How to Fall In Love with the Future

Wednesday, May 13 | 12:00-1:30 PM ET

Join Radically Rural and otherWise for a 90-minute online session with Rob Hopkins, renowned imagination activist and co-founder of the Transition Town movement. Rob’s work invites us to consider a simple but transformative idea: that vivid, sensory, grounded imaginations of better futures can sharpen our sense of agency right now – especially in times of uncertainty or erosion.

Together, we will:

• Hear Rob share insights from his newest book, How to Fall in Love with the Future (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025).
• Engage in a collective imagination practice—a guided “Time Travel” exercise—to experience how imagination can function as a practical, effective, and even essential tool for local resilience, rural revitalization, and cooperative economic possibility.
• Dream forward with others invested in rural creativity, economies of vitality, and community-shaped change.

Register Here

Reckoning

Many of us sense that the old maps no longer match the terrain. We are facing real pressures: affordability, housing shortages, childcare gaps, education strain, fragile funding systems, ecological & social breakdown, and more.

These forces are reshaping daily life in rural places right now. 

Reckoning means naming them clearly and opening space for honest exploration of the upstream drivers of many of the intersecting challenges of our time.

Reorienting

Rural communities are not standing still. The summit provides a rare opportunity to gather as neighbors, artists, organizers, journalists, farmers, public servants, and practitioners across many sectors. Like roots, we will form and deepen relationships.

In our sessions, we will encounter communities practicing new (sometimes old) patterns of cooperation and care. We will explore models and tools for stabilizing local systems through municipal resilience efforts, strong local journalism, food systems, shared governance, land stewardship, and more.