Ridiculously Hopeful Futures Meets Meeting of the Minds

At California Workforce Association’s (CWA) Meeting of the Minds conference in Monterey (September 2025), we invited participants to time travel with us. 

Building from our experiential futures project, Ridiculously Hopeful Futures, our workshop transported participants into a new California – one where all our programs and policies are co-designed with people who have lived experience. The future they were invited into was one where public servants and those working in education, non-profit and other organizations providing critical community services are respected and celebrated for their work. 

Welcome to the Celebrating Impact Awards!

After traveling through the time machine (a sparkling curtain of lights meant to indicate that travelers had crossed the threshold into a new world), they were greeted with delightful decorations, celebratory music, a beloved Assembly Member, and an awards show host. They had just arrived at the Celebrating Impact Awards, a fictional award ceremony set around 15 years in the future, to celebrate the people co-designing policy in the Hopeful State of California.

The awards – brought to you by the fictional “Civic Council for Co-Design” – were meant to recognize people behind projects and the collaborative efforts to research and continuously improve government services. This aspirational Civic Council for Co-Design is comprised of community members with lived experience whose insights and dedication drive policy and program decision-making, enacted in state law to enshrine human-centered government.

To bring this immersive experience to life, every interactive element that the standing-room-only audience experienced at Meeting of the Minds had been meticulously designed with input from state policymakers, department heads, case managers, and people with lived experience accessing public benefits. We did this through a collective visioning process with expert design futurist, Hillary Carey, who brought Participatory Experiential Futures (PXF) to our work.

The Participant Experience

After taking their seats, Celebrating Impact Awards programs in hand, audience members were introduced to Assembly Member Moore, a fictional character played by our project partner, longtime workforce innovation catalyst, and founder of CWA, Virginia Hamilton. In this future, she talked about the legislation that had been passed 15 years prior to enable a shift in policy development from public comment to co-design. This set the stage for the awards ceremony.

Four awards were given out to unsuspecting audience members in the following categories:

We designed these awards to be general enough that they could speak to the work of any education, non-profit or workforce professional in the room. As people filtered in, we determined who would get each award based on what we knew about their work. At the same time, we secretly nominated presenters to read out introductory speeches for each awardee.
Each time we’ve led this experiential future, it’s been a delight to see our attendees transform into active participants and actors in this world.

What We Heard

After the simulated awards ceremony, we debriefed with the audience to get a sense of their experience. What did they interpret as the innovation we were demonstrating for our near-future? How did they feel stepping into a Ridiculously Hopeful Future?

Participants noted that moving from public comment to co-design as a practice could have high impact for people accessing public benefits, and that it represents an approach that is “community up” versus “top-down.” Others remarked on inclusive language being used throughout the ceremony, as well as redefining what success looks like, from the perspective of our fictional Civic Council for Co-Design.

Finally, we asked participants at the end to share some words to describe how the workshop felt; here’s some of what they shared:

• Relaxation and possibility
• Hopeful and happy
• Unburdened
• Relief
• Feeling like the future is attainable!
• “Breaking through barriers”

What’s Next

Our team has seen the immense value in futuring methods, like collective visioning and participatory experiential futures. We want to do more of this work, and invite others to join! If you’d like to learn more about our design futures offerings, sign up for our Futures newsletter. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions, ideas or visions for a more equitable future!