Community leaders, social workers, and NGO executives from across the Paarl Valley gathered at MCM’s Tiffany’s Community Centre last week for a groundbreaking two-day workshop that challenged conventional thinking about social care and community support.

The event, titled “The Future of Care in the Paarl Valley,” took place on 23–24 October and brought together about 40 participants to explore how communities imagine and shape their approaches to compassion and social intervention.

Led by Dr. Riel Miller, a renowned futurist with over four decades of experience in futures studies, the workshop introduced participants to the concept of “futures literacy” – a framework for understanding how people use their imagination to anticipate and respond to change.

Understanding futures literacy

Dr. Miller explained that everyone uses the future constantly, from looking for cars before crossing the street to planning long-term goals, and that the future can only be imaginary. The critical question, he suggested, is understanding where that imagination comes from and why people imagine in particular ways.

Futures literacy helps people distinguish between probable futures and desirable futures, though many don’t separate these concepts clearly due to various inhibitions, including deference to expert opinion and fear of disappointment.

“Just as we encourage everyone to learn to read and write because it opens up worlds of possibility, everyone can and should learn to be futures literate,” Dr. Miller said during the event.

The discipline draws on relatively recent developments in relational biology, particularly the work of mathematician-biologist Robert Rosen, who identified anticipation as a crucial component of all living organisms.

A sector under pressure

The workshop addressed urgent challenges facing the care sector in South Africa. According to dr. Yolande Steenkamp from Hugenote Kollege, one of the event’s organisers, the survival of NGOs, which play an indispensable role in communities, is under serious threat due to economic pressures and other factors.

Rather than focusing narrowly on organisational survival, organisers chose the broader theme of “the future of care” to help participants explore their imagination more effectively.

The event included a co-design phase beforehand and was deliberately held in a community space that isn’t typically a church or religious centre, which made a significant difference to the outcomes.

Practical applications

For organisations, futures literacy offers a competency-based rather than goal-based approach to thinking about the future, and when competencies change, the goals themselves can shift. Dr. Miller cited Shell Oil’s long-standing use of scenario processes as an example, noting that such approaches foster humility, equality, and more open communication within organisations.

Greater understanding of the relationship between planning and emergence, and between certainty, uncertainty, and risk, allows organisations to become more sophisticated, accumulate and curate their imaginaries more effectively, and be less surprised by change.

A unique gathering

Dr. Miller observed that the group shared a foundation of belief related to caring, creating a less transactional environment than typically found in corporate or government settings. Participants included social workers, NGO chief executives working at grassroots level, and clergy members involved in care or diaconal work, many sharing a common faith framework.

Steenkamp emphasised that the greatest enemy of learning is the perception that “I know” or “I have the answer,” and that real learning requires an earthquake in conceptual frameworks. By the workshop’s conclusion, participants had moved from certainty to productive uncertainty, asking how they could learn more rather than returning to comfortable assumptions.

Intentional disorientation

Unlike traditional training courses that guide participants from orientation through disorientation to reorientation, futures labs intentionally leave participants in disorientation, opening things up and activating imagination.

Steenkamp described futures literacy as a competence or skill rather than fixed principles to memorise, comparing it to learning to read and write — it doesn’t mean you suddenly know everything, but you gain the ability to find information and keep learning.

The event was a collaborative effort between Hugenote Kollege, Future Africa at the University of Pretoria, MCM, and KC107.7. Future Africa operates as both a physical campus and a transdisciplinary network for research collaboration across the continent, and houses the Future Africa Futures Literacy Incubator.

Moving forward, there is now an opportunity for continued learning with community partners, firstly to understand how the community works, and secondly to develop the ability to use understanding of the future to live more intentionally in the present.

Organisers hope the approach pioneered in the Paarl Valley can be shared with other communities facing similar challenges, offering new perspectives through what Steenkamp described as “a new pair of glasses.”