The Anticipatory Capability Fund awards Dr Anneke Tolan and Dr Anouk Mensah a grant to end a primary school newsletter's habit of reprinting the same "term ahead" paragraph term after term.
The grant funds Dr Anneke Tolan and Dr Anouk Mensah's work with a primary school parent committee to draft its "term ahead" column against the actual plan, rather than carrying the previous term's paragraph forward unread
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent the past two years asking what a plan looks like once nobody in the room is reading it fresh — how a workshop’s live language survives, unchanged, into the version filed twelve months on. Its newest funded project tests the question somewhere nobody would think to look for it: the “term ahead” column of a primary school newsletter, drafted by a rotating parent committee under a print deadline that arrives whether or not anyone has anything new to say.
The funded protocol pairs each edition’s draft against a log of what the committee actually planned that term, flagging any sentence carried straight over from the last one before it goes to the printer.
The workshop where a phrase gets minted is easy enough to find. What’s hard is catching the moment, a term on, when nobody in the room notices they’re still using it. A newsletter column turned out to be the easiest place to watch that moment happen while it’s still happening.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Co-grantee Dr Anouk Mensah said the column was “a comparative method I’d normally run on old strategic plans, except this committee gets to see the carried-forward line before it’s printed rather than after.”
The grant carries $196,742 and a standing bet, on the School’s part, that a habit worth studying is also a habit worth catching in time to change.
Anticipatory Capability Fund: Redrafting the School Newsletter's Term-Ahead Column Before the Copy-Paste Sets In · $196,742 · awarded to Anneke Tolan, Anouk Mensah