As we stand at the threshold of a new year, I want to offer a reflection and an orientation rather than an announcement—one that has been shaping my thinking across philanthropy, social movements, environmental work, and cross-sector collaboration.

This reflection comes from an unexpected but grounding place. The other day, I gathered the first harvest of tobacco leaves from this season and began the process of drying them for ceremonial use. Here in California, you can grow tobacco year round. As I cut through the crispy yet soft branches, I noticed that it had been a while since I slowed down enough to commune with their medicine.

The work many of us are engaged in is moving faster than meaning can hold. It has become a luxury to take the time to plant, tend, and harvest—to slow down enough to process what is happening to us and around us.

Across our fields, people are working beyond full capacity—funding, organizing, innovating, responding—yet fragmentation, backlash, and cascading crises continue to intensify. Environmental disruption, migration, institutional mistrust, and political volatility are no longer separate challenges. They are interacting across sectors, across the hemisphere, and across time. The limiting factor is no longer effort or expertise. It is our shared capacity to interpret reality together across sectors.

Cross-sector organizing is needed now more than ever in the face of these cascading, interconnecting, hemispheric crises. Yet our sectors were not designed to be mutually intelligible. Government, philanthropy, markets, movements, and academia evolved with different logics, timelines, accountabilities, and definitions of legitimacy. Most existing cross-sector frameworks function only under conditions of relative stability and rely heavily on personalities, informal trust, or power asymmetries that remain largely unaddressed.

As environmental stress intensifies, these limits are becoming visible. Climate disruption does not arrive as a “sectoral” problem. It simultaneously affects food systems, housing and migration, finance and insurance, labor markets, public health, governance legitimacy, and cultural meaning. Each sector may be acting rationally within its own frame—and still be collectively incoherent.

When sectors cannot read one another’s logics, constraints, and forms of knowledge, stress does not integrate—it multiplies. Policies become technically sound but socially illegible. Philanthropic investments succeed locally but fail to consolidate systemically. Movements generate insight that institutions cannot absorb. Environmental data accumulates without producing shared action. Crisis response accelerates urgency while degrading trust.

In the Americas, this fragmentation is compounded by hemispheric asymmetry. Decisions made in one part of the hemisphere routinely externalize environmental harm elsewhere, displace labor and communities across borders, and generate adaptation costs that surface in entirely different sectors. When this misreading persists, environmental stress becomes a driver of instability rather than coordinated adaptation.

This is the deeper condition that The Creation of Coherence Across the Americas and Working Together Across Time were written to address—and it is part of a larger body of work that now functions as a canon, not in the sense of hierarchy or completion, but as a navigational field.

I’m sharing the Poetic Futurism Canon: A Field-Based Reading Guide as a way to make that navigation more visible. Readers are invited to begin wherever coherence feels most under pressure.

CONDITIONS OF RUPTURE
• Love Politics — relational diagnosis
• The Creation of Coherence Across the Americas (also in Spanish)— hemispheric architecture
• Terrenales (in Spanish and English)— lineage, time, and responsibility
• *What You Are Asked to Carry *(also in Spanish) — witness of human cost

COHERENCE CARRIED
• Poetic Futurism (also in Spanish)— foundational framework
• Poetic Futurism: Leadership and Identity — leadership capacity
• *Creating Coherence: Poetic Futurism and Community Organizing *(also in Spanish) — movement grounding
• Working Together Across Time (also in Spanish)— continuity and exit ethics

SYSTEMS UNDER PRESSURE
• Poetic Futurism and Governance (also in Spanish)— public systems translation
• When Institutions Meet Communities (also in Spanish)— applied institutional ethics
• After the Academy — post-institutional knowledge
• AI, Institutions, and Poetic Futurism — acceleration hinge

This canon is navigational, not sequential. It was not written to be consumed quickly or mastered.
It was written to be returned to, entered from different angles, and used as an interpretive support when familiar frameworks stop working.

I also want to share that most of these titles are now available in Spanish, and that all of this work is being shared freely. Making the canon accessible across language and geography has been an important part of the project, particularly given the hemispheric conditions the work is addressing. If for some reason you cannot get the text that you want, reach out and we will get it to you via email. Also please check back to our page as more refined versions of the texts are about to be published.

In response to interest from many of you, we are also opening Poetic Futurism reading groups. If you are interested in participating, please use the reading group interest form to sign up. We will be reaching out next week with three possible dates for the first set of conversations. So far, we’ve heard from people interested in joining from California all the way to the UK, and we’re shaping the groups with that range in mind.

For those working across philanthropy, movements, government, business, academia, and civil society, this matters because cross-sector collaboration increasingly fails not at the level of goodwill, but at the level of interpretability. Without shared meaning architecture, alignment remains brittle and short-lived, especially under environmental stress.

As the year begins, my hope is that this map helps you locate yourself more clearly—whether you are working inside institutions, alongside communities, across movements, or in the quiet work of holding continuity where it is least visible.