Create The Future seeks mini-sponsorship from climate conscious partners

Monday, 4th October 2021

Today, brand new future-facing anthology project Create The Future has put out a call for corporate ‘mini-sponsorship’ in the form of two very small but highly impactful grants to enable the anthology project to go ahead.

The request mini-grants have a combined value of less than £200 but would have a huge impact on the small and fully voluntary team running the competition, workshops and interview process from home.

Books have helped us to easily imagine futuristic, technology-driven worlds as well as dystopian dictatorships – so what if we could use fiction to help us imagine a clear path to climate justice, too?

That’s the question that sparked Create The Future, the anthology that aims to give creative writers a seat at the climate change table, and to acknowledge the powerful role that culture plays in enabling societal change. Fiction not only encourages a suspension of belief that helps readers to be able to imagine how their own lives might change when we build a better future, but it also encourages empathy, meaning we can feature a wide range of voices and encourage connection across socioeconomic and geographic boundaries.

The visionary short stories and poems chosen through a global writing competition will help readers to imagine what the future of our planet could be like, while the intermingling of factual interviews with climate leaders and changemakers will tell us how we get there.

The project Founder said: “The anthology is unique in that we don’t just want to tell the story of climate change and give creative writers a more prominent voice. We want to focus on the future and the possibilities it holds, changing the narrative to one of hope and creativity rather than fear and destruction. However, we’re a tiny team with an even smaller budget – and we know that there are organisations out there who would like to support our message.”

To support the climate writing competition, interviews and social media curation, Create The Future is now seeking a climate-conscious and ethical partner organisation to ‘sponsor’ one of two possible project-changing tools:

• A Zoom Pro membership for 6 months (£72) to allow us to host writing workshops online for longer than 40 mins and to reach a wider range of people with social media streaming and live transcription so we can also enable Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to attend. Zoom Pro would also help us to run longer-lasting professional interviews with innovative climate leaders, changemakers and writers and to be able to talk in our team meetings without rushing to stay within the 40-minute free plan limit. It would also allow us to host a launch event at the end of the anthology project and to invite all shortlisted writers to speak / read their work aloud to the audience, to celebrate their hard work and skill.
• A Canva Pro membership for 1 year (£99) to help us with creating social media content to advertise the anthology project and reach a wide range of people, and to help us design and edit graphics to be used within the finished anthology. All of the team work or study full-time outside of working for Create The Future and the time saved through the Canva Pro tools would make a huge difference to what we can achieve.

Sponsors would be offered the chance to take part in an interview, write a guest blog, and be acknowledged as an official sponsor both on the website and in the completed anthology. Further requests will also be considered.

Any interested parties should contact Emma: emma@createthefuture.earth as soon as possible for more information.