In that world, the concept of 'shared humanity' is an agreement.

An agreement that says people are worthy of dignity, care, and participation simply because they are alive, and that systems should reflect that truth. Over time, that agreement expands into something broader: respect for shared life. Not only human life, but the social, ecological, and relational systems that make life possible at all.

That idea stayed close to me throughout this past year, and in many ways anchored me and my work. Somehow, Star Trek anchored me in a deeper commitment to humanity.

Across humanature and the Wealth + Work Futures Lab, our work was grounded in the belief that dignity has to be built into structure, even in pursuit of profits or market growth. We spent time with young workers and employers asking what an economic floor actually requires in practice from the public and private sector. Some of those explorations included the wages people can live on, workplace benefits that might reduce economic instability, and conditions that don’t assume endless resilience in the absence of support. We looked closely at how grief and loss influence economic trajectories for young people, particularly as forces that can quietly compound over time.

We also considered questions of hope by exploring what it means economically and structurally, not just emotionally. Hope showed up as access, predictability, and the sense that effort leads somewhere. It showed up in conversations with employers who understand that stress, instability, and life complexity don’t disappear with better tools or even with AI. Without support infrastructure, both workers and organizations carry the cost.

Urgency has been a steady companion this past year. The work matters, and it asks for movement. 

I’m learning, though, that many of the most urgent questions are marathons. They ask for pacing, care for the body, and attention to how urgency can accumulate rather than resolve. When that adjustment doesn’t happen, the body answers for us. Learning how to stay engaged without burning down capacity has become part of the work itself.

This sensibility shapes how I’m thinking about what comes next. The work ahead continues to focus on building real economic floors for young workers, deepening our understanding of grief, loss, and hope in economic life, and supporting employers and other partners who want to build environments that can actually hold human complexity.

In Star Trek, humanity evolves by choosing differently again and again, and how it relates to the world it inhabits. That evolution is cognitive, social, and cultural. I'm continuing to discover that this is a journey of practice, not mastery. In 2026, I’m staying close to practice—learning in public and private, testing ideas in real conditions, and building toward a future rooted in shared humanity and care for life.

The future isn’t waiting on us. It’s being assembled through the choices we make next.

Let's build Star Trek HUMANITY!

These are the books, films, and resources that inspired us in 2025—some deeply tied to our work, others simply meaningful to who we are as humans.

Here’s a curated look at what shaped us in 2025:

Mike’s Picks:

• Book: The Case for a Debt Jubilee

• Article: A Biocratic Paradigm: Exploring the Complexity of Trauma-Informed Leadership and Creating Presence™

• Report: The Grief Tax

• Brief: Universal Basic Assets Map

Austin’s Picks:

• Poetry: Dear God, Dear Bone, Dear Yellow

• Poetry: A Portable Paradise

• Poetry: Citizen: An American Lyric

• Book: Caring Democracy

• Book: There is Always this Year: On Basketball and Ascension

• Book: Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts

• Article: Tragedy of the Commons by Elinor Ostrom

• Article: Insiders and Outsiders Assess (Who Is “The Community”: Participant Observation, Key Informant Interview, Focus Group Interview, and Community Forum)

Alicia’s Picks:

• Book: Loving Corrections

• Report: Building a Learning Society

Rian’s Picks:

• Book: The Eye: How the World's Most Influential Creative Directors Develop Their Vision

• Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow

• Book: The Creative Act: A Way of Being

• Movie: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Movie: The Croods

Kyron’s Picks:

• Book: The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection

• Book: The Last Days of Cabrini-Green

• Book: Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

• Book: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents 

• Book: Complete Family Wealth 

• Book: Outwitting The Devil: The Secret to Freedom & Success

So, how does collective purchasing actually work?

At its simplest, collective purchasing uses economies of scale by pooling resources from a group of independent or smaller buyers in order to access quality goods and services at rates that are typically reserved for bigger businesses and previously unattainable. Instead of each business negotiating separately for accounting, bulk food supplies, insurance, or point-of-sale systems, a group negotiates better rates that spreads the cost, risk and benefit across members. That can look like:

• Bulk procurement of staple ingredients or packaging to reduce per-unit cost

• A shared bookkeeping or payroll service

• Joint contracting for insurance or compliance support to lower premiums

• Access to a higher-quality POS or inventory system tailored for small operators

• Sharing the cost of marketing.

The result: a democratic way to lower costs, access to services that were once out of reach, increase customer reach, and develop partnerships. However, collective purchasing isn’t just about saving money. It creates a multiplier effect in local economies:

• Stronger small businesses: Predictability, lower operational costs and better business foundations create stability that can reduce churn and allow owners to invest in growth strategies,  reinvest in staff, storefronts and community while reducing risks.
  

• Local retention of dollars: When businesses save on overhead, more revenue stays local, circulating through wages, local suppliers and rent.
  

• Market access: Cooperative purchasing can help small producers compete for larger contracts and reach new customers.
  

• Trust and capacity building: Shared services create routine interaction, shared governance, and peer learning, building infrastructure that supports long-term resilience.

