Trista Harris on Creating FutureGood

 About, three and a half years ago, I was running the Minnesota Council on Foundations. It is an association of 170 foundations that give away a billion and a half dollars every year, and our role was to help them be more effective. What I was starting to notice, talking to our members and talking to other foundations and nonprofits across the country, was that the pace of change was getting faster and faster and faster for the sector. I knew from my futurism work that we were on this exponential curve where change gets quicker and quicker and faster and faster and more intense as you go on. 

At that point in time, it felt like we were right at the knee of this curve, that it was just starting to get really fast. And I knew that it was the right time to help organizations learn how to both predict and shape what the future is gonna look like, because I could see how the pace of that curve was just gonna sort of drag them along for the ride, and it was gonna start to move too fast where you couldn't react to the change quick enough. 

So building FutureGood was about making sure that those tools were available to lots of folks within the sector. It can't just be, you know,Trista’s a philanthropic futurist, she can come in and tell us what's coming next. We need millions and millions of people within the sector to be able to understand what's coming next and help organizations create that view of the future that they're trying to create so that they can harness this fast pace of change. So it felt like the timing was right to do that sort of work. 

 It is my purpose. I have been somebody, since I was seven or eight, that knew I wanted to make the world a better place. When  my friends used to draw these like beautiful pictures of Barbie dream homes, I used to draw community centers. It would have a Zoo on the top and there'd be a slide that goes through and they'd have programs and a food shelf, and they had all these pieces that come together and create a sort of a vibrant and happy community. That's my hope for the world. What I've figured out as an adult is that I can't do all that work <laugh>. So there's a lot of important change that needs to happen in the world, and Futurism is a tool that helps people make that future that I hoped for when I was a little kid possible.