The Reimagination Lab is Be The Ones’ creative civic experiment — where art, imagination, and organizing meet to reshape how South Carolinians relate to power.
Click on image to watch Lab Video!
REIMAGINATION LAB 2025
Be The Ones was selected as one of four national organizations in the Center for Artistic Activism’s Field Tests Program - a project designed to spark bolder, more creative ways of engaging voters, mobilizing community, and shifting power.
Through this partnership, we launched the Reimagination Lab — a 10-week creative experiment exploring how South Carolinians relate to power, place, and the State House itself.
We gathered 40+ grassroots leaders across five artistic experiments, asking a central question:
“What if the State House wasn’t a distant institution for the powerful — but a shared home where all South Carolinians felt reflected, welcomed, and represented?”
The Lab invited participants to lean into utopia, creativity, wild imagination, and their own lived experiences to explore new narratives and prototype ideas.
Each experiment engaged a different group of leaders, offering five distinct ways to reimagine:
Imagination Workshop: building reimagined State Houses out of art supplies and imagination prompts
DIY Toolkits: using small “do it yourself” boxes of materials to design their own state house creations
Little Free State House Installation: deciding what a State House should include - literally, metaphorically, or by way of policy - and creating a portable resource box (modeled after Little Free Libraries) filled with civic tools for the community
Storytelling Workshop: a showcase of storytelling led by grassroots leader and Charleston storyteller Minerva King, challenging participants to imagine their stories not just as they are now, but how they could evolve
Housewarming Party: a playful, intimate gathering mirroring a housewarming party, exploring what it would mean to make the State House feel like “home”
These workshops were about more than art and glitter. They were about agency. Belonging. And reclaiming the right to dream boldly.
SCALLING THE EXPERIMENT
As a culmination of the Lab, we hosted the Center for Artistic Activism team in Charleston for a free training for grassroots leaders on building sustainable, impactful artistic activism strategies within their own organizations and campaigns.
AND alongside our national partners — Fair Count, the American Association of People with Disabilities, and QLatinx — our collective learnings were compiled into a published Field Tests Guide.
The Guide captures findings from all four organizations’ experiments, offering practical checklists, best practices, and tools for running creative field tests in advocacy and organizing. It demonstrates that experimentation unlocks a different kind of success: one rooted not only in outcomes, but in learning, adaptation, and the ability to respond creatively in a rapidly shifting political landscape.
REIMAGINATION
LAB 2.0
In 2026, we’re building on what worked — and expanding the vision!
The next iteration of the Reimagination Lab moves beyond reimagining the State House to reimagining our communities’ relationships to power itself — who holds it, how it operates, and how we claim it together.
Reimagination Lab 2.0 blends community-centered learning, arts-based practice, and civic engagement to cultivate civic imagination across generations. Through intergenerational workshops, artistic activations, and community-based experiments, the Lab invites participants to move from observers to co-creators of the systems, stories, and spaces around them.
At its core, the Reimagination Lab is a civic imagination incubator — a place to test bold ideas, prototype new narratives, elevate local voices, and practice shaping what oftentimes feels out of reach to deepen awareness, expand possibility, and inspire communities to shape what comes next.
This work matters because democracy requires imagination. Now more than ever. If we cannot imagine institutions and communities that reflect us, we struggle to see ourselves within them. The Reimagination Lab creates space to experiment, adapt, and build agency — reminding us that civic engagement isn’t only about responding to what exists, but actively shaping the future.
We’ll be sharing more soon on these projects and how you can join us!