One Future Post: On holding space for your community 🪴
Join us in the July 2025 edition of the One Future Post, where we explore ways to create joyful and productive community spaces!
Contents
Hello from Vandita 💌
This Month @ OFC 🗞️
Coming up! 🔜
Art and Action! 🖊️🔧
Get Involved ⚙️
Hello from Vandita 💌
What should shared spaces for communities look like?
In our last edition, I reflected on the need for communities and shared spaces to build and support the leadership capacities of new and seasoned leaders. As I welcome you to the July 2025 edition of One Future Post, I return to that thought after our mid-year break.
June was Pride month, and marked by convenings for us at OFC, amidst which I was reminded how complex the challenge can be ensuring that communities have safe, accessible and accountable spaces as they come together. Organising such spaces requires a deep understanding of the social and individual needs of those we are organising for. You may ask yourself - how can we make our spaces more physically accessible, psychologically safe, socially relevant, and most importantly, joyful, given the resources available? Are we including and centering our participants in our decision making process? What are our limitations, and how can we work around them? As facilitators and participants, it is important to engage critically with the convenings we are a part of, as well as the process by which they came to be.
P.S. I facilitate part of the One Future Fellowship, where we discuss how to build and support collectives. Apply today and become part of our latest cohort.
Love,
Vandita Morarka
Founder and CEO, One Future Collective
This Month @ OFC 🗞️
Belated Happy Pride, dear reader! The spirit of Pride is one celebrating and honouring community, culture and resistance. It is crucial that we mark it with a commitment to strengthening our capacities for action, joy and cross-movement solidarity as communities. We’re now back in office after a mid-year break in the last of June, but over the last month, we at One Future Collective had been hosting, organising and attending various convenings - big and small - that reinvigorated our Pride spirit!
First, we hosted the first offline OFC huddle of the year with our alumni community across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Organised as an intimate art-based reflection space, it encouraged participants to express and examine our collective rage, hope, and realities. One of our facilitators described the huddle as "one of those spaces that […] inspire you to the bone; to speak, show up, mark your presence and act."
Not part of our alumni community yet, or want to join an upcoming huddle in September? Reach out to community@onefuturecollective.org.
Another first of the year was our first Sanskaari Girls Book Club meet-up of the year on June 25, where we read Heart Lamp by International Booker Prize awardee Banu Mushtaq.
Not part of the 350+ member Sanskaari Girls Book Club, a global community for feminist literary critique? Check out the website!
Speaking of inspiring spaces, we were also represented at the DRAPAC Digital Rights National Meet Up by Uttanshi Agarwal (Lead, Consulting), where participants discussed emerging and pressing digital rights issues along with identifying key strategies that civil society actors working in this space can build on to address them. This meetup was organised by Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Engage Media, and Point of View in Bangalore.
Finally, an important update from the Feminist Leadership Hub, developed with FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders, where the dates for the very first Feminist Leadership Convening have now been announced! This two-day virtual event will be held on 10th and 11th of September, with more details to follow.
A note on our process in organising and designing this convening - as a community-driven platform, it was crucial that any convenings on the Hub be designed in a way that is participatory and participant-centered. With this in mind, the convening was preceded by multiple focus-group discussions and a learning-needs survey to identify whether, and around which focus areas, a convention should be organised. We heard from over 100 hub members in this process. In an effort to keep this convening as accessible as possible given our limited resources, it has been designed as a virtual offering, for which timings will be set such that it can be attended by participants from as many time zones as possible.
Sign up to the Hub and ensure you can RSVP to the Feminist Leadership Convening in September!
Finally, while we’re on the subject of practising our politics, the team has been hard at work reading the many applications we have received so far for Cohort 9 of the One Future Fellowship. Haven’t sent yours in so far, or know a budding leader who would be the perfect fit? Apply today - applications close on July 15.
We are excited to continue putting our learnings on holding and sharing community spaces into action and see where we go.
Coming up! 🔜
#NoRightAnswers is a conversation series hosted by Vandita Morarka, Founder and CEO of One Future Collective, on the Feminist Leadership Hub.
This is a space to explore questions that don’t have easy answers, only honest ones. We’ll sit with discomfort, share evolving thoughts, and learn together in community. July and August bring powerful themes and conversations, with subject matter experts and partners who offer deep and diverse insights.
Stay tuned and join us on the Hub to be part of an upcoming event:
📅 July 8 | 5:30–6:30 PM IST
Theme: Alternative Resourcing Models
What does it mean to fund movements with dignity, equity, and trust at the centre? What are the trade-offs? What might we need to unlearn?
Art and Action 🖊️🔧
Our work this month led us to reflect deeply on the themes of building, sustaining, and critically examining relationships within our communities towards transformative futures. Take this journey with us - ask and answer your own questions with this month’s curated collection of art and action resources.
Get Involved ⚙️
Help us germinate feminist social justice leadership in South Asia - learn more and apply to the One Future Fellowship. Have questions? Email us at fellowship@onefuturecollective.org. Hurry - applications close on July 15!
Sign up to join the Feminist Leadership Hub, and RSVP to our conversations with #NoRightAnswers.
Thank you for reading this volume of One Future Post, curated by Karishma Shafi! Please subscribe to this newsletter to be notified of all upcoming volumes.
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