Advocacy and Policy Change TIG Week: Why Advocacy Needs Foresight and Foresight Needs Advocacy by Taylor B. Anderson

Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Hello! I’m Taylor B. Anderson, Founder and Principal Consultant of Taylored Insights. I lead monthly salons for the Advocacy Meets Foresight Community of Practice (CoP) started by Annette L. Gardner.

Since 2022, the CoP has brought together advocates and futurists to explore how our fields can strengthen each other. Our speakers have ranged from futurists on postnormal times and participatory futures games, to evaluators on boundary judgments and emergent learning, to an advocate-turned-legislator on how elected officials weigh the long-term.

Today, each salon starts with a signal of change from the news or members’ experiences, and explores what it might mean for advocacy. Two core questions guide us:

What does futures literacy offer advocates?

Futures literacy is the capacity to imagine multiple possible futures and use them to navigate uncertainty and make better decisions today. Advocacy is often driven by present urgency, yet the policies it shapes last for decades, in conditions none of us can predict.

• Strategies outlive the moment: Foresight helps advocates stress-test a campaign against more than one plausible future, so today’s changes still serve communities as conditions shift.
• If you don’t imagine your future, someone else will: Movements with a clear, shared, long-term vision can shape policy more durably than those reacting to each crisis.
• Learning can look forward, too: Advocates often learn from what has already happened. Foresight adds early signals to the evidence base, so advocates can adjust strategies as conditions evolve.

What does advocacy capacity offer futurists?

• Futures don’t build themselves: At our first gathering, a CoP member and futurist warned that foresight’s cardinal sin is “taking clients to the future and abandoning them.” Advocacy strategies can bridge a preferred future and the steps to get there.
• No future is neutral: Articulating a “preferred future” is a claim about values and beneficiaries. Advocates are often explicit about these, and that clarity about power and purpose is something futurists can borrow.
• Advocates know where decisions get made: Legislatures, agencies, courts, ballot measures, philanthropic and corporate boardrooms each move in their own ways and on their own timelines. Without that understanding, a future scenario might stay a story.

What We’re Discussing Now

Our recent observations lead us to ask compelling questions about the future of advocacy:

• Can we still trust public voice when comments generated by artificial intelligence flood public engagement processes?
• How much evidence is enough to take action when research on a harm is young but the public momentum is strong?
• If advocacy power is shifting toward hyper-local organizing, what role remains for national organizations?

Hot Tips

Start small and play. Foresight may be new language for many advocates, but most already practice it every time they anticipate a decision-maker’s next move. Gather a wide range of people to play with the future, such as building futures wheels to map the ripple effects of a change in your issue area.

In my experience, a method opens the door, but the lasting shift comes from a habitual practice of asking advocates, “What else could become true?”

Rad Resources

• Nesta’s Our Futures: By the People, For the People draws on hundreds of participatory futures examples from around the world.
• The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s Scenario Exploration System is a game that lets advocates and policymakers stress-test decisions across different futures.

Notice the Signals

The future is where advocacy’s outcomes will be realized and experienced. The sooner advocates and futurists can learn from each other’s crafts, the more of our shared futures we can shape together, today.

What signals of change are you noticing in your communities? What might they tell us about the future of advocacy?

The American Evaluation Association is hosting APC TIG Week with our colleagues in the Advocacy and Policy Change Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our AP TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.