Imagine The Future & The Ecoversity

I established Imagine The Future Inc in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Our ITF projects included

- the world’s first ecoversity, which hosted many seasons of sustainability forums in the 1990s

- a series of events exploring the past, present and possible futures of Timor Leste, with Melbourne’s East Timorese refugee community, entitled East Timor: Towards Peace, Prosperity and Self-determination, incorporating a Youth Ambassador Training Program and a speaking tour, by the youth ambassadors, of North America

- the community e-journal Redreaming the plains, which incorporated the Homelands Project and Habitus: Sense of Place, a collection of contributed stories about living on Victoria’s basalt plain and other plains around the world

- Painting the Future Real with its interactive possum skin cloak

- Re-imagining your Neighbourhood with communities in Western Melbourne, including Sunshine

ITF has now been de-incorporated, but the ecoversity fittings and ITF documentation ’lives on’ in the archives of the State Library of Victoria, the Sustainability Collection of Museum Victoria, and at The Patch Primary School in the Dandenong Mountains. And there are now many ecoversities around the world, including one at Bradford University in Yorkshire, where I was a guest in 2009.