Our Institute for Restoration and Imagination—Dot Connector’s charitable project fiscally sponsored by Contina Impact—is building a space for those seeking to recover what it means to be human in increasingly inhumane and unhuman times.
Because of our deep first-hand experiences with organizational collapse, with burnout and with loss, we are building a home for people working across the fields of justice, health, social impact, arts, media, and culture to grieve together, to find community, and to find new ways to belong and to imagine in these volatile and uncertain times.
Begun in 2026 to honor the passing of Dot Connector’s Founder, Jessica Clark, we are learning how to tend to the loss, failures, and exhaustion that dull our collective imagination and reawaken to the dignity, wholeness, and connectedness of our shared future.
From Extraction to Regeneration
Emerging from the framework of “from extractive to regenerative futures” evangelized by our team who met through the Guild of Future Architects, the Institute exists to recenter ancient wisdom covered over by centuries of horrific violence.
To move from extractive and colonial futures to futures that are regenerative, we must know how to practice deep personal and collective healing, truth, reconciliation, transformation, and we must imagine new ways to belong to one another.
By creating spaces of cross-disciplinary imagination and restoration, The Institute will create interventions that apply pressure at targeted acupuncture points in the interlocking American societal epidemics of grief, loneliness, and gender and racial violence. We will convene and edify intersectional practitioners; resource and conduct actionable research; birth and prototype experimental projects; and create and weave speculative future narratives.
The Institute restores imagination through its three core pillars:
Healing: restoring our relationship with ourselves among immense grief, trauma, burnout, and extraction in an era of cascading crises, ecological uncertainty, illness, and collapse.
Belonging: restoring our relationship with one another in an era of increased loneliness, fragmentation, and disconnection caused in large part by technological, capital, and authoritarian influence
Pluralism: restoring our capacity for the “hard, delicate, and ultimately, joyful work of belonging—and even thriving—together in justice” (Pop Culture Collaborative) beyond othering, domination, and dehumanization.