Alexandra Stef
Founder, Collective Futures
Collective Learning & Innovation Director, Inspire Institute
I work with communities and their partners to design and test experiments that spark collective agency and build support structures for it to last.
Learning, reflection, and experimentation in service of collective capacity in turbulent times.
How I work
We are living through a time of overlapping crises that cannot be addressed through technical solutions alone. Many institutions feel the pressure to adapt quickly, while also struggling to remain meaningful, relational, and accountable.I start from the belief that hope is a mobilizing force when it is grounded in practices and collective forms that can be sustained over time. The work is less about predicting or designing futures, and more about creating the collective conditions through which shared futures can be imagined, tested, and gradually brought into being.Much of what I do takes place at an early and often invisible stage: alongside community initiatives, latent assets, and forms of collective capacity that exist before there is formal structure or external recognition. I work with small groups of people who can already sense new possibilities for their communities, even when these are not yet widely shared or institutionally acknowledged.Over time, this kind of work helps build trust, relationships, and social capital, creating the conditions for new community-rooted organizations and institutions to emerge, often long before they have a name, a structure, or public recognition.
Collective futures take shape not through grand plans but through imagination, shared practice, and trust built over time.I accompany journeys from emergence to endurance.
Collaborations
Learning
Collective learning & community building
Designing and facilitating learning journeys, peer exchanges, and collaboratively created gatherings that bring people into relationship and support the formation of groups and communities of practice that endure beyond events.
Strategy
Collective sensemaking & strategy
Helping teams and networks clarify direction, role, and contribution in complex contexts. Noticing and stimulating assets and attuning to what is becoming possible and can be intentionally nurtured instead of controlled / programed.
Experiments
Design, testing & anchoring of experiments
Designing and piloting small experiments to start a practice of building iteratively and creatively in complexity. Collaborative experiments across groups and organizations can birth new network and collectives.
Facilitation
Accompaniment of emerging community infrastructure
Working with early-stage, community-rooted initiatives to surface local assets, build tools for participation, and support their evolution into steady structures for collective action.
Selected experience
Community foundations & place-based philanthropy
Philanthropy infrastructure & support organizations
International learning communities & convening
Early-stage civic and social innovation
Writing
I write about emerging community institutions and networks, collective imagination, learning by doing, and hope in turbulent times.
Infrastructures for imagination
Might of infrastructure
Bottom-up institutions
Contact
Open to exploratory conversations and aligned collaborations.
Based in Madrid, working internationally.
Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.
Collective Futures is a partner to design and run experiments in collective agency starting from where you are today.