A Camden Prototype: Built With Business Leaders, Not For Them

Across the past several years, Camden’s entrepreneurs have shown the informal cooperative energy a formal model needs: mentorship, resourcefulness, and regular cross-business support. Our team is in the early stages of working with local business leaders and partners to prototype shared services and collective purchasing ideas that respond to Camden’s real constraints — language access, compliance complexity, lack of options and limited working capital.

More details on the Camden prototype and its learnings are coming soon.

To close, collective purchasing and cooperative practices  are not a silver bullet. They require trust, good design, and careful financing. But when done right, they turn scattered, struggling small operations into a networked economy that can afford higher quality service, withstand shocks, and create lasting local prosperity. 

If you run a small business or support local commerce and want to learn from Camden’s work as the prototype unfolds, stay tuned. We’ll be sharing lessons and opportunities to get involved soon.

Austin Planer is the Director of Operations at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab and Chief of Staff at humanature.

• the floor – stability, security, dignity

• the ladder – opportunity, growth, choice

One without the other doesn’t work. Mobility without stability is fragile and unrealistic; stability without mobility is stagnation. Both can create conditions that challenge people’s ability to thrive and be well. 

In a changing economy, stagnation makes people vulnerable to downward mobility. We need both: a sturdy floor and a real way to move up, so people gain economic power and can meaningfully share that power across generations.

When looking at some measures, you could say we’ve made progress. The city’s income-based poverty rate fell to 20.3% in 2023 (down from 21.7% in 2022 and the lowest since 2000). Median household income reached $60,302, and unemployment averaged 4.5% last year. These are often lauded as real improvements. But averages and medians can hide gaps: 12.5% of white (non-Hispanic) residents lived in poverty versus 24.5% of Black, 26% of Hispanic, and 19% of Asian residents (Pew’s State of the City, 2025). 

Metrics can be a powerful way to make sense of the world and often signal whether we’re moving in the right direction. But to use them well, we need to be honest about what they tell us and what they don’t. We need to distinguish survival (the floor of short-term stability) from thriving (the ladder of mobility), and start to name the real conditions it takes for Philadelphia households to do both.

What We Measure Matters: Poverty Line vs. ALICE vs. MIT Living-Wage Tools

• Federal Poverty Line (FPL) / Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).
  In 2024, the FPL for a family of four was just $31,200—a bar so low a household can be counted “not poor” while still nowhere near stable in Philadelphia. These are deprivation measures, not sufficiency. The SPM does adjust for housing costs and taxes and is better for comparisons, but it’s still a poverty benchmark, not a local cost-of-living budget. These metrics can be useful for eligibility and trend lines, yet they set a very low floor—and reporting on them without context risks obscuring the realities of people’s lives. (HHS, 2024)

• ALICE (United For ALICE).
  Think of ALICE as the research term for the working poor—Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed. These are individuals who are “playing by the rules” and still not finding the stability they need to survive. ALICE measures a survival budget that prices the basics of where people live, including housing, food, childcare, health care, transportation, taxes and a 10% misc budget. In Philadelphia (2022), ALICE puts essentials at roughly $29,000 for a single adult and $92,200 for a family of four—far above the poverty line and closer to what families face as they work to stabilize. 

• Living-Wage Calculators.
  Tools like the MIT Living Wage Calculator build a bottom-up budget and translate it into a wage by family type. In Philadelphia County (updated Feb 10, 2025), a single parent with one child needs $43.77/hour (about $91,046/year) with housing (~$19,723) and childcare (~$17,685) as major drivers. A two-worker, two-child household needs $30.83/hour per adult (about $128,236/year); if only one adult works, the target jumps to $42.52/hour (~$88,441/year) but assumes $0 childcare because one caregiver is home. Bottom line: childcare, who’s working, and health plan design swing the “living wage,” so there isn’t one right number.

  It’s ok for different tools to answer different questions. However, we can often silo the conversations about financial precarity and affordability leading to challenges 

Costs are Rising & Wages Continue to Fall Behind 

Household Budget Realities in 2025 

Citywide data tells a consistent story: even as a few indicators improve, household budgets are tight. Across the country, essentials have been eating up any gains experienced by households. The Urban Institute’s new American Affordability Tracker shows child care is up 40%, rents 50%, ACA Silver plans 41%, and since 2019 groceries are up 32%. These rising costs are eating families bottom-lines. Urban finds about 52% of people in American families don’t have the resources to cover what it really costs to live securely in their communities. (The American Affordability Tracker, The Urban Institute, October 28th, 2025). 

Two Clear Ranges for 2025: What It Takes to Survive in Philly (The Floor)

Let’s stay focused on the short term—what it takes to avoid a monthly crisis. Long-term mobility is deeply connected, but it’s broader than wages or take-home pay alone.

• Single parent + one child (renter).
  On a good month, the budget just about balances when income lands somewhere in the mid-$40ks to low-$50ks — if childcare is subsidized or reasonably priced and the job includes employer health coverage that doesn’t wipe out January’s paycheck. Take away one support—a waitlisted childcare slot, a high deductible, a cut in hours, an unexpected expense —and the math breaks fast, turning small surprises into rent-threatening crises. With this in mind, does this equal stability? Does this give you a floor or foundation to move forward from? 

