and Indigenous leaders, the Lab’s space is emergent and co-created, rooted in the elements of liberating transformation.

Through experiences, experiments, and practice, as well as engaging resources and tools, the Lab transforms leaders, organizations, and movements by engaging and experimenting in these 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?”

– Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum

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.

John W. Mack Movement Building Fellows Program

The John W. Mack Movement Building Fellows Program cultivates transformative leadership and collective power among movement leaders across Southern California. Launched by the Weingart Foundation and now a program of the Prefiguring Futures Lab, the Mack Fellows Program supports leaders who are reimagining what’s possible for justice, equity, and liberation in their communities.

The fellowship offers a space for fellows to practice deep reflection, experiment with new ways of leading, and strengthen the networks and relationships that sustain movement work over time. Through facilitated learning, peer exchange, and emergent practice, fellows explore how to build and share power, nurture well-being, and prefigure the futures they’re working toward.

Across cohorts, fellows have surfaced lessons on what it takes to lead with love and accountability, balance urgency with care, and build ecosystems that can hold complexity and transformation.

In 2026-2027, we are thrilled to be offering the Prefiguring Futures Lab John W. Mack Fellowship. Created for Los Angeles area organizers—including those working in advocacy, campaigning, healing, and cultural strategy—the Lab is a rigorous, sacred, and liberatory learning space. At a time when communities are carrying compounding and systemic challenges, the Lab also seeks to be a nourishing space—one where participants can replenish themselves while advancing our future. While applications are closed, we invite you to learn more about this LA-based program and stay tuned for shared learning in the coming year!

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

Director, Prefiguring Futures: Elissa Sloan Perry
Core Team: Elissa Sloan Perry (Lead Designer), Alison Lin (Managing Director & Designer), Aja Couchois Duncan (Liberation and Sovereignty Content Development), and Natasha Winegar (CoWeaver)
Experience Coordinators: Mariana Silva (Consultant, Operations Specialist), Leslie Cao (Administrative Coordinator), and Aina Dang (Collectiva)
Learning & Narrative Strategies: Natasha Winegar and Naima Yael Tokunow.

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