The Clark Institute for Restoration and Imagination
The Institute is a new pillar of Dot Connector, built to honor the vision of our founder, Jessica Clark. Jess dreamed of a refuge for futurists, storytellers, and creatives who do the hard work of imagining better futures while carrying the weight of the present. The Institute exists to make that refuge real.
The weight behind our work
In our years of futures work, we kept running into the same wall: the people most committed to building a better world were also the most exhausted, the most grieving, and the least resourced to do anything about it. Researcher Steven Lichty calls this futures unconsciousness — a state in which unprocessed grief, trauma, and burnout block our ability to envision and build something better. You cannot design a future from recycled trauma. And yet most organizations treat grief as a private problem, something to manage quietly and push past.
We believe that's a structural failure, and we want to build something different: an infrastructure for leaders, communities, and organizations to metabolize loss together, and find their way back to the work with more clarity, more care, and more capacity for genuine imagination.
Our inaugural program: The Restoration Department
The Restoration Department is a grief and renewal practice for the social impact leaders, futurists, and community builders in our network.
At the center of this work is the Sanctum Cycle: a six-month community program built around Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's Seven Rests framework, which addresses the full range of human needs—physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual. Each week, participants engage in facilitated practices and rituals designed to process loss, recover capacity, and rebuild connection.
This prototype is a community-shaped experiment in what it looks like to grieve together, rest deliberately, and come back to the work more whole.
What we're learning
Over the course of this first year, we're documenting everything: what works, what doesn't, and what the futures field might need more broadly. Our goal is to build resources (field guides, a curricula, a ritual library) that any organization can use to build its own capacity for collective grief and restoration.
The Institute is in its founding year. To learn more or explore partnership, reach out at hello@dotconnector.co.