• Two adults + two kids (both working).
  When both adults can count on steady hours, a total household income around $80k–$95k generally keeps the lights on and the bills current in Philly. To actually breathe—to build a small emergency cushion, chip away at debt, and put something into retirement—households need roughly 10–15% more (about $90k–$110k). 

As of 2023, Black households in Philadelphia had a median income of about $45,000, and Latino households about $51,000—both below the city’s overall median of $60,302 – and significantly below white, non-hispanic households median of 82,940 (Pew’s State of the City, 2025).

Starting the Conversation about Quality Jobs in Philly: It’s Pay and Conditions

When we talk about stability, we often look to “good jobs,” but I urge us to not stop at hourly pay. For a Philly household to move beyond surviving, benefits and predictability matter as much as dollars. A stability-focused benefit stack might include:

• Health plans that actually reduce risk for individuals (affordable premiums and deductibles; reasonable out-of-pocket maximums).

• Paid sick and family leave so people can care for loved ones without missing rent.

• Predictable schedules (posted weeks in advance, with minimal last-minute cuts).

• Childcare supports (stipends, slots, or hours aligned with shifts).

• Transit or parking help to stabilize both time and cost.

• Emergency-savings tools or zero-interest employee loans to prevent predatory debt cycles.

• Retirement matches that help convert today’s work into future security.

• Employee ownership models that allow all employees to share in the wealth of a company. 

The Employment Capital framework (Brandeis IERE, 2013) shows how job conditions—benefits, flexibility, consistent hours—can build and protect wealth, not just supplement wages. Health insurance and retirement plans, that don’t move risk onto the employee, can preserve income by buffering shocks and converting work into assets over time. Flexibility and reliability determine whether workers can hold steady hours, upskill, and stay attached to better-paying roles long enough for compounding to matter. In short, employment capital has the opportunity to turn stability (the floor) into mobility (the ladder).

Citywide wage medians—especially for workers of color—still sit below what many families need for stability once you factor in childcare, healthcare, transportation, and other costs. That gap won’t close if we only focus on pay and ignore all the other conflating factors - affordability, stability, and access to quality benefits.

Be Honest About What Stability Costs

Numbers without context can keep us treating hardship like a budgeting mistake—as if families simply need more willpower. What gets obscured are the systems and conditions that hold financial precarity in place across Philadelphia: rents that outpace wages, health plans that shift risk onto paychecks, commutes that steal time with loved ones, and neighborhood disinvestment that still shapes options. If we only look at the line items, we’ll keep missing the architecture around them.

Reflection: How are you seeing this tension between true stability and opportunity show up in your work or community? Where are you seeing the data underperform—or even mislead—the conversation?

Alicia Atkinson is the Research and Innovation Officer at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab.

Psychological safety—the belief that one won’t be penalized or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes—is crucial for fostering a healthy and productive workplace. When employees feel safe to share their thoughts and take risks, innovation flourishes, engagement increases, and overall job satisfaction improves. This is particularly important in today’s climate, as the current U.S. administration moves to strip down Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) protocols, making the need for psychological safety in the workplace even more pressing.

Why Psychological Safety Matters

Without psychological safety, employees may suppress valuable insights, avoid challenging the status quo, or disengage altogether. Insights, new ideas and engagement are vital to innovation and adaptability. In the absence of a supportive environment, organizations risk losing diverse perspectives, which are essential for problem-solving and growth.

In fact, studies show that teams with high psychological safety are 2.8 times more likely to be high-performing, according to research from Google’s Project Aristotle. Conversely, workplaces that lack psychological safety experience higher levels of stress, burnout, and turnover.

A study by the Center for Creative Leadership found that almost 50% of employees in the U.S. report feeling they cannot freely share their opinions or feedback at work. Furthermore, 65% of employees say they often feel unsafe voicing their concerns or admitting mistakes for fear of judgment. 

How Employers Can Take Action

To foster psychological safety, employers can:

1. Develop a Culture of Feedback and Vulnerability: Leaders should set the tone by openly acknowledging mistakes and seeking feedback, which helps normalize the process of learning from errors.

2. Incorporate Policies That Foster Open Communication: Create spaces upheld by explicit and implicit policies and practices where employees feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and concerns, whether it’s through regular check-ins, surveys, or anonymous feedback channels.

3. Prioritize Inclusivity: Actively engage employees from all backgrounds and ensure that diverse perspectives are heard and worked through, particularly in decision-making processes.

4. Provide Support, Resources and Opportunities for Development: Offer training in emotional intelligence and conflict resolution to help employees navigate difficult conversations respectfully and constructively.

Psychological safety is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s essential for fostering a thriving, innovative workplace. Organizations should focus on creating environments where every employee feels valued and empowered to contribute.

