WHAT IS NEXT RIVER?
Next River is an institute for practicing the future. We are part culture change lab, part think tank, and part ecosystem builder. To create the world we want and deserve requires long-term, future-facing thinking and action. The key to change across so many of our most pressing issues—from the economy and climate to civic engagement and health—hinges on our ability to look beyond our current systems toward a future that sustains and heals us. In order to do something different and be something different, we must be purposeful in our intention, attention, and action. What if we fanned and fed the practices, people, and ideas that are living into a transformed future and made that future more real?
This is the opportunity in front of us. This is the promise of Next River.
WHAT WE DO.
Next River moves conversation, culture, and resources into the spaces where transformed realities are being dreamed into the world. Our research reveals solutions being practiced in the margins of our country. We nurture leaders and leadership models that point us toward our collective vitality. We reshape fundamental concepts like liberty and labor to untwist them from the captivity of history and the crisis of the status quo.
WHY WE DO IT.
Next River is not a rapid or reactive response to a world in crisis. Next River is standing in the long arc of time. We cast into the past and future to lift up the ways of being that release our imaginations from survival mode. Practicing the liberation we want for our future will give us the space to look up and out, rather than myopically planning change that can only be achieved within a grant cycle or election term. We face overlapping crises—crumbling democracies, a climate on fire, rising inequality and injustice, misinformation and threats to civic participation, disconnection, and exploitation. It is because of these crises that we get limited in our ability to vision what’s possible. And that’s how we lose. Not because of the crises, but because we let them rob us of our willingness to see and live into the future we deserve. Next River exists so that we can be courageous and audacious in creating the world we want to for ourselves and our descendants.
WHERE WE ARE GOING
We actively envision a future where we all have what we need to live a life rich with wellbeing. In the future we deserve, we experience a profound sense of belonging that is rooted in welcome, not exclusion. It is a future where abolition is past tense. Not only have we dismantled prisons and policing, but we have built broad systems of support where people are seen and cared for. It’s a future where everyone is housed, with nutritious food to eat and clear air to breathe. In this future, when the inevitable conflicts arise, we use transformative justice to repair and restore. There is accessible healthcare for all of our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. Paid labor is no longer the organizing principle of our time and lives. We live in right relationship with land and all living things. Next River is collectively building a future where we all have what we need to live a liberated life rich with connection and community.