News from The Future
“People build peace only when they can imagine a more peaceful set of circumstances, a more peaceful future.”
Like all education, peace education fires the imagination. We believe an essential part of peace education is imaginative pedagogy. In short, we must be able to imagine the future we want to build. An exciting imaginative device is News from The Future —
News stories written “in the future,” wherein those stories explain how an important problematic cultural, structural, or direct violence, was solved. If we can write “news” stories about how we are building peace and human security, we are, in effect, summarizing how problems can be solved; insecurity, injustice, and violence can be transformed into peace.
Imagine
People build peace only when they can imagine a more peaceful set of circumstances, a more peaceful future. Therefore, imagination is crucial for peacebuilding.
Like all education at its best, peace education fires the imagination. We believe an essential part of peace education is imaginative pedagogy. In short, we must be able to imagine the future we want to build. An exciting imaginative device is News from the Future— news stories written “in the future,” wherein those stories explain how an important problematic of cultural, structural, or direct violence, was solved.
If we can write “news” stories about how we are building peace and human security, we are, in effect, summarizing how problems can be solved; insecurity, injustice, and violence can be transformed into peace.
Examples:
- Imagine a story datelined 2025 that explains how the United States— its government, US corporations, civil society and religious organizations, educational institutions, all with wide public support—decided to do the structural work, mostly political and legal work, necessary to take climate change seriously
- Imagine another story dated in 2032, posted in Port-au-Prince, explaining how Haiti came to have clean, safe water (see below). Imagine a story dated 2035 that explains how the world’s last nuclear weapon came to be decommissioned.
Global Community
The teams who will produce News from The Future will constitute a global community of sorts, with members joined together from across the world, participating in many languages. We will also be working to help build a global community, because the “news” stories that are written about one problem in one place will have applications to many problems in many places.
Empower
Contributing to News from The Future will be a way to experience the empowerment of building peace for others around the world; and it will be a way to empower others in their own imaginative powers toward peacebuilding. Participation in NFTF is also an excellent way to learn about the complexities of the problems that challenge us, the solutions that can be leveraged against them, and the demands of social and political change.
Vision
Our vision is to produce such stories from around the world, for publication and syndication in news media across the globe. We imagine university classes designed to produce these stories, as students learn the skills of research and of writing for popular audiences. We imagine journalists turning their attention to this project and occasionally producing or editing stories, or mentoring other NFTF team members. We imagine interested individuals who are excited by the challenge of writing such stories, taking the opportunity and offering us their best efforts.
News from the Future Guidelines
Stories will be written according to our NFTF guidelines in the preferred language of the author(s), and a team of editors will evaluate the stories according to a set of guidelines. An editorial team member will contact the author(s) as to editorial demands, and acceptance or nonacceptance of the story. Once a story is accepted as written, either the author(s) (with NFTF permission) or the NFTF Team will pursue its publication with a news media organization. A list of partner news media will be cultivated. The distribution of stories in respect to all news media organizations will be executed by the authority of the NFTF Team. News story authors will sign a consent form expressing their agreement with all the terms of the partnership as stipulated by the NFTF Team. These terms will be subject to change at the discretion of the NFTF Team/EGP. At present, we cannot compensate authors for stories.
All news stories shall read like conventional news reports, with language pitched at the reading comprehension level of a standard newspaper or other professional news story.
Word limit: 1600 words
The story/report shall answer basic questions: What? Where? Who? When? Why? And How?
The story shall explain the chronological process: how a particular, material problem came to be solved, or significantly improved, over a period of time, and why the outcome being reported is the solution or improvement being reported.
The story shall be written in the non-ideological, “just the facts,” style of conventional journalism.
We recommend that authors model their stories, in terms of their organization or structure, voice, grammar, etc., after actual news stories.
Get In Touch
Please contact us if you are interested in being part of one of these teams:
- Research and writing team that will both conduct research as necessary to the integrity of ourstories, and produce stories as well
- Editorial team that will edit stories, working in partnership with their authors
- Publications team that will look for new venues for the publication of our stories.
Project leader:
Michael Minch
Project Collaborators:
Juan Felipe Carrillo
María Paula Unigarro