Our team is committed to helping businesses create workplaces where psychological safety is a foundational value, building stronger, more resilient teams in the process. Contact us here for support and check out a podcast interview featuring our Director of Operations, Austin Planer, on this topic here.

“Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,” said Griffin. “But it’s not.”

- R.F. Kuang, Babel

The future seems so bleak these days. Headlines tell us where we’re headed: war, environmental collapse, AI domination. Many of us are grieving. Not only the present state of the world, but also the future that seems to hang over us like a dystopian nightmare. It feels so inevitable. And that sense of inevitability makes that grief heavier.

But here’s the truth: there is no future.

Show me an example of something tangible from tomorrow that exists today. You can’t. The future doesn’t exist. It only shows up today in our anticipation of it. Anticipation is the only artifact of the future we’ll ever hold. Inevitability is an illusion.

That realization may sound hopeless, but to me it’s freeing and full of hope. If the future doesn't exist, then we are free to create it.

So why does something that doesn’t exist feel so unavoidable?

The problem is that the future often feels certain because of the stories we’re told about it. Through media, news, and entertainment, we’re bombarded with narratives that frame the future with so much certainty that we lean into them, even when they don’t serve us. And often, those stories reinforce old power structures.

Take the AI futures being sold to us right now. Whether it is AI taking over labor or running the world, the same power brokers remain in place. These futures are manufactured to benefit them. And when we prepare for them, when we accept them as inevitable, we surrender our power to shape new and better futures.

In his article Predictions Without Futures, Sun-ha Hong argues that these technologically driven futures, “technofutures”, give the illusion of progress while narrowing what’s possible. We’re sold images of flying cars and robot workers, while the reality is low-wage laborers suffering PTSD from content moderation and children forced into labor mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As Hong writes: “Technofutures preach revolutionary change while practicing a politics of inertia.” In other words, they promise revolution but deliver the sold old power structures dressed in chrome. The same colonial exploits were just given a shiny, metallic coat.

Not only do these colonized futures reproduce the same structures of harm and exploitation, but they also limit the possibilities of what the future could be. While we’re directed towards AI domination and neon cities, there are much more expansive futures available to us.

Take for example the USPS failed attempt at “rocket mail.” In 1959, the USPS launched a nuclear missile with a crate full of mail from Virginia to Florida, and hailed it as the future of mail delivery.

To start, we can begin by asking: “What version of the future is shaping my choices without my permission?”

That question helps us reclaim our agency. It moves us out of inevitability and into possibility.

This is where Futures Literacy can be useful. UNESCO defines it as the ability to “imagine multiple futures, understand the role of anticipation, and use the future to innovate the present.”

Futures Literacy isn’t about prediction. It’s about paying attention to how our expectations of the future shape what we do right now. Practicing Futures Literacy helps us shift from inevitability to imagination. It invites us to ask:

What if the futures we’ve been sold are too small for us?

What if uncertainty isn’t a threat, but a resource?

What new options appear when we stop treating the future as fixed?

The stories we carry about the future shape how we live in the present. If we only cary dystopian scripts of collapse, domination, and scarcity, then we risk reproducing them. But if we practice imagining futures of care, abundance, and community, we begin to act as if those are possible too.

Novelty lives in uncertainty. By rejecting inevitability, we leave space for the unexpected to emerge. That’s where transformation begins. That’s where our grief can shift into creativity.

So when we say “there is no future,” we’re not closing the door. We’re opening it. We’re refusing inevitability, rejecting colonized futures, and making space for the futures we actually want to live into.

So when things are seeming bleak, just remember, there is no future. Then go create your own.

TJ Dean is the Associate Director of the Media Design Fellowship at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab.

Conversations carry throughout the room, some heavy and some light, but all with love and mutual respect. People speak about grief, loss, love, and the longing to belong. Others sit in quiet reflection. Laughter is a constant as people connect on the unique memories of what makes Philadelphia feel like home.

This was the scene at a Moment of Sharing, an event curated by the Lab to open space for conversations about grief, loss, and well-being.

As I wandered with my camera, taking photos, there was a moment where it clicked. In a world so dominated by digital interactions, there is real power in the tangible. 

These moments cannot be replicated. AI couldn’t produce this. 

There is strength in community. There is something grounding about looking someone in the eye, about exchanging words and energy in real time. The bonds that form in those spaces have weight. A brainstorm over coffee, a debate that ends with a handshake, or a moment of silence shared between strangers. All of it carries meaning.

It reminds me of what I often hear from elders: “The kids don’t play like how we used to.” And they are right. Somewhere along the way, play got pushed aside. And as adults, we have created even fewer places to play, to connect without agenda, to be present with each other in a way that feels human.

As technology has raced forward, we’ve started to lose the plot. Online, it has become easy to dismiss, to insult, to forget that there is a person on the other side of the screen. Empathy gets stripped away when our communication is reduced to comments, likes, and quick reactions.

So what do we do?

We touch grass.

Not just in the literal sense of stepping outside, but in fully immersing ourselves in nature, listening to the wind, feeling the sand under our feet, watching the light change across the day. We carve out intentional moments to gather, to organize, to eat together, to build together, to sit in silence together.

