Overview
To dream is to expand what is possible. To dream is to build new worlds, now and for our collective futures.
Girls and young feminists are daring to imagine worlds where everyone thrives and belongs. Even amid deep injustice and inequality, they are transforming their communities and systems, actively building lives rooted in dignity, freedom, and justice. ​
The Dreaming & Worldbuilding publication traces the visions, practices, and insights that emerged from girls and young feminists who participated in the Dreaming and Worldbuilding Game across multiple countries. It offers a window into dreaming as a transformative practice and lays out clear calls to action for funders to resource it as essential pathways to systemic change.
Why Now: Dreaming as a Political Act
Dreaming expands what is possible. Worldbuilding brings it to life.
Dreaming is how change happens. It is a practice of transformation; it widens the horizon of what is possible, and helps us envision more just and life-affirming futures.
Dreaming is both a strategy of resistance and a source of hope, challenging and refusing to normalize injustice. To dream is to break beyond the ways in which systemic oppression actively constrains imagination and concentrates power and resources in the hands of a few.
Girls and young feminists are teaching us that dreaming is not simply hope for a better future, but a demand of their right to shape the world itself. Their dreams are visionary and tangible, already guiding the path towards abundance, solidarity, and new possibilities.
Dive into the themes of the worlds that girls and young feminists are dreaming and building…
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1. Freedom, Safety & Belonging: A world that feels like a hug
The presence of safety, the deepest sense of belonging, and the right to take up space without apology. Freedom, safety and belonging are the conditions that make all other dreaming possible.
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2. Mutuality, Care & Shared Wellbeing: We see each other and help each other
Worlds sustained through mutual responsibility, shared abundance, and collective wellbeing. Care is not a private burden, an act of charity or reserved for few who can afford it: it is the operating system of society.
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3. Freedom to Express, Question, and Be Curious: A world that is patient enough to reach the truth
Freedom to think, wonder, rebel, and speak the truth. Expression is unpoliced, questions are welcomed, and curiosity is a form of power rather than a threat. Worlds where people pause, think, and look beneath the surface.
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4. Connection to Land, Nature & Ecological Harmony: A world of regeneration
Worlds that honor the land, the sky, the water, and the creatures with whom we share life. Nature as a relationship to be tended to, not a resource to be extracted. Environments that breathe, regenerate, and hold us.
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5. Reclaiming Joy, Rest, and Play:Time is not a race – it is a rhythm
Worlds where time moves gently, and where rest, joy, and play shape the cadence of life. Pleasure and rest are not seen as distractions from a meaningful life, but are the substance of a meaningful life.
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6. Art and Sensory Worlds: The beauty of life
Art, beauty and sensory experience as core components of healthy societies, challenging paradigms that treat the arts as non-essential, secondary, or reserved for those with wealth. Creativity supports communities in teaching, healing, governing, and remembering.
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7. Leadership, Agency & Shared Power: Leading as responsibility
Worlds where power is reconfigured, not as dominance or hierarchy, but as shared responsibility, ethical guidance, and collective decision-making. Leadership is deeply relational, distributed and collective.
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8. Justice, Systems & Structural Fairness: A world with abundance for all
Worlds built on fairness, equal access, and dignity in daily life. Everyone has enough, power is shared, and no one thrives at another’s expense. Worlds where everyone can live with dignity, without fear, and without scarcity.
Calls to Action for Funders
Imagine a world rooted in our collective dignity, freedom, and justice? What would it look like, feel like, sound like? What would be possible if we invested in those already creating that future?
Girls and young feminists are already shaping life-affirming realities for themselves, their communities, and for all of us. Their dreaming is not an escape from the world as it is, but a demand to remake it.
This is an invitation to invest in futures already taking shape. When resourced with trust and flexibility, girls’ and young feminists’ dreaming and worldbuilding transform systems and expand what is possible for everyone.
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Funders can choose to support this visionary work. This includes:
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Investing in spaces for dreaming, care, joy, experimentation, and radical imagination
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Trusting, funding, and supporting girls’ and young feminists’ leadership through sustained, flexible resourcing
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Recognizing girls and young feminists as cross-movement leaders and supporting intersectional work
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Embracing liberatory practices and emergent learning by rethinking conventional approaches to monitoring, learning, and evaluation
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Funding opportunities for long-term economic self-determination
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Leveraging resources and influence to mobilize additional funding towards dreaming and worldbuilding
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Participating in collective learning and practice to become resource stewards (learn more about the Game!)
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The future is shaped by what we choose to resource. Join us in building it.
Reflections from facilitators
Dreaming and Worldbuilding game facilitators accompany girls and young feminists in spaces of imagination, resistance, and collective creation. Their insights and reflections offer important learnings from practices of holding and guiding spaces for girls to dream and articulate the worlds they are building.
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The facilitators reflect on how accompanying girls in dreaming and worldbuilding disrupts their own assumptions, loosens adult-centered hierarchies, and revives their own capacity to imagine collectively.
They highlight the transformative possibilities that emerge when girls’ and young feminists’ dreams are held, shared, and built collectively.
Acknowledgements
With deep gratitude to all of the girls and young feminists who participated in the sessions of the Dreaming and Worldbuilding Game across Argentina, India, Jordan, Kenya, Romania, Tanzania, the United States, and multi-regional sessions, whose radical imagination, dreams, insights, resistance and worldbuilding form the foundation of this collective body of work.
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We are also deeply grateful to the feminist facilitators and allies who accompanied these spaces of collaborative, intergenerational creation and learning, including those who have contributed their reflections to this report: Asha Athman, Augustina Mihaela Vasile, Banan AbuZainEddin, Gabrielle Bailey, Jimena Alejandra Aon, Juliana Roman Lozano, Kruthika NS, Nyawira Wahito, Priyanka Samy, Purity Kagwiria, and Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli.
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Publication text by: Majandra Rodriguez Acha, Jody Myrum, and Laura V.
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Illustrations by: Ayleen Mayte Diaz Rivera
