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In the midst of the world’s upheavals, are you looking for a more positive and effective way forward
– for yourself and for the world?

Join us in this innovative program developed by Dr Robert Gilman, former astrophysicist and long-time sustainability thought-leader, that provides you with the frameworksskillsexperiences and community to start living a bright future now and become a potent contributor to the emergence of the world’s bright future.

At its heart, Bright Future Now is a pathway to expanding your capacity to make positive change at all levels – from personal to global – and to spend more time living in harmony within yourself, with others and with nature.

Discover your way forward through this highly-interactive, experience-based journey to the future that’s…

Transformative

See yourself and the world with fresh eyes ~ Find root causes and leverage points for change ~ Expand your experience of the brighter future that’s already emerging.

Learn more about the
CONTENT

Practical

Increase your capacity to accelerate the positive shifts the world needs ~ Learn simple yet powerful tools and skills to do so ~ Expand your compassion, confidence and hope.

Learn more about the
PROCESS

Collaborative

Multiply your impact for the work that matters most to you ~ Connect with like-hearted people worldwide ~ Gain inspiration and support as part of the Bright Future Network.

Learn more about the
NETWORK

This eight-week learning adventure may be unlike any learning program you’ve ever experienced. It’s all about opportunities, not requirements. There are no tests, nothing to hand in, no external standard to meet.

Each person’s path through the program is unique. You focus on what feels valuable to you and take whatever helps you grow. After 360 participants, we can say it meets you where you are and helps you go further, whatever your background or previous experience. And later, if you want to go deeper still, the material is always available to you. Some of our graduates describe it as time-release medicine.

Then, at the end of eight weeks, you take your personal learnings, the relationships you’ve built, the language and experiences you’ve shared into the even more generative and collaborative setting of the Bright Future Network.

Orientation and self-study begin as soon as you register.
The experiential and group-interactive part of the program
runs May 4 – Jun 29, 2024.

$595 Early-Bird registration ends Mar 30, 2024.
$695 Regular registration ends Apr 13, 2024.

Your registration fee provides you with both the course
and the opportunity to join the Bright Future Network.

If you take the course with one or more co-workers, housemates or friends the group rate registration is $550 per person ~ We have a payment plan (on the registration form) that enables you to spread the cost over as many as 8 months ~ If you feel you need financial assistance beyond these options, you can apply for financial aid.

Money-back Guarantee – If at any time up through the third week of the main program you decide this course is not for you, we will happily refund your registration fee in full.

Course graduates share their experience

(You might also enjoy this page with video testimonials.)

FAQs

We speak about a “bright future” as an opportunity, not as a prediction. If it happens, it will be because humanity – all of us – have created it. We’re working to tip the balance in favor of that outcome.

Context Institute has been studying the state of the world and strategies for cultural change for over 40 years. You can see the breadth of territory we covered in the over 900 In Context articles we produced decades ago.

Based on all that study and active participation, we’ve come to deeply understand that action motivated by panic, fear, reaction and anger generally produces poor results while action that springs from genuine love and creativity is much more successful and enduring.

We care deeply about the results, so we’ve developed pathways to powerful sustainable action that taps our deep wells of love and creativity and enables us to more effectively address the world’s crises.

The Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” We’ve come to see, embedded in the world’s crises, enormous but largely unappreciated opportunities for humanity and the Earth. We are then able to see, based on experience and solid data, today’s crises more as birth pains than as death throes.

We were well ahead of the times 40 years ago when we started to explore the prospects for humane and sustainable cultures. We feel we are equally ahead of the times now. Join us and discover life beyond the despair, discouragement and disempowerment that is so common these days.

It varies from person to person. We estimate generally a total of 7 to 10 hours per week of flexible time – less time than many people spend on social media each week. 

The course is designed to fit into the lives of busy people. It works best when you carry the concepts and experiences from the course into your daily life. It this sense, it’s more a matter of mental bandwidth than of minutes. (See the Process page for more details.)

That depends on the group, especially their time zones. If we have participants from east of North America (Europe/Africa/Middle East) and west of North America (Asia/Australia/New Zealand), we often have one meeting in the late afternoon on Saturday, Pacific Time, and the other late Sunday morning, Pacific Time.

Since each group is different, we always involve the group in deciding the times.

You start with an Orientation Call – a video call using Zoom, which is our interactive platform. That call connects you to one of the program guides and, among other things, introduces you to our online forum.

Your next activity is to post your self-introduction and photo to the forum so the group can start to know itself and form well before the first weekend meeting. This leads to still more forum activity.

We also encourage you to watch the following publicly-available presentation videos:

The course is quite different in style from, but complementary to, the presentations. Each without the other is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping.

Then, in the last two weeks before the first weekend meeting, your ally will reach out to connect with you. You’ll also schedule your first triad meeting and help set the times for the weekend meetings.

The metaphor of an adventurous journey gives a much better sense of what Bright Future Now actually feels like than simply thinking of it as a “course.”

It a special kind of adventure where we journey to a future culture, the Planetary Era, rather than to an exotic place on the planet. You don’t have to go anywhere physically but you are invited to go to new places in your awareness.

The focus is on your experience, not meeting some external standard. There are no tests and no written assignments. It’s deep, powerful work yet we have fun along the way.

Your journey has Guides, who introduce you to different parts of a future mind-set, skill-set and consciousness. Each week focuses on a different area and each weekday you explore a new territory looking for fresh experiences and insights.

You do your daily exploration on your own, but you share with your companions, your fellow Explorers, through Triad meet-ups and weekend group meetings. Your fellow Explorers are all ages and come from all parts of the world and a wide variety of backgrounds.

You also have the on-call and weekly check-in assistance of your Ally, an Explorer from an earlier journey who has volunteered to befriend you in your explorations of the mind-set, skill-set and consciousness of the Planetary Era.

This journey is immensely practical. You’ll be able to apply the treasures and tools you find along this journey in crucial areas of your daily life – professional as well as personal – during the very same week that you discover them. No need to wait to integrate the awareness gained and the lessons learned into all levels of your life.

As you would with a physical adventure journey, you have preparations to do in the weeks before the actual travel begins. You don’t need to get a passport or airplane tickets, but you do need to orient yourself to the territory and you need to make sure, with our help, that your adventure gear (for video calls) is in good working order.

The journey continues after the 7 weeks of the guided part. As a graduate Explorer, you join other graduate Explorers in the Bright Future Network where you continue, in self-organized ways, to explore (and create!) the territory of the Planetary Era.

Yes. We offer this course every three months, starting in early January, April, July and October.

About Robert Gilman

The Bright Future program was developed by Dr. Robert Gilman. Trained as an astrophysicist, Robert decided in the mid-1970s that “the stars could wait, but the planet couldn’t.” He then turned his attention to the study of global sustainability, futures research, and strategies for positive cultural change.

His on-the-ground sustainability efforts have included co-founding the Context Institute, creating and editing the award-winning In Context, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, co-founding the Global Ecovillage Network, doing Citizen Diplomacy with the former USSR, serving as a City Councilman in Langley, Washington, and working with the American Institute of Architects on issues regarding sustainability and the built environment. 

You’ll be working with Robert and other team members during the course and in the Bright Future Network.

You can get a feeling for his wide-ranging, whole-person, whole-system approach via this presentation for The Stoa. (The full video including 35 minutes of Q&A is available on Vimeo.)