Technology has given us the ability to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere, but those exchanges are in vain if they do not feed into authentic, layered relationships.

To embrace tangible connection means choosing eye contact over endless scrolling, laughter that fills a room over reaction emojis on a screen. Because no matter how advanced our tools become, the strongest bond will always be the one felt in real time, in real space, face to face.

Rian Watkins is the Design + Community Engagement Officer at the Wealth and Work Futures’ Lab.

In our weekly Friday wellness sessions, the Design Fellows have developed the ability to recognize and respond to grief in ways that have facilitated their art, design and engagement skills. The lessons below illuminate the generative nature of our relational and contextual work at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab.

Lesson 1: The way to navigate the healing power of grief in the city is not above, over, or under young people. It is only with them.

This does not always mean we are in the room together, but that we co-create and design space(s) in our practice, policy, and research that are informed by the power and urgency of every stage of human development. While there has been an increasing focus on grief care for children and families, young people, upon turning 18, are often left on their own to navigate death and non-death-related losses that are common for 18-25-year-olds. Losses that are often exacerbated by unattended grief.

Lesson 2: Young people are willing to lean into the complexity and uncertainty of grief to explore ways of increasing their own knowledge and skills as they grow into adulthood.

It is common for humans to move through life with grief reactions buried deep within their emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual selves. However, when young people are given consistent support and the opportunity to explore their own perceptions, thoughts, and ideas about grief, what may initially be perceived as risk often becomes discovery. Their expressions manifest artistically, intellectually, relationally, and spiritually,opening pathways not only for their peers, but also for the adults who support them in increasing awareness and advocacy.

In and outside of the cascading overwhelm, they can see all of the Philly’s from up north to the down south and beyond. To Flint, to Gaza, to the Congo, to Atladena, to Ferguson, to Breonna, to Walter Williams, and to all the ones with wounds who go unnamed in the systems services provided by bright lights. As hard as this vision may be, they most often are bathed and simultaneously pledged with this knowing as their identities are being carved and navigated.   

Lesson 3: Grief work is work.

We should never underestimate the energetic force that grief carries into our places of work, living, and play. Young people are often disregarded, discarded, or discouraged when navigating the arduous combination of emotional and intellectual labor. These dismissals are often entangled with adults’ attempts at control; an inability to sit with the intensity of emerging thought, and, often, our own lack of having done the work ourselves.

This work — for both youth and adults — involves simply noticing the self in relationship to others, recognizing how systems shape all of our development, and genuinely leaning into conscious grief. Spending time with body, mind, and spirit awareness takes time, effort, and acuity. It requires attention to the needs of the self, others, and the broader community. Courage and tenacity, combined with curiosity, anxiety, fear, sadness, and questioning are arts in themselves, serving as doorways to change.

Lesson 4: The change process yields joy.

One key to building a foundation for grief care and literacy is to create the widest possible portal. A net that welcomes the full range of human feelings and deep understandings, which, in turn, allows joy to emerge. Institutions and individuals in popular culture often prioritize happiness while simultaneously suppressing grief. These demands and expectations around how people "should" feel or think often result in suffering and the suffocation of our full emotional range.

Young people often respond to this dilemma with a mix of creativity, resignation, resistance, and rebellion. When we recognize that change is a fundamental part of existence, and lean into that knowing, we create a synergistic space that invites openings to a transformative ease of body and mind. This does not remove the grief and trauma reactions, but makes more room to inhabit the physical body and the fullness of life-affirming energy around it. 

Lesson 5: This particular moment in history has presented young people with unique grief and loss challenges.

Some of the losses young people have identified include:

• Loss of history

• Loss of reproductive freedom

• Loss of legal protections

• Loss of affordable living

• Loss of access to career-building work

• Loss of language

• Loss of early childhood

• COVID-related losses

• Loss of physical location

• Loss of educational options

• Loss of the transmission of resources from grandparents and parents

• Loss of pathways from family to community care

Lesson 6: The circle is the remedy and the answer.

As we have gathered over time, I have observed a convergence of awareness, practice, risk-taking, and co-regulation. When we ask young people to reflect on their individual physical bodies, their political bodies, and our collective bodies — and to bring that data back into the circle — we witness their stress and concern. Yet, trust increases as a sign of our interconnectedness, collective strength, and cultural resilience.

The circle brings order while human-made systems clash with the natural world. Grief is increasingly tied to justice, liberation, and the creative tools we use to pursue both. When you die sooner and more often in the physical realm while your material circumstances shrink, there is washing that occurs that tumbles young peoples’ lives in a circle. As the cyclone moves, the circle and the sun arise, and the heat of that cycle begins to surface in justified rage and passion, spinning forward in choices. These choices include either spinning out of care or spinning into creating safer circles where they can see and be seen.

Lesson 7: Young people are clear about our ties to the Ancestors and how we can look closer to see through our physical disconnections to discover our ongoing spiritual connections.  

