Photo Credit: David Dini & Joan Encarnacion

With the 80th United Nations General Assembly just down the street from our NYC studio, anchored by the theme “Better Together: 80 years and more for peace, development, and human rights,” we saw an opportunity to build on themes from the Future Of Series and return to what surfaced most clearly in our first sessions: collaboration grounded in user-centered needs.

We partnered with Opportunity Collaboration and Public Digital to convene funders, policymakers, advocates, and grassroots leaders for a living conversation about what working together differently really looks like. In a fractured moment when consensus on even the most basic principles of justice feels out of reach, the urgency to anchor in people’s lived experiences feels like one of the most critical places to build from. At its heart, this is about more than inviting people to the table—it’s about rearranging the seats, and in some cases, redesigning the table altogether.

Lightning Insights

We designed a series of lightning talks to explore the layers where user-centered collaboration holds the greatest potential for change: in how programs are designed with communities at the center, in how global institutions align user needs with systemic transformation, in how financing architectures connect local solutions to global systems, in how governments serve their citizens, and in how the next generation builds its own future. Here’s a few tidbits from each of our speakers:

Abraham Leno, Director of Government Relations, Alight

Too often development is seen through a corporate lens measured in bottom lines rather than human lives. Abraham reminded us that if this work is truly about bettering lives, it must be designed with end-users at the center. Refugees, he noted, are often the last to be warned yet the first to be impacted and in the absence of formal systems, they are already building their own networks of care and resilience.

Milica Begovic, Head of Strategic Innovation, UNDP

Development has a habit of treating user needs in isolation, fragmenting people’s lives into siloed projects that fail to address root causes. Milica argued that real transformation requires holding user needs and system needs together valuing lived experience as expertise, shifting from projects to adaptive portfolios, and funding for long-term systemic outcomes rather than short-term efficiency. It’s a “boring” revolution that’s decidedly unglamorous, but the kind of revolution that will yield serious results.

Lauren Kahn, Global Impact Sector Lead, Public Digital

Success rests not on what institutions do but how they do it. In her talk, Lauren outlined a “radical how”: building multi-disciplinary teams around user needs, adopting test-and-learn approaches that allow governments to adapt quickly around user needs, and investing in digital foundations instead of one-off “shiny” solutions.

Aly Rahim, Program Manager, CIVIC, World Bank

In an era of overlapping crises, climate change, inequality, and a collapse of trust, Aly called for a renewed civic architecture. Local, people-driven solutions already exist but remain disconnected from international finance. With aid shrinking and fragmented, civil society risks being sidelined. Through CIVIC, he proposed bridging local solutions into global financing streams so they can scale within larger systems, rather than remain stuck as pilots.

Simi Nwogugu, CEO, Junior Achievement Africa

Simi returned us to lived expertise. Through the 10 Million African Girls Initiative, she showed how entrepreneurship equips girls not just to survive but to design their own safety nets. “Nobody’s coming to save you,” she tells them. Instead, they build businesses that generate wealth and sustain their communities.

In the chaos of UNGA, where big stages and bigger promises can drown out the lived realities of the people we’re designing for, it felt grounding to refocus on how we meet real needs in this moment. Our creative tensions exercise made the many perspectives on reimagining collaboration visible in the room. It’s our go-to for surfacing friction and sparking honest dialogue. It shows in real time that perspectives are never tidy and rarely fixed. From whether partnership means listening to user needs or letting users lead, to whether collaboration falters more from politics or personal dynamics, to whether funding should solve today’s challenges or reimagine systems, the conversation underscored that the future won’t be built by erasing tensions but by working within them.

As the Future Of series continues, we’d love to hear from you: what themes should we explore next, and where should we bring the conversation? If you’d like to host a session in your city, reach out and let’s imagine it together.