Have Trista Speak at Your Next Event

Change is accelerating exponentially and future-focused leaders have a responsibility to predict and shape those trends. Philanthropic futurist Trista Harris shares how to use futurism to know what’s coming and how to organize efforts to continue helping the communities you care about.

Invite Trista to Speak

Who Is Trista Harris?

Trista will MacGyver her way into the most unexpected situations to discover the signals of the future that will help you make the world a better place.

She once negotiated her way into an interview with Sir Richard Branson and was later invited to his home on Necker Island. During this adventure, she got her DNA sequenced, was mobbed by a conspiracy of lemurs, watched Richard kitesurfing in a tuxedo, and gave a speech on the future of doing good. She'd have thought it was a fever dream if she didn't have pictures.

Trista has worked in nonprofits since she was 13 years old. Her last job was the president of a community of grantmakers that gave away $1.5 billion a year. She is now the President of FutureGood, a consultancy focused on growing a movement of visionaries dedicated to building a better future.

To develop her futurism skills, she learned about scenario planning at Oxford University, hung out with the technologists at Singularity U, went to Amy Webb's Future History Festival, and trained with the team at the Institute for the Future. She also has a Magic 8 ball on her desk.

Trista recently spoke on Necker Island about the Future of Doing Good, at the Southern California Grantmakers conference on trends that will impact foundations, at Gateway Center for Giving’s annual meeting on how nonprofit and foundation staff can become future-focused leaders, and at 1440 Multiversity on clarifying your future impact as a visionary leader.

Popular Talks

Each talk is customized for your audience and includes a one-hour call with your planning team. Each talk can be given as a keynote or a half-day up to a three-day workshop.

Do you want to learn how to use futurism to predict and shape the future so your organization can make the biggest positive impact possible and help the most people while maintaining operational harmony and stability in everchanging, sometimes-turbulent times?

Shift the conversation from day-to-day to where you want to be twenty years from now
See how to use organizational resources to create a more equitable future
Learn how to push change forward and get quick adoption of better policies
Improve your ability to eliminate sources of pain in communities and work toward healing

2022 Philanthropic and Nonprofit Trends

The pace of change is accelerating exponentially, and we have a responsibility to become future-focused leaders that can predict and shape those trends. Join Trista Harris in this fast-paced tour through trends (short-term and long-term) that will impact our ability to remain effective and relevant to the causes and communities we care about.

Creating an Equitable Future

Nonprofits and foundations have the power to create a Star Trek or a Hunger Games future, depending on how effectively we use an equity lens in our work. In this thought-provoking keynote, Trista will help you better understand the four key roles of a social sector organization and show you how to apply an equity lens in your roles as a funder or a program provider, economic entity, employer, and community citizen.

Future Started Yesterday

An increasing rate of change makes the already challenging work of doing good, even more difficult. NGO’s, foundations, donors, and social entrepreneurs all are trying to make the world a better place but are often using yesterday’s information to do so. What if we could predict the future and prepare for the coming realities that will impact our communities? Join Trista Harris as she takes us on an interactive journey where she’ll uncover tools to create the future.

Use Future Thinking to Drive Strategic Planning

In this interactive workshop, Trista will teach how to develop a strategic planning process that starts with the development of your foundation’s ideal future. You will also understand where your future vision lives in your current organizational reality.

You will develop a two-curve framework in your own strategic planning process. The first curve identifies how you have done your work in the past and what practices will remain in the future. The second curve describes the transformation that you will undertake to achieve your ideal future vision. Participants will develop an example two-curve framework during the session.