Oftentimes the remembrances surface through acts of making visual art like media, poetry, essays, conversations, sitting still in quiet practices of contemplation, and listening to each other and to the self. The influx of ideations that seem distant and apart from their hearts and minds drift in like utterances of that “they” and “we” that we have been longing to feel and hear above the clamor of always doing and performing.  

The repairing of soul and spirit is at hand…

The rebirth of our people is in the waters of our connections…

The re-energizing spins around every opportunity for change…

Together, we remember the cradle of love that builds our protection in the future, past and present.  

Learn more about the Wealth and Work Future’s Lab Media Fellowship Program here.

Kevin Carter is a Senior Practice and Research Fellow at Drexel University’s Wealth and Work Futures’ Lab and the Director of Wellness at the Lab’s Media Design Fellowship.

For example:

• What are the historical conditions that fertilized the soil to grow the economic landscape we live within today?

• What new conditions must we nurture now to grow the democratic, relational, life-centered future we know is possible? 

This isn’t a passive reflection. It’s an active practice, an act of imagination in the face of structural harm and scarcity. It’s about daring to believe we can live into new futures, even before they feel fully within reach. 

At the Lab, this shows up in projects like the Employment Capital Project, which builds on the work of Thomas Shapiro. There, we study how employers can move beyond offering wages alone, but becoming sources of care, stability, mobility, and long-term social wealth.

How the Soil Was Stripped 

We can’t plant new seeds without first acknowledging the soil we’ve inherited. 

Our current economy didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was designed through policy, disinvestment, and exclusion, to benefit some while harming others. From redlining and the GI Bill to mass incarceration and the dismantling of public systems, deep structural inequities shape our present. 

Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion in home loans—98% went to white families. Redlining and GI Bill exclusions locked Black communities out of homeownership and wealth. Today, Black households hold just 15% of the wealth of white households.

Deindustrialization drained cities like Camden and Detroit of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, undermining economic mobility—particularly for Black and Brown workers who had gained middle-class footholds through unionized industry. Today, both cities face persistently lower life expectancy and higher poverty rates than their state and national averages, legacies of industrial collapse and chronic disinvestment Policies like the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act fueled mass incarceration.

Among Black men born around 1981, 1 in 3 were projected to be imprisoned in their lifetime—though for those born in 2001, that figure has fallen to about 1 in 5 today. Even in mental health care, disinvestment means more people with serious illness end up in jail than in treatment. In some neighborhoods saturated by trauma and surveillance, PTSD rates mirror those of war zones.

These are not distant histories. They’re the conditions we live in—and grieve—every day. And still, in the face of these layered harms, people have resisted, reimagined, and reached toward one another. The grief is real—but so is the yearning for something more whole. That yearning requires us to shift our frame. Not just what went wrong, but what could be made right—together.

From “I” to “We” 

In relation to these truths, I’ve been carrying with me a set of questions from Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives that feel like they belong in the marrow of our work: 

• Can you live with me? Even if it will require you to loosen your grasp upon something to which you have been clinging a long time, tightly?

• Can I live with it, with you? Even if it will require me to cede some stance, some sense of the world, which I have been prizing a long time, too?

• What if we are being told, by the violence rippling through the world, that our living must not any longer be solely for ourselves?

• What if the object each of us is undertaking is no longer an individual life, but a collaborative work massive in scale?

Smith asks us to reject the seductive falsehood of the American Dream—the myth of individual self-sufficiency. Her questions call us back to something that has all but been lost: the truth that our futures are bound together.

Prefiguration: Practicing the Future, Now

 If we want a different economy, we have to ask: What can we do and practice now that will inform that future? What are we rehearsing in our workplaces, our movements, our relationships? 

This is what we call prefiguration: the act of living the values and systems we hope to see, even within the constraints of the present. It’s not about waiting for perfect conditions. It’s about practicing them in the here and now. 

We saw this clearly in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The encampments weren’t just protests—they were living experiments in cooperation, care, and collective decision-making.

People organized food, healthcare, libraries, and daily assemblies grounded in horizontal leadership. Even the layout of space reflected these commitments—commons were carved out for gathering, rest, care and learning. It wasn’t flawless—existing hierarchies and tensions still showed up—but it was a real attempt to live otherwise. And even after the encampments ended, Occupy’s seeds spread. Many of today’s mutual aid networks, debt collectives, and workplace cooperatives trace their roots back to its influence.

Prefiguration isn’t about utopia—it’s about trying, failing, adapting, and trying again. It’s about learning to act as if a better world is already possible. 

We already see this in worker cooperatives, childcare collectives, community-run clinics, and neighborhood fridges. These are not just feel-good stories; they are real, ongoing experiments in economic democracy and mutual care. 

From Mondragon’s worker-owned federation in Spain to the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture (POCA) here in the U.S.—explored in our colleague Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism—we see living proof that alternatives not only exist, but can thrive.

Work as a Site of Possibility

So, what does all of this mean for how we spend the bulk of our waking hours—for work?

Work shapes our time, our relationships, and our sense of self. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out how we’re judged by entirely different standards at work than at home—efficiency versus character—creating deep internal rifts. 

