"The Future We Long For Is Possible" with Mia Birdsong

The future we long for is possible. Not because it arrives, or even will in our lifetimes, but because we learn to live into it now.In this conversation with ⁠Mia Birdsong⁠, we explore what it means to practice the future: in our organizations, our rituals, and in the ways we move through and make meaning of time. Mia shares how ⁠Next River⁠ is creating room for the world it seeks to build, from rethinking organizational calendars and rhythms to grounding freedom in deeper humanity, purpose, and community. We move beyond nostalgia for a different time and into the work of practicing the future now. Along the way, we locate each other as fellow travelers on the arc toward justice and liberation, and invite others to join us in the unfolding of our freedom.Together, we move back and forth between future and present, exploring abolition and invoking ancestral memory to ask what it means to practice freedom in an unfree world. As Mia reminds us, “what we practice is the world we’re building.”---