A few weeks ago, I found myself explaining