We’re often told to keep work separate from life. But we know that’s not real. 

If we spend hours every day in spaces that ignore care and exploit us, we carry that harm everywhere else we go. Likewise, when we experience collaboration, dignity, and shared power at work, it changes how we show up beyond it. 

Psychologist Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance shows that we’re driven to resolve contradictions between our values and our behavior. Our work—how we organize it, who we center in it—is one of the most powerful places where this tension plays out. 

This is why we keep asking:

• What kinds of workplaces make healing possible?

• What practices invite not just productivity—but wellbeing, democracy, and repair? 

This isn’t just theory. It’s practice. It’s the work of regenerating the soil. 

REFLECTION: What Will You Tend To? 

Here’s a set of guided reflection questions, adapted from the Socio-Ecological Model, that we often return to in our work and invite others to sit with: 

• Individual: What daily practices might bring your actions closer to the future you long for? Where can you begin—or deepen—habits that reflect your values?

• Interpersonal: How do your relationships—at home, at work, in community—reflect care and shared power? Which ones feel most nourishing? What ways of being in those relationships could you carry forward elsewhere?

• Community: What communities are you a part of that are already modeling dignity, humility, and cooperation? What can you learn from them? How might you bring those values into spaces that haven’t yet made that turn?

• Society: How do your political, economic, or cultural choices support or disrupt the systems we’ve inherited? What larger-scale practices could move us toward a more just and equitable future?

These aren’t questions we answer once. They’re questions we live inside—together. Because the future we want isn’t something we wait for. 

It’s something we practice. 

“What if the object each of us is undertaking is no longer an individual life, but a collaborative work massive in scale?” — Tracy K. Smith

According to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, 1 in 4 Black youth in Philadelphia will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 25. These numbers don’t include caregivers, best friends, teachers, or neighbors. And they don’t begin to capture the compounding losses caused by incarceration, forced displacement, or collapsing public services. These structural and social losses accumulate over time, often without recognition or adequate response, deepening cycles of disconnection, instability, and economic exclusion.

Over the winter of 2024–25, the Wealth and Work Futures Lab Media Fellowship Program sat down with roughly 30 Philadelphians in their late teens and twenties to explore how the city’s fabric — its neighborhoods, resources, and rhythms — shapes their sense of safety, possibility, grief, and growth. The conversations spanned West, North, and Southwest Philly and were framed by an interview protocol that asked about place, opportunity, well‑being, and loss. What emerged is a portrait of young people who hold deep pride in Philadelphia’s grit and creativity even as they navigate environments that can feel chronically unsafe and starved of opportunity.

Place and safety. Interviewees speak of Philly as both “home” and “a more dangerous place,” capturing an almost dual‑exposure image of nostalgia and hyper‑vigilance. Proximity to jobs and culture is a clear asset, yet many describe keeping their guard up at all times: “You shouldn’t let your guard down … that’s how people get killed out here.” Despite this, the city’s toughness is also a point of honor; to many, Philadelphia represents strength, hustle, and an irreplaceable sense of community and artistic inspiration.

Stigma, resilience, and the role of supports. Participants feel that outsiders (and sometimes civic leaders) cast local youth as “dangerous,” “lazy,” or on a “burger‑flipping track.” Those narratives, they say, seep into young minds and can become self‑fulfilling. Yet the same speakers insist there is “something you cannot take away from the youth in Philly … we’re too powerful.” Formal programs and trusted mentors prove crucial buffers: long‑term initiatives like Girls Track offer weekly structure, sisterhood, and tangible help with school, college, and public speaking, steering young people toward broader horizons.

Loss, opportunity, and adaptation. Grief surfaces in varied forms — the death of relatives, the constant backdrop of neighborhood violence, and the quieter “loss of opportunity” that comes when trades disappear from high schools or post‑secondary paths feel out of reach. Some cope by refusing to dwell, while others channel pain into art or community work. Many see economic precarity as the root: without solid job prospects, “some people try the easy way out” in informal economies. Even so, interviewees draw lessons from change itself; Philly’s four seasons, they say, teach adaptability, and the city’s musical and activist communities model how grief can transform into collective strength.

Taken together, the interviews reveal a generation that loves its city fiercely, critiques it candidly, and holds a clear-eyed belief that better resourcing, dignified work, and consistent support can turn latent resilience into thriving futures.

Expanding Our Understanding: What Loss Truly Means

For Black youth in Philadelphia, loss is a multi-faceted experience. It's not confined to the sharp pain of bereavement. It also encompasses:

• The absence of opportunities: Systemic barriers that hinder access to quality education and meaningful employment.

• The lack of quality public goods: Under-resourced schools, inadequate healthcare facilities, and neglected public spaces.

• The erosion of safety: The constant hum of community violence.

• The instability of family: The impact of death, incarceration, and a dysfunctional child welfare system on family cohesion.

Adding to this complex picture, forces like gentrification and the disruption of social networks further unravel the fabric of once-tight-knit communities. This leaves individuals with fewer resources and relationships to buffer the impact of these compounded losses. The cumulative effect can wear down a young person's ability to learn, to grow, and ultimately, to build a sustainable future in an ever-changing job market.

