Overview

In a time of tremendous transition, unrest, and re-organisation, how can we think and be when we are sure that the future we hope for will not come?

While no single conversation can fully encounter or resolve this question, this event aims to offer a doorway in. It seeks to both inspire and challenge ingrained ideas about how we might meet our individual and collective futures.

We will explore this through three diverse perspectives as drawn from their respective context and experiences:

Victor Udoewa, a U.S.-based Nigerian and American civic designer, liberation futurist, and practitioner of Radical Participatory Design, who has experience giving up power and prioritizing the wisdom and skills of community members as they lead their own interventions and approaches.
Dana Shen, an Aboriginal/Chinese Australian based meditation teacher and systems change practitioner. Dana’ s work and personal life explores two intertwined strands. The first is a personal decolonising journey grounded in cultural practice, Country, language and story. Working with those with lived experience is a systems-facing practice that makes visible the unintended harm often created at the intersection of legal, social and health structures.
Stacey Ong, an Australian based, Malaysian Chinese social change practitioner, whose aim is to bring pleasure and the body back into social change. She is an economist by training and a recovering management consultant, working with government and not-for-profit clients primarily in the area of gender equity and justice. She believes that love and the erotic are pathways for personal growth and collective liberation, in the tradition of Audre Lorde, bell hooks and adrienne maree brown.

Kate Baxter, will join the session as graphic recorder.

Flow of the event

We will open the space with a mindful moment, and an offering of Codes of Care of how we can be in conversation together. Victor and Dana will each offer a talk, followed by a facilitated conversation with Stacey.

In his talk, Victor will explore the question, What do you do when the future you want will never happen? His approach to Impossible Futures is a practice that embodies an ethics of hopelessness, rooted in Black Liberation theology, letting people with and without hope move forward together, treating liberation as a way of being rather than a goal to achieve.

Deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophies, and seeing the hurt in her own people, in her talk, Dana proposes that hope and hopelessness need to be held in equal measure, where balance provides the vehicle to negotiate these two paths.

Stacey will host a conversation between Victor and Dana. She will explore what an ethics of hopelessness can offer us in an Australian context, when so many of us may be losing hope, have lost hope, or are still clinging to hope for a better future. She will bring perspectives from decolonial feminist thought and erotic embodiment to the conversation.

After the conversation, we will facilitate small group conversations to enable participants to reflect and digest what was shared, and consider what resonates, what feels challenging, and what you will take with you. We’ll return to the collective space for final reflections before closing.

This event is for you if you are:

A practitioner who is working towards social good outcomes through one of many lens such as systems change, social justice, public policy, systems thinking or design
Finding it hard to avoid burnout and overwhelm when the success of your work relies on achieving outcomes in a system where those outcomes are difficult to achieve
Aware or beginning to notice that our systems are in service of fewer people and less of life than we hope for
Still holding on to hope and/or feel there is more hopelessness than hope these days

And you would:

Welcome new and old ideas about how to meet this question
Appreciate perspectives different from your own, even ones that might challenge your own thinking
Enjoy deeper conversations with an opportunity to reflect and digest with others in a respectful, compassionate, and kind way

Session Details

Date/time (Australia): October 30th 9-11:30am Brisbane time/9:30am Adelaide time
Date/time (USA): October 29th 4:00pm PT/7:00pm ET
Session to be held on Zoom, with a link to the event shared the day before
Check the world clock here

Ticket Fees

This is a non-profit event. All proceeds will be used to support our speakers, and make a donation to a charity of their choice.

Stacey has nominated InTouch : providing services, programs and responses to family violence in migrant and refugee communities

Free tickets are available for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants - please connect with seanna@thesystemsschool.org for details.

Speaker Bio's

a dark skinned man, with short dark hair in a black dress shirt, red striped tie, and a red v neck sweater, with a big smile looking off camera to the right. standing in front of a grey background

Victor Udoewa, Engagement Manager at Bloom Works

Victor is Nigerian-born, US based practitioner of Radical Participatory Design, and has experience giving up power and prioritizing the wisdom and skills of community members as they lead their own interventions and approaches. He is a dedicated practitioner and advocate of participatory design, a meta-methodology he has applied across service and system design for governments, multilateral institutions, nonprofits, for-profits, and communities. Victor is committed to bringing practices such as positive deviance, pluriversal methods, and systems practice into civic design. Through initiatives such as Justice by Design and an equity-centred meetup group, he advances work to decolonise design and embed equity within practice.

a light skinned aboriginal and chinese woman with dark shoulder length hair, and broad smile faces the camera. she is wearing a scoop neck black shirt, and a necklace of large flat circle beads that are neons, yellow and pinks

Dana Shen, Dana Shen Consulting and Meditation.

Dana is Aboriginal/Chinese and a descendant of the Ngarrindjeri people in South Australia and has a passion for working with Aboriginal people and communities. Dana has over 20 years’ experience working across the public and not for profit sectors in the areas of health, families and child protection. She previously held the role of Principal, Social Services, Systems & Aboriginal Policy and Director of the Family by Family program at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) Dana completed a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher’s course with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach and is committed to making this accessible to organisations and communities in South Australia and bringing a strong First Nations and Ngarrindjeri lens to mindfulness practice.

A Malaysian woman with a dark wavey bob, black rimmed glasses, a large smile and mauve lipstick. She wears dangling colourful earings, and a white blouse

Stacey Ong, Executive Director, One Red Step

Stacey is a Malaysian Chinese woman and has over 17 years’ experience working with government, corporate and NFP clients in social policy. Prior to founding One Red Step, she was a Director in management consulting with PricewaterhouseCoopers focusing on social policy and was their national staff lead for cultural diversity and inclusion for three years. Stacey is also on the Board of Women’s Health Victoria and Melbourne City Mission. Stacey is a Fellow with the Women's Leadership Institute of Australia. She is a pleasure coach and is undertaking her PhD at RMIT University exploring women’s pleasure and resistance.

a light skinned woman with a big smile, and long wavy blond hair, some of it is pinned up above her forehead, while the rest hangs down. she is holding several large markers, and wearing a jean shirt, and standing in front of a large graphic illustration.

Kate Baxter, Graphic Recorder and Creative Director, Kate Baxter

Kate is a recognised expert within the global community of visual practitioners, with a specialism and passion for digital mediums of capture. With over 20 years of experience in the commercial arts and over 10 years globally as a graphic facilitator, scribing sessions across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, New York, Houston, Delhi, Toronto, Barcelona and London.

This event is being organised by seanna davidson of the systems school, with the support of:

Contact the host of Ethics of Hopelessness

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