Resilience in These Times | Visiting Scholars

Spaces for Growth: Learning Our Way Out of a Crisis

As founder of the International Futures Forum in Scotland, The New School’s Winter 2026 Visiting Scholar Graham Leicester, and partner Margaret Hannah, are interested in human growth and potential in the face of powerful times. In their time as residents at Commonweal’s New School, they will continue to explore how the global, community, and personal challenges of these times can be met with creativity, collaboration, determination, and efficacy. You can join the exploration by reading Graham’s residency statement, below, and for conversation with Graham on Tuesday, February 17 at Commonweal’s New School, either at Commonweal or on Zoom.

Beyond Survival: Sustaining Human Agency in Challenging Times
Graham Leicester and Hosts Oren Slozberg and Katherine Fulton
Tuesday, February 17 | 1:00 pm PST – 3:00 pm Pacific Time
REGISTER HERE

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Graham Leicester spent his early career in the British diplomatic service, specializing in China and the European Union. He went on to establish and run Scotland’s leading think tank, the Scottish Council Foundation, founded in 1997. In 2001 he became founding Director of International Futures Forum, stepping down at the end of 2023. He remains closely connected with IFF, including work on special projects.

Graham’s professional interests include the practice (and funding) of system transition; governance organizing for legitimacy, integrity, and future-conscious action; and developing people to foster 21st century competence for outgrowing our problems. He also takes a special interest in the arts, having spent some time in his youth as a professional cellist.  He has written widely on all these themes. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the Executive Arts Circle stewarding the intellectual legacy of Jim Ewing.

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Margaret Hannah, MD, has a passion for improving the health and wellbeing of people, communities, and planet. With a background in medicine and public health and two decades of learning with International Futures Forum, Margaret supports innovative and wise initiatives addressing contemporary patterns of need. Her own work includes the SHINE programme, a conscious initiative to shift the culture of care in NHS Fife over many years, starting by addressing the needs of people with chronic and complex health conditions in ways which enable them to thrive. Margaret is also one of the creators of IFF Kitbag, the product of wider work initiated in 2005 to address the challenge of global mental distress. Kitbag is a resource for children, young people, and their caregivers which grows the psychological capacities required for a stable, empathetic, and creative future.

Margaret is author of two books on pioneering practice in the fields of health, healing and public health: Humanising Healthcare: patterns of hope for a system under strain (Triarchy Press 2014) and The Future Public Health (co-author, Open University Press 2012).

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From Graham:

When I was first invited to spend some time at Commonweal, a number of words kept recurring in the conversation: resilience, longevity, polycrisis, healing, transition.

These are potent themes for the times. And they are present on the agenda of Commonweal itself—a remarkable, long-lived “integrity,” celebrating its first 50 years, looking ahead towards the next 50, and equally engaging the fierce urgency of now.

I come to these themes, as we all do, with my own history and experience. At the turn of the century, I was one of the founders of a group that set out to discover “how to restore effective, responsible and humane action in a world we do not understand and cannot control.”

Twenty-five years on, International Futures Forum continues to provide a small, dependable infrastructure for those engaging in creative inquiry and wise initiative in pursuit of that original mission. Thousands of practitioners around the world have joined our community of practice, purpose and mutual support.

I stepped down as director of IFF in 2024—slowly and deliberately in a process of thoughtful transition, thoughtful recruitment, and thoughtful succession. I now find myself with greater freedom to reflect: revisiting paths less travelled, promising insights not pursued, glimpses of light and life from those early conversations that promise a deepening of our practice today.

My own focus is human growth and potential in the face of powerful times. It is a focus shared by my partner Margaret Hannah, author of the book Humanising Healthcare and pioneer of IFF’s Kitbag. Margaret will be accompanying me to Commonweal, honouring one of IFF’s principles for working at the edge: “no solo climbers.”

In 2022, as the world started to emerge from the pandemic, I published with Maureen O’Hara a pamphlet called “Spaces for Growth: learning our way out of a crisis.” It is a statement of our core stance in relation to what it takes “to support individuals, groups, organisations, communities, institutions, human beings in all formations to expand, to develop and to grow, to rise to the occasion.”

The pamphlet sets the following ambitious challenge:

Our goal is to enable 21st-century people to become artists of their own lives, in supportive patterns of relationship with others, doing meaningful work, offering practical hope. If we are to rise to the challenge of this century we will need all of this and all of us: revealing the abundance that lies in our humanity and the full magnificence of the human being.

I regard this, in my more conscious moments, also as a personal challenge. Among the questions I will be bringing to my time at Commonweal will be these:

• How might I become the artist of my own life, discover and make available my own unique contribution at this time?
• What levels of discernment do I need to develop to seek out and work within supportive relationship, whilst also spreading IFF’s learning and experience far and wide and as generously as possible?
• What constitutes ‘meaningful work’, what I have come to call ‘the real work’, in a time of polycrisis?
• How do I need to show up to offer ‘practical hope’, such that the offer can be heard and received in an environment suffused with loss, grief, resignation, and worse?

As the “conceptual emergency” we identified in 2003 increasingly shows its deeper foundations in an existential emergency, I cannot think of a better place to spend time exploring these questions, in theory and in practice, than in the company of Commonweal in California in the USA in the early months of 2026.

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Artwork at top: Jon Marro

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