Tomorrow Making with Lilly Pads and Tipping Points

For several years when you visited this site, you would find our feature project: The Tomorrow Makers Game: Creating a New Operating System for Humanity. You may wonder what happened to this project.  While off to a quick and successful start, we found we did not have the energy to carry it forward. Other priorities of family and health took the upper hand. We were a bit early with the idea and funding for such outrageous proposals was not available. We do not consider it a failure, however.

First, we learned many things and met many wonderful change-makers and doers. We learned more about gaming and our research took us into many previously unknown places proving both historical context, adjacent possibilities, and future potentials and possibilities. As Tomorrow Makers, we discovered others with the same goal, to co-create a new operating system that works for all life with abundance and stewardship. Indeed, these others have been growing, and maturing and are now cohering and engaging thousands of people. We feel privileged to connect, knowing that thousands upon thousands—and increasing exponentially—are now in some way or another working, playing, and living into a new operating system. One that, as it matures, will enable us humans to human well with all of life on Gaia, this place we call home. 

Alas, you might say, a few, even thousands working to create a healthy world is not enough! We are still doomed. Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t think so. Consider the lily pad metaphor. Take a pond and give it one lily pad with the plan to double the number of pads every day. From one to two to four to eight to sixteen and so on… Guess what! The day before the pond is full it is half full! We live in a world of exponential change without taking time to realize the phenomena. So while it looks hopeless, these little initiatives, this gathering of energy and action, we are in fact quickly reaching a tipping point, where the game changes and we move swiftly forward into a new world, a new world that we, tomorrow makers around the world are making initiative by initiative, lily pad, by lily pad.

Here are a few, but certainly not all groups and individuals activating initiatives bringing them alive beyond the page. They are mostly comprised of “We the people,” ordinary people, learning to reach beyond ourselves for mutual benefit of Earth and all life into a new and far-reaching paradigm.  As readers and followers of Tomorrow Makers, I am sure you will recognize many and, in fact, see yourselves here.  

SINE (Synergized Impact Network Exchange) is a global alliance of social innovators committed to large scale behavior change through collaborative learning, innovation, and unprecedented unified action.

Living Cities Earth is an interdisciplinary action research network, connecting 10,000 cities and a web of integral experts serving Gaia’s well-being.

EarthWISE Centre collaborates as wholeness coders, future creatives, evolutionary catalysts, pattern weavers, and new paradigm storytellers for a thriving planetary civilization. Together we serve as a global Collaboratory for enabling human thriving in harmony with our planet and in support of future generations. 

The Alternative is a place to re-orienate, pull the strands together and build. Feet on the ground; mind, body and spirit in the emerging possible. Here you can experience futures organising, future economies and future flourishing in the present moment, ready to converge in a town or city near you.

The Leciel Foundation offers a set of foundational values and principles beyond cultures or traditions, in service of life, that aggregate into what we call Primordial Wisdom, a sense of knowing more than a “knowledge”, that puts universal values, principles and resulting ways into action.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute honors the legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) and continue his effort to make the world work for all of life, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation.

https://www.youthxyouth.com is one of the most exciting websites that I discovered. These are very young people working together to heal our world, step up and work together across all boundaries to recreate our wondrous, collective understanding for we as humanity have to offer, should we choose to do so.

These groups have a lot of diversity of nations, cultures, ideas, and philosophies. They are learning and practicing co-creation as ordinary citizens scattered liberally around planet Earth.  It is an honor to participate in any of them. Your ideas and skills will be welcomed. Your unique difference matters to them. 

Additionally, there are individual initiatives like ecocities, organic farms, doughnut economics, city restorations, prison reforms, world peace making and keeping, changing goals in education … all to become places for humans to human well.  While scattered, they are coming together, finding each other, not to compete or swallow each other up, but to join each offering their difference. This is the greatest magic … where emergence steps through a door offering next steps, ways of togethering for a greater purpose.  

We believe, that while dollar resources are in short supply, this will not be the case much longer. Slowly, we are shifting from earning a living any way we can, making money any way we can, playing individual against community, rich against everyone else. We are all learning the art of stewardship and what it takes to restore the earth as a work of art for all life. We are working together, finding new economics, ways of helping, taking care of, and having each other’s backs. 

All this is happening while the news rolls out and over us with bad news, news of corruption, pettiness, fake news, and fears and disasters. We can’t afford to let this overwhelm us or seem like all there is. It’s not, certainly not the majority!

Tomorrow Makers is investing in you and me, we the people, on a journey creating a different operating system for and with Planet Earth. We are stewards of Gaia. -Gail