Illuminating the Path Forward: Research and Recognition

Recognizing the depth and breadth of this issue, the Wealth + Work Futures Lab is embarking on crucial research to understand how grief intersects with opportunity, identity, and mobility for young Philadelphians aged 18-24. Through a mixed-methods study, involving a 150-person survey and 75 in-depth interviews, the Lab is aiming to map both the emotional and structural dimensions of grief.

This vital work is rooted in a fundamental belief: knowledge is cultivated through lived experiences, through relationships, and through memory. By prioritizing epistemic justice, the Lab centers the narratives of young people, affirming their experiences and insisting that their grief be understood within the broader context of racial and economic inequality.

Breaking the Silence: Towards Healing and Repair

When left unaddressed, this silent burden of grief can interrupt emotional development, hinder engagement in school or work, and sever connections to community life. These unprocessed losses can become significant barriers to economic mobility and can lead to social withdrawal.

However, by choosing to listen deeply and respond holistically, we can begin to shift this narrative. We can start to design policies and make investments that don't just passively acknowledge loss, but actively work to repair the harm it has caused. It's time to bring this hidden burden into the light and collectively work towards a future where all young Philadelphians have the support they need to heal and thrive.

Reflection: How might these broader definitions of loss – such as the loss of opportunity, safety, or community cohesion – be impacting young people in your own community? What steps, big or small, can we take to better acknowledge and address these often invisible burdens?

What if we’ve been asking the wrong question?

At the Wealth and Work Futures Lab, we’ve been rethinking this question entirely. Through our research and engagement with communities impacted by  economic immobility, we’ve come to an insight that is shifting everything for us: the opposite of opportunity isn’t necessarily poverty—it’s severe constraint. It's the absence of choice.

This distinction matters. Poverty is an outcome, a result. But constraint—the lack of agency, of autonomy, of viable options—is a condition that permeates lives and communities, often long before poverty takes a developmental toll and long after wealth remains out of reach.

When we look at workforce development and economic policy through this lens, the landscape changes. It’s not enough to offer people jobs. It’s not enough to train them for “what the market demands.” If the structures they’re living in remain deeply coercive—dominated by unstable, precarious, low-wage work with little to no benefits beyond health, limited protections, and no path upward —then we haven’t created opportunity. We’ve simply shifted the shape of constraint.

We’re doing our best at the Lab to document and demonstrate the breadth and depth of this loss—and I use the word “loss” intentionally. It’s not just about the numbers. It’s about human impact. It’s about understanding that people are living at the intersection of grief, precarious work, and the absence of wealth. And grief is a crucial word here—it names the emotional toll of lost dreams, broken promises, and intergenerational disinvestment.

As Raj Chetty’s work points out, economic mobility—the ability to rise in income, wealth, and opportunity—is deeply tied to your zip code, the quality of your local schools, your racial background, and a host of other structural variables. But what Chetty calls “opportunity,” I’ve come to understand as the presence of real, viable choice coupled with intentional investments. 

If opportunity is about options—about having a variety of paths you can choose from, about access to education, mentorship, capital, and stability—then its opposite isn’t just financial struggle. It’s coercion. It’s a system of heavy constraints—structural, cultural, economic—that limit a person’s ability to imagine, let alone pursue, a future that looks different from their present.

These constraints play out across levels of existence:

• Personal: Where someone may be making daily decisions between paying rent or buying groceries, not because of irresponsibility, but because their wages fall short of meeting basic needs.
  
  

• Institutional: Where schools in under-resourced communities continue to receive less funding, fewer supports, and less investment—perpetuating cycles of underachievement and stalled learning. .
  
  

• Systemic: Where housing policies, tax laws, labor regulations, and generational wealth building tools  ensure that some communities remain on the margins of growth.
  
  

So when we talk about economic development, we must also talk about healing. When we speak of workforce strategy, we must also speak of restoring agency. People need not just jobs, but power over their own development, the freedom to decide who they become.

At the Lab, we’re exploring what it means to center dignity, agency, and healing in the way we design workforce policy. That means:

• Supporting worker ownership and cooperative business models that distribute power.
  
  

• Exploring  asset building strategies that enable families or individuals to stabilize their lives and pass something down.
  
  

• Advocating for universal basic assets—access to housing, healthcare, childcare, and education as a right, not a privilege.
  
  

• Rethinking metrics of success, from GDP growth only to frameworks that also include health, community wellbeing, and outcomes rooted in human flourishing.
  
  

Until we address the systems that restrict choice, that limit potential, and that force people into cycles of survival, we’ll never truly be a society of opportunity.

The opposite of opportunity isn’t poverty. It’s constraint.

And, liberation starts with recognizing that everyone deserves more than just survival—they deserve the freedom to thrive.

Reflection: What would it look like for our communities, institutions, and systems to prioritize expanding real choices for everyone—not just removing barriers, but actively creating conditions where people can live, grow, and thrive with dignity?