This article was written by Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME CEO & Founder, on behalf of the AIME team on May 29, 2024.

We were moved by how poignant and passionate it was, and wanted to share it with you, our Warndu community.

AIME is an indigenous outreach platform that fosters universal imagination, custodianship, and mentoring.

AIME’s journey reflects a commitment to crafting healthier networks for all life on Earth, recognising that inequity knows no borders. Their goal is to dismantle inequity and cultivate a world abundant in opportunities for all.

Learn more about AIME Mentoring.

To Reconcile

In 1958, my Mum was born in a small town in country NSW, Australia. Her family were one of only a few Aboriginal families in the town, a nation where Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census. No Aboriginal stories were told in Australia. Our family, our people were being structurally and intentionally erased from history with an attempt to erase us from the future.

In 1988, I was 3, and Mum walked with my little sister in her belly across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to protest on Jan 26, alongside 40,000 people in the largest protest in Australia’s history since the Vietnam wars, crying for reconciliation and justice, crying out for land rights.

In 1998, Mandela was President, and I was 13 and in year 8, dreaming of playing cricket for Australia, and getting my braces off.

In 2008, I was 23, and organised an event at Manning Bar at Sydney Uni to watch the Prime Minister of Australia apologise to the Indigenous people of this country for the Stolen Generations, for the pain and for the suffering; to reach out a branch, to heal, to seek a path forward.

In 2018, 20 years after my Mum and so many Australians walked across that bridge, AIME helped move the Hottest 100 from Jan 26 to the fourth weekend in January, for the first time ever.

In that same year, in 2018, I found myself sitting in Pretoria launching AIME into South Africa, at the University of Pretoria in a mentoring interview with Candice Mama (who now works for AIME, leading kindness economics globally), and Candice shared with me her personal apartheid travesty and path to forgiveness. You can watch the interview of that moment here as part of AIME’s Mentorclass, which we are turning into a game to release next year with 20+ years of mentoring knowledge for kids across Australia and around the world to have a game to hunt knowledge not pain.

I felt so deeply in that moment with Candice that this was the sliver of a path for us to find a way, to forgive, not to forget. To release, and then to move forward.

Justice is so complex, it spans the course of all time, and all space.

Equality, the same.

In Australia, closing a gap isn’t a challenge that can be done in isolation from the rest of a nation, or the world. It cannot be done in isolation from other species.

We all live on Earth. The plants and the trees, the birds and the bees, all things big and small, and nothing exists without anything and everything else. All life is connected.

As a human species, to reconcile, we must shift how we are networked, where the intelligence comes from, what we value, the process of inquiry and relations, how we listen to each other, when we are able to say, “Hey, I don’t know that, please explain it to me” and we give space to learn, to grow and to adapt.

Anything fixed is false.

Life is fluid and in constant movement.

It’s reconciliation week in Australia, and we wanted to reach out a hand to every single human in the world who feels pain, who feels hurt, no matter your skin colour, to all who have experienced injustice, to those who are angry and those filled with joy, to those who scream and those who channel the screams into behind the scenes design. To us-all. 

To us, a species finding a path.

May we in this time of disruption, may we reach for the best in each other, may we strive to meet each other, may we try, may we please, please, please try to be kind and to find a path to a life where we value each other and nature.

May we reconcile with the window we have of a life in outer space and may we strive and reach for joy on Earth for us-all.

Nothing but love from me and the AIME team to all of you.

Artwork titled: I see you, I thank you. By Steph Beck

In 2024, my Mum has 1M books in circulation across Australia - thank you Mum, what a generational contribution and shift in one era, the stories move the stories, which move the values, the laws, and the lives we live. And she is one of 1000s, 10000s, across our nation and the world, who have stood up every single day and said I will move this mountain, I will give everything I’ve got in every way I can. And that’s how it changes. Thank you to every single person who has fought for change bigger than themselves before me, and those that come after. Thank you for caring about us, about every being on this rock.

