Building the Conditions for Communities to Thrive: Toward a Just and Regenerative Future

Ksenia Benifand is Associate Director, Americas at Forum for the Future, and a systems change designer, futurist, and strategic foresight expert. She works at the intersection of climate justice, health, and equitable, regenerative systems. In this article, she reflects on America's 250th anniversary as an opportunity to reimagine what it means for communities to thrive, exploring how climate resilience, community leadership, and shared responsibility can help shape a more just and regenerative future.

Commodity supply chains like coffee, cocoa, cotton are under unprecedented pressure. Price volatility, climate and conflict disruption, and regulatory change are exposing a system built for cost, not resilience. Good intentions and sustainability initiatives exist, but they remain fragmented, siloed and unscaled. In this piece, Neil Walker of Forum for the Future argues that overcoming these barriers requires borrowing from design thinking: running structured experiments, building cross-functional ownership, and creating genuinely shared spaces for learning. 

As the United States marks it's 250th anniversary, we have a unique opportunity to reflect honestly on the country’s founding ideals and the future we want to intentionally shape. 

As a relatively recent newcomer to the United States, I’ve spent the years since I moved here deepening my understanding of this country including its founding ideals, its contradictions, its complexity, and the many different ways people have shaped, challenged, and expanded the American promise over time. 

I have also come to appreciate the extraordinary diversity that defines this country: diversity of thought, nationality, culture, gender, relationships to land, literature, art, lived experience, and ways of imagining what a good life can be, and how we get there.  

I often wonder what the founders would make of the world we now inhabit: a country transformed by industrial progress, scientific discovery, technological power, and the extraordinary capacity of people to innovate, build, and connect. 

They could not have foreseen the profound effects human activity would have on the climate and the living systems we all depend on. But the Declaration’s central promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness offers a way to think about what it will take to thrive in the centuries ahead. 

In a climate-changed future, those ideals are not abstract. Life depends on clean air, safe housing, nourishing food, clean water, and protection from extreme heat, storms, floods, and pollution. Liberty depends on people having the resources, voice, and agency to shape the decisions that affect their communities. And the pursuit of happiness depends not only on avoiding harm, but on creating conditions for families, workers, businesses, ecosystems, and local economies to flourish. 

At a time when climate action is too often narrowed, politicized, or pushed to the margins, we need a clearer reminder of why it matters: because climate is already connected to the daily realities that shape health, safety, economic security, and the ability of communities to thrive. In fact, majority of Americans accept that climate change is happening, nearly two-thirds are at least somewhat worried about it, and a significant majority believe it will harm future generations and our health and wellbeing.  

And the impacts of climate change don’t land equally. They are shaped by long-standing patterns of environmental injustice, disinvestment, exclusion, and unequal access to resources and decision-making. Communities that have contributed least to the problem are often more exposed to its harm and have fewer resources to adapt, recover, and shape the decisions that affect them.  

As a parent of a young child born and raised in the U.S., I experience this personally. The future is not an abstract idea. It is the air our children will breathe, the communities they will grow up in, the weather they will come to know as normal, and the kind of country we will leave for them. That is one reason this work matters so deeply to me.  

At Forum for the Future, we use futures as a powerful tool to help people look beyond single issues and see the wider systems shaping our lives. Our work is guided by a just and regenerative approach: one that asks us to focus on the conditions that allow people and living systems to adapt and thrive. It also asks us to value history, context, and lived experience, and to make space for people to shape the futures that affect them. 

So, as we look forward to the next 250 years in America, we need to ask: what conditions would allow communities to thrive in a climate-changed future? 

Instead of focusing only on vulnerability, can we ask: what knowledge, leadership, culture, care, and creativity already exist in communities? 

Instead of designing solutions for people, can we ask: what would it take to build solutions together? 

Communities are not homogenous. Their histories, cultures, geographies, relationships to land, and visions for the future are different, and climate action must make space for that difference. 

Across Forum’s work, we see the same lesson repeatedly:  

  • In our climate and health work, addressing climate impacts on population health means looking beyond traditional healthcare to the conditions that shape wellbeing: nutritious food, clean air and water, safe and affordable housing with access to cooling, resilient infrastructure, dignified work, and the resources people need to prepare for and recover from climate impacts. 

  • In our regenerative agriculture work, it means seeing farming not only as practices and technologies, but as land, livelihoods, farmer and farmworker wellbeing, nutrition, biodiversity, regional economies, and justice. 

  • And in our renewable energy transition work, it means recognizing that the shift to clean energy is not only about technology or infrastructure. It is also about energy access, community resilience, trust, local ownership, and ensuring that the transition does not reproduce extractive models but instead creates shared benefits with the communities most affected. 

The visions already exist. The work now is to listen, invest, share decision-making, and help make them real. 

America’s 250th anniversary gives us a moment to ask better questions.  What kind of future are communities already imagining? What would it take for those futures to become real? And what must shift — in power, investment, policy, business practice, and public imagination — to make that possible? 

The founders helped articulate what America aspired to stand for. But it is our communities who will shape what America becomes next. 

For businesses, philanthropy, government, and civil society, this creates both responsibility and opportunity. The role of institutions is not simply to communicate concern or deliver solutions from the outside. It is to show up differently: to listen before acting, support community-defined priorities, invest in local capacity, address harms, share benefits, and be accountable for the impacts of decisions. 

The answers will not come from one institution, one sector, or one national narrative. They will come from the many people and communities already living with climate impacts, already caring for one another, and already imagining a better future. 

The work now is to help make those futures real. 

If this resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you.

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