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The Futures Hour

📄 Print this kit (PDF, letter, black-and-white-safe)

One class period. Students write what they see for their city ahead, then hand in a nameless harvest — a vision line, a complaint, a neighbourhood-superhero nomination. This is the lesson plan, the sheet, and nothing else.

Kids welcome. Food shared. Nobody pays. (This kit’s whole family of gatherings runs on that rule — no cost to run this in your room, food or not, whatever your school allows.)

A note to the teacher

This is your class, your lesson, run under your rules. Follow your school’s process for classroom activities and outside materials — this page asks nothing of your school beyond its own rules. This is not a City of Toronto government program — it’s a free, open civic kit, one of a family run by neighbours, congregations, and community rooms across the city. Nothing behind this kit visits your classroom, enrolls your students, or asks anyone to join anything — take what’s below, change whatever doesn’t fit your room and your grade, and run it as soon as it’s convenient. Aim for September if you can; it’s built to be ready the week you print it.

Futures writing is real civics, not a filler assignment: Torontonians are asking each other, in rooms all over the city, what they expect the years ahead to hold — and your class’s answers join that citywide record of what the next generation sees coming, counted in aggregate, alongside every other classroom, block circle, and dinner table running this same harvest this fall.

Curriculum fit, one line each:

Roughly grades 5 through 12, and it holds up unchanged in a first-year post-secondary seminar — adjust the vocabulary and the warm-up discussion, not the structure.

The 60 minutes

Zero prep beyond printing the harvest sheet, one per student.

0:00 – 0:05 · The frame. Tell the class, in your own words: people across this city are asking each other what they expect their blocks, their commutes, their neighbourhoods to look like in the years ahead — and today, your class adds its answers to that record.

0:05 – 0:15 · Warm-up, out loud. Two questions to the room, quick answers, no writing yet: What’s on your street that actually works? What’s broken? Let it run loose for ten minutes — this is where the prompts below come alive before anyone has to write alone.

0:15 – 0:40 · Silent writing — the futures statement. Twenty-five minutes, heads down. The centrepiece of the hour: Toronto when you’re 30. A paragraph, or up to a page. Put a few prompts on the board — students pick what speaks to them, not a checklist to answer in order:

0:40 – 0:50 · Optional share-aloud. Ask for volunteers only — never graded, never required, never called on cold. Two or three students reading their own line or paragraph is plenty; if nobody wants to, move straight on.

0:50 – 1:00 · The quick harvest. Ten minutes: on the same sheet, each student adds a one-line vision, a complaint, and a neighbourhood-superhero nomination (below). Done by the bell.

The extended-assignment variant

If a single hour doesn’t fit your unit, stretch it into a week-long piece instead — any format the student wants: an essay, a letter to their future self, a short story, or a drawing described in words. Same nameless harvest sheet at the end, same fields, just more room to work with.

The harvest sheet — one per student, no name anywhere

Printed without a name column, on purpose — the city needs the ideas, never the identities. Nobody writes their name on this page.

FUTURES STATEMENT — Toronto when you’re 30

_______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________

Horizon (optional, check one): [ ] 2030 [ ] 2040 [ ] A lifetime from now

VISION — “Toronto in 2030 should ___”

_______________________________________________

COMPLAINT — what’s broken on your way to school? (cross-streets okay, never a full address)

_______________________________________________

NOMINATION — a neighbourhood superhero (someone who quietly holds your block together)

_______________________________________________

How you submit it

One classroom’s harvest counts as one conversation in the citywide count — headcount is however many students are present that day, never a roster. You, the teacher, batch-submit the whole stack in one sitting at unitetolove.ca/harvest — pick “classroom,” enter your headcount, then enter each nameless sheet’s lines. Or skip the form entirely: photograph the stack of nameless sheets and mail or hand them off.

If the online form isn’t live yet, the paper is the record — nothing is lost.

Your own email can sit on the classroom entry as the contact for that room — never a student’s. No student name and no student email goes anywhere, at any point, in this process. What leaves your school is a count: how many students, how many statements, how many lines — never who wrote any of them.

(If a student’s writing turns to candidates, parties, or the election, that’s their line and it stands as written — nothing in this kit asks for it. This is about the city and the years ahead, not this fall’s ballot.)

Translate this kit

A one-page translation is itself a civic act. Priority languages, per the multilingual program (pending census confirmation): Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Urdu, Tagalog, Spanish, Tamil, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Farsi, Bengali. A student writing in their home language is first-class, not a fallback — the form takes any language, and a bilingual futures statement is worth more, not less. Send translations through the same link: unitetolove.ca/harvest.

A free, open kit. Copy it, change it, translate it, make it yours. — uniteTOlove.ca