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Catalytic collaborators

Pollinators carry pollen from flower to flower. These are the thought leaders, futurists, researchers and practitioners who move between us and the wider field, cross-pollinating what we’re learning here with what’s happening everywhere else.

Illustration of a dragonfly

What a catalytic collaborator does

Our collaborators don’t present at us. They bring brief, experiential drops that participants can engage with, question and push back on. The point is to level the field: to give community members the context they need to be genuine contributors to the national conversation, not just audiences of it.

They also carry what emerges here outward, into the rooms they already walk into.

Shaping the Oakland Activation Lab

At our first Activation Lab on November 7, 2026, these collaborators led the experiences that moved participants from imagining a future to building one.

  • Dr. Marc Chun

    Portal to the Future

    Designed the three future scenarios at the centre of the day, where small groups stepped into possible futures for learning and worked out how each had been built.

  • The Rithm Project

    The AI Effect: Youth, AI and the Relationships That Shape Them
    with Marisol Jimenez, Vinaya Sivakumar & Alex Mathew

    How young people’s relationships are being reshaped by AI, and what adults need to understand about it.

  • Education Reimagined

    Back to the Future: A Learner’s Experience in the Oakland Ecosystem
    with Alin Bennett & Francine Habacon

    What learning already looks like when it is designed around the learner, drawn from what is alive in Oakland right now.

  • Playlab

    Building With AI, From Possibility
    with Colleen Broderick & Kristie Wanjohi

    Hands-on building with AI tools, starting from what might be possible rather than what already exists.

  • Flourish Agenda

    How to Bring Healing Into the Classroom
    with Lee Porscha Moore

    Healing-centred practice, and what it asks of the adults in a classroom.

Collaborate with us

Every person who joins a Living Lab brings their own networks, relationships and spheres of influence, and that is precisely the point. If you work at the leading edge of learning design and want to bring an experiential drop to a future Activation Lab, we want to hear from you.

Get involved Meet the CoLab