In 2024, in AIME’s orbit, we have just welcomed new citizens into a new nation, IMAGI-NATION. By my count, no one has successfully created a relational network as an alternative to social networks, no one has created a nation state into the internet, no Australian NGO has ever successfully carried an idea globally and been received so deeply. We are first, leading, and I don’t like claiming this space, but I do want us-all to be given the support required to lead such an extraordinary journey, to open spaces for those that come after in significant structural ways. This has all been led by Indigenous systems thinking, Indigenous people and others pushed outside the margins, we are reshaping how we are networked and the world is turning to us.

In our global work we’ve been accepted across 52 countries and now are working to weave Indigenous systems thinking to the start of the design queue - from economics in Oxford, to the UN in Paris, to investors in New York and systems designers in San Francisco, from strategists in Berlin, to leaders in Pretoria, they are turning to imagination, turning to us, to the oldest continuous surviving thriving intelligence lab on Earth, because we have relations with nature, because we are the longest running designers who know how to live and work with nature.

They are turning to the old old nation of Australia, and coming to our nation, to trade. And on the ground we are setting the case studies with sea the weed returning organisations to the water, with the Indigenous knowledge systems labs, with 10000 Imagination classrooms starting their build here - this is the valley of imagination and the people are coming to us, in the rite way.

For building this immense bridge and holding this space between I’m bloody proud of all of us, every one of you that reads these words, that supports, that acts, that thinks. I’m so proud of all of my family’s strength (including the next generation shaped with my powerful partner and magical kids) and endless generosity and love and hope and I’m even proud of that little kid about to get his braces off in 1998. Across many Hoodie Days, many strut the streets, a mentoring session in the sky in Australia, a chartered plane to bring the world to us, many, many mentors and mentees, across Australia I feel like in 20 years we’ve contributed as much as we can to answer the cries of our ancestors from 1988 and well before, and in the last decade we’ve listened to the cries of the Earth, for us to come together as a species, to find our path, to restore and centre our relations with nature, from which we come to which we go.

This is the design generation of our species. We cannot waste a minute over the next 8-10 years. The climate clock is ticking, and we are on the chopping block. 

There is plenty to be done, so let’s do it.

Let’s find the way to deeply activate Indigenous land once more. What we will do on this front is what we are already doing - this year we’ve helped shepherd the monetary contributions to re-secure two lots of Indigenous knowledge systems land back in Australia, and over the next 8 or so years we have left we are working on trying to secure land for 1000 Indigenous knowledge systems labs across Australia and the world, all in embassy, all in exchange, all in relation.

Next week, Jane Goodall (whose foundation we are working with to unearth IMAGI-NATION Presidents to re-activate custodial economies) will come to town and Professor Hope will interview her at Sydney Town Hall alongside IMAGI-NATION’s 2nd round of Systems Change residents that are set to change the world. One that I particularly love, who we are bringing in residency, is Rohani, a Torres Strait Islander woman, based in Detroit, working on solving the food shortage challenge for human kind and who found us by searching the internet for ‘imagination’. How’s that for a full circle with some straight lines made curved again.

Artwork titled: Network of Network weavers open IMAGI-NATION May 17th 2024. By Steph Beck.

By 2032 we will deliver 5000|130|50|150 (5000 Action VISAs - 1000 JOY Corps, 1000 Indigenous Knowledge Systems Labs, 1000 Imagination Labs (Schools), 1000 Imagination Presidents re-establishing custodial economies, and 1000 systems change citizens ||| 130 Systems Change leaders with deep tool and knowledge development residencies to help them unlock the potential of human kind || 50 cities lit up in BIG story || 150 tools left behind for universal imagination, mentoring and custodianship).

In 2028, 5 years before our intentional death we’ll share this:

• We hope to show you 50 of the first Indigenous knowledge systems labs creating a decentralised global network of on-land consulting for the world’s leaders and eating into the current 700 billion consulting budget and shifting where the design of intelligence lies and who writes the rules.

