COMMENTARY
Meeting the Moment with Bolder Futures
By Karthick Ramakrishnan
February 27, 2026
Disorientation, disillusionment, and despair.
These were dominant feelings in 2025 for millions of Americans who had devoted their lives and careers to building sustainable, inclusive, and vibrant communities. As long-standing norms, laws, and even institutions buckled in the face of withering attacks, many resigned themselves to salvaging what they could. Many others simply resigned.
A new year, however, brings new possibilities.
Instead of scrambling to protect the old order—one that in many instances wasn’t working for our communities—it is time for us to build anew. Building anew does not mean that we should discard everything from the past. It does mean, however, that we need to shift our mindsets or mental models, as the FSG framework for systems transformation demonstrates so elegantly and powerfully.
Over the past decade, I have had the good fortune of building AAPI Data as a powerful resource for those who care about our communities. I have also valued the opportunity to advance social impact more broadly through the Center for Social Innovation at UC Riverside and the statewide California 100 Initiative through UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Through this social innovation work, I have also learned a tremendous amount about strategic foresight, which can be described as an advanced form of strategic planning, producing positive outcomes even under conditions of disruptive change, including high uncertainty and massive volatility. There are many ways to practice foresight, which involve some mix of design thinking, creative imagination, and strategic calculation.
Community-engaged foresight can be grouped under two main types: aspirational futures, which entails imagining and building the worlds we want to see, and disruptive futures, which involves anticipating and adapting to undesirable or unpredictable future scenarios. As we are now increasingly aware, it is important for our communities to be engaged in both types of futures-oriented activities.
Building Bolder Futures
I am excited to announce that this spring, Bolder Futures will launch as a companion effort to AAPI Data that leans more strongly into the “Action” part of AAPI Data’s DNA: Data, Narrative, Action framework.
Major projects in this new initiative include:
- The Bolder Futures Fellowship (BFF) program, which we started in fall 2025 to support social innovation and entrepreneurship among next-gen leaders looking to build inclusive and vibrant communities, and which we will continue in 2026 by focusing on harnessing “AI for Social Good” by supporting smaller nonprofits as well as graduating students and early-career professionals.
- The Youth and Bolder Futures Summit, which empowers young leaders and builds more meaningful intergenerational commitments, enabling our communities to envision and build a dramatically better future.
- Social impact startups that we have had the opportunity to incubate, including RaceDataViz, an innovative platform to help data designers advance racial justice; Rooted Strength, a youth wellness program that draws on traditional practices like Yoga and Ayurveda to address mental health challenges and build resilience and strength; and Gaming For Our Future, a social impact accelerator that leverages the power of games to support a more prosocial mindset for future generations.
- Advisory services to help our communities—including grantmakers, nonprofit organizations, and community collaboratives—get better at advancing bolder futures under conditions of massive disruption.
In its first year, Bolder Futures will lean more heavily into the aspirational aspects of futures work. Its three main pillars—collective visioning, intergenerational collaboration, and social innovation—are all interconnected and build upon one another.
By engaging in collective visioning, we can move beyond perceived divides and identify shared values and goals. Visioning allows us to work together across generations and to understand that we are stronger when we work together. This intergenerational collaboration also facilitates transformation and innovation. By working boldly and intergenerationally, we can harness the true strength of our communities and tap into wells of social innovation and entrepreneurship.
Disruptive Futures: A Rupture, Not a Transition
Even as we keep our focus on aspirational futures, Bolder Futures is also working to strengthen our partners’ ability to anticipate and adapt to disruptive conditions, including scenarios that are unexpected or undesirable.
One of the fundamental mindset shifts we need to make in disruptive futures work is to understand that our current predicament is a “rupture, not a transition.” This is the core concept that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out in his 2026 speech at Davos. (Carney’s remarks are worth reading or watching in full; while he spoke primarily about middle powers in a new global order, his calls for increasing the “power of the less powerful” are also relevant for marginalized groups within democratic countries).
Ruptures can be difficult to comprehend, especially when those in power can abruptly change the rules of the game. The expression of “moving the goalposts” is familiar to many of us. It encapsulates both the uncertainty and the unfairness of changing the rules in the middle of a game. Just as a rupture is more sudden and dramatic than a transition, our mental models for understanding ruptures also need to change.
Extending the sports analogy: while a transition might be seen as shifting what it takes to win, a rupture must be understood as changing the game in a more fundamental way, including its core rules, forms, and norms. More dramatic than moving the goalposts, a rupture would be akin to switching from playing flag football to playing tackle football in the middle of the first quarter.
The Necessary Changes Ahead
We need to expand our imagination of what is possible. We need to move from being reactive to being anticipatory, and from being defensive to being bold and audacious.
While the work of Bolder Futures may seem unconventional, it is precisely the approach we need now, given the challenging and uncertain nature of our times.
We need to continue to dream, and to enact, more hopeful visions for our communities. We need to expand our imagination of what is possible. We need to move from being reactive to being anticipatory, and from being defensive to being bold and audacious.
We also need to hold onto seemingly contradictory impulses. To toggle between the immediate and the long-term. To be aspirational and pragmatic. To work with young people as well as elders, and to seriously consider the needs of generations not yet born. To dream and to do.
Bolder Futures is about supporting the next generation of “dreamers and doers” who will change the world for the better. We look forward to partnering with Bolder Futures to make this happen.
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Karthick Ramakrishnan is the founder and executive director of AAPI Data.