The Future Is Already Here

Over three decades building and stewarding permanently affordable homes on Orcas Island. As of 2025, OPAL manages 75 rental units and is developing a new 20-home campus with $10.9M in state support.

As a Leadership San Juans project, Liz Smith started a Facebook group to help islanders learn to grow their own food. It grew to hundreds of participants, neighbors sharing advice, seeds, and encouragement. She also helped develop a community kitchen project with the San Juan Island Grange.

A small English town began planting food in every available public space, beside railway platforms, in front of the police station, along the canal, with a simple invitation: help yourself. Run entirely by volunteers with no paid staff and no public funding, Incredible Edible Todmorden has operated continuously since 2007 and inspired over 700 similar projects worldwide.

A mid-sized English city redirected its anchor institutions' purchasing toward local suppliers, established worker cooperatives, and built a community land trust, becoming one of the most cited examples of community wealth building in practice. The insight at the core of the Preston Model: anchor institutions (hospitals, universities, local government) always spend money. The question is where. Redirecting that spending locally is within any community's reach.

Founded in 1968 by Bill Strickland, Manchester Bidwell has spent five decades surrounding young people and displaced adults in Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood with beauty, natural light, art, and high standards, as a deliberate strategy for human renewal. Youth arts programs and employer-partnered adult career training operate from a purpose-built facility. Now replicated at 17 sites through the Strickland Global Leadership Institute.

A volunteer network collecting surplus food from restaurants and distributing it to communities experiencing food insecurity. It operates entirely on volunteer labor with no staff budget, built on the simplicity of the model itself. Founded in New Delhi and active in more than 15 countries.

Patagonia operates the largest repair facility in North America, repairing approximately 50,000 garments per year and running Worn Wear mobile repair events globally. In 2022, founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective, with all profits not reinvested dedicated to fighting climate change and protecting nature. These are two distinct stories: repair as a business model, and corporate ownership as a model for mission-driven stewardship.

The Brixton Pound (2008 to 2021 and beyond) pioneered local complementary currency in London, accepted at hundreds of local shops and cafés, and including electronic and mobile payment options ahead of mainstream banking. It distributed thousands of pounds to local social causes through community voting. The currency's story demonstrates what community currency can achieve and what sustains or challenges it. The Brixton Pound is in governance transition.

When the pandemic shuttered restaurants and farmers' markets in 2020, the Food Hub pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales connecting island farmers and food producers to neighbors across three islands. In one week during the height of the crisis, the Hub filled 70 orders worth $5,000 in groceries, with 70% of sales reaching outside Friday Harbor.

In August 2003, Navigating Our Future built an exhibit at the San Juan County Fair showing working sustainable practices already present in the islands: Andrew Bauer's backyard biodiesel made from restaurant fryer oil, Liz and Ron Keeshan's solar-net-metered home, straw bale construction, and hybrid vehicles. Over 21,000 people attended the Fair. This is the earliest documented version of what this library continues.

A structured program where small groups of neighbors work through a practical workbook together, making concrete changes in energy use, transport, food, and water, and supporting each other in doing so. Documented pilots have shown measurable household savings in carbon, energy, and cost. One of the few Transition-adjacent initiatives with independently verified quantitative outcomes.

Cities are developing city portraits using Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics framework, mapping their performance against both a social foundation (meeting human needs) and an ecological ceiling (staying within planetary limits). The Amsterdam city portrait is the most thoroughly documented example, now used by multiple cities as a community dialogue and policy tool.

Children of the Setting Sun is a Coast Salish-rooted organization in Bellingham producing films, podcasts, education programs, research, and community gatherings sharing Indigenous stories, history, and ecological relationship. Its work is explicitly organized around fulfilling responsibilities to ancestors, educating one another in a better way of being together, and building a Culture of Gratitude for future generations. Setting Sun Circle is a 17,000-square-foot immersive storytelling and cultural center currently in development in downtown Bellingham.

A radically decentralized healthcare organization in which small teams of 10 to 12 nurses manage their own patients, schedules, and coordination without middle management, producing better patient outcomes at lower cost than institutional care, with dramatically higher nurse satisfaction.

Project Drawdown modeled 100 existing, substantive solutions to climate change and found that, deployed at scale, they could eliminate more than a trillion tonnes of CO2 by 2050. Founded by Paul Hawken in 2013 and published in 2017, Drawdown provides a navigable inventory of what is already working across electricity, food, land use, buildings, transportation, and health.

The Family Resource Center has spent years doing whatever the community needed, food access, housing help, support for families, a sense of belonging for people who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Its framing, islanders helping islanders, peer support, mutual aid, people showing up for each other, is its real strength.

Free community gathering spaces where volunteers with repair skills help neighbors fix broken items, electronics, clothing, furniture, bicycles, toys, instead of discarding them. Founded in Amsterdam in 2009 by Martine Postma, Repair Café has become one of the most widely replicated community practices in the world, now operating in more than 40 countries.

One of the original nodes of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), Sustainable Connections has spent more than two decades building a regional community of local businesses, running a Think Local First campaign, and developing community energy programs in Bellingham, directly within LIFE's Cascadia Bioregion.

A network of worker-owned cooperatives, a commercial laundry, a greenhouse, and a solar installation company, developed in Cleveland's low-income neighborhoods, anchored by contracts with hospitals and universities that spend their purchasing power locally. Developed with support from the Democracy Collaborative.

A community-led participatory design project transforming degraded public spaces in one of Nairobi's largest informal settlements into productive community infrastructure, with recreation, food growing, drainage, and economic activity combined. Developed by the Kounkuey Design Initiative.

Interface Founder Ray Anderson launched Mission Zero in 1994, a 25-year commitment to eliminate the company's negative environmental impact. The company's modular carpet tile design allows worn sections to be replaced individually rather than replacing entire floors. Mission Zero was completed ahead of schedule in 2019, with independently verified results including a 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions globally. Interface is now pursuing Climate Take Back, a commitment to become carbon negative by 2040.

Architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart developed the Cradle to Cradle design framework: materials should be designed as either biological nutrients (safely returning to natural cycles) or technical nutrients (circulating indefinitely in industrial systems). Their founding collaboration produced Climatex Lifecycle, a textile made with Rohner Textile AG in Switzerland, whose manufacturing trimmings could be used as garden mulch and whose process water met Swiss drinking water standards. The Cradle to Cradle certification program now covers more than 8,000 products from 150+ companies.