Imagining Otherwise
Imagining Otherwise is a youth-led participatory arts program that explores how we can reimagine the systems shaping our communities -- from care and climate to belonging and justice. Through creative practice, dialogue, and collective world-building, we explored new ways of living, leading, and creating community, collectively building the confidence and tools to shape more equitable futures together.
This program ran from December 2025 to March 2026.
What Emerged When We Made Space
Imagination as Civic Practice
Imagining Otherwise brought together a cohort of 12 youth to explore civic imagination as both a creative and political practice. In a time shaped by uncertainty and overlapping crises, we gathered to reflect on belonging, systems of power, and the futures we inherit -- and those we hope to build. Through dialogue, storytelling, and collective inquiry, the program created space to slow down, listen deeply, and ask: "What becomes possible when we imagine otherwise, together?"
From Reflection to Creation
Across workshops, youth engaged with systems thinking and creative world-building to better understand how social, environmental, and economic forces shape everyday life. We moved between critique and possibility, naming the challenges of the present while experimenting with new ways of seeing and relating. Imagination became not an abstract exercise, but a grounded, shared practice rooted in lived experience, curiosity, and care.
Building Skills, Confidence, and Voice
Along the way, youth developed skills in creative facilitation, collaborative design, and policy literacy. They practiced translating complex ideas into tangible expressions, learning how to move from reflection to articulation, and from imagination toward action. Many participants shared a growing sense of confidence: in voicing their perspectives, one engaging with others, and in seeing themselves as active contributors to conversations about community and change.
What We Created Together
The process gave rise to a range of collective and individual works, including zines, a futures tapestry, visual pieces, and interactive installations. These creations do not offer fixed answers; instead, they hold questions about care, justice, sustainability, and possibility. They are invitations into dialogue, into reflection, and into the practice of imagining beyond what currently exists.
An Ongoing Practice
The Community Conversation Café (March 14, 2026) marked a meaningful moment of sharing, bringing together over 50 community members to engage with these works and with one another. Yet the spirit of Imagining Otherwise extends beyond a single program or event. It lives on in the relationships formed, the ideas sparked, and the projects beginning to take shape.
Because imagining otherwise is not a one-time act.
It is a practice.
It is a way of being in relationship with each other and the world.
And it is something we continue to build -- together.
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Partners
Imagining Otherwise would not have been possible without the generous support from the Youth Social Development grant of the Social Planning Council of Ottawa, Luc Lalande and the team at the Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Resource Centre, The Grove, and Rae Landriau, Michaela Norgren, and Yvvana Yeboah, the youth leaders who facilitated IO's artful workshops.