• We hope to share with you the world’s first 50 JOY corps - relationally healthy organisations with joy on the balance sheet, mentoring in their DNA, nature at their core, peace in their veins, and working to showcase business where relations are the heart of the impact and everything is in context.

• We hope to show you the world’s first 50 imagination labs - schools marginalised by history, now jumping to trade as labs to solve the world’s largest challenges in real time. The necessary intelligence to solve tomorrow’s challenges is always beyond the margins.

• We will show you 50 systems change citizens mapped from isolation in their view, to relational health, who can now access the map and the systems view because they are in relation.

• We will show you the first 50 IMAGI-NATION Presidents re-establishing custodial economies and moving our attention, intention and relation to nature for micro economic and macro economic stimulus that will help us unlock the 750B nature based market waiting in our future as we find a healthier path to live with the intelligence of all life on this rock.

• We will share with you the 39 Systems Change Residents who have worked on projects from harnessing the power of the sun, returning us to the water, solving food shortages to designing the world’s global leading BIO regional marketplace.

By 2028, we hope to share with you that together we’ve rechannelled 100M worth of global funding to this work, and helped open up a marketplace around the world for Indigenous systems thinking, relational economics, relational networks, mentoring, custodianship and imagination.

With this funding secured by 2028, AIME will not be seeking any more $ at all, and will be fully relational for our final 5 years, and all of our $ work will be to move billions of untapped $ to those marginalised, and to nature.
We reckon we actually will have modeled and pulled off Hoodie Economics and a moneyless shop, and a hoodie driving relational economic change - that’ll be something! We’ll have over 20 deep case studies of relational physical hoodies all kept in value with the Re-Serve Bank. And we hope to share with you our alternative to NFT’s, Knowledge Based Tokens, all linked to the Professors and all mapped back to nature.

From IMAGI-NATION{Gallery} we hope to have successfully started to map story back into the landscape, re-activating songlines and helping show another path to unlocking the 750B Nature marketplace.

In embassy via the 1000 year dream project (going live in the next few months across Australia) and building 10000 imagination classrooms we’ll share the genius we have kicked it with magical schools and kids across the world.

And finally, tools, the role of the mentor, to pass on knowledge. This is where we’ve invested so much in the last 6 years. We will share with you 20 tools that will live on for as long as we can imagine, open and universally accessible to all on our planet. We can’t wait to share with you in 2025 IMAGINE Film, The Professors TV Series, the Mentor App, and Mentorclass.

We will model an alternative way to build networks, not social, relational.

We will Model for nation states how to do well being economies.

We will Show how to invest in relations so we know how to live with the robots.

We will Awaken our collective imagination.

And be the ones, every single day, that get up and get to work, because hope is not ours to own - hope is atomic, moving everywhere, all the time, it’s up to us to keep the frequency to receive it alive, and to fuel the power of that very essential universal element. Where there is life, there is hope.

Let us reconcile, design, build, imagine, and find that path to peace on Earth - and try our very, very, very best every single day with every single thing we’ve got.

A leader once taught me that when sickness comes to us in networks, sometimes our role is to spit out the poison so it doesn't affect the rest of the network, not to prey on it and amplify it like the design of many of these platforms parading as “social” networks.

We are not sick, the networks we’ve inherited are.

To our friends here’s my promise to you, for the remaining 8 years, 9 months, and 1 week that we have left as an organisation, we are going to continue to be the group that reaches for joy, that imagines and plays for the most important reasons, for a smile that changes things, for that element of relational energy, we’ll follow the tangents, we’ll paint the world we want to see, we’ll dance with puppets and magic, we’ll imagine, we’ll be the circus, the clowns, the jesters, and you better believe we’ll engineer and design and build, because that’s the responsibility of those who dare to dream and dance with the world of dreams, that we must deliver them back to reality.

Onwards we roll, peace be the journey,

Jack MB

AIME CEO and Founder

29 May 2024

Artwork titled: Knowledge in relation is alive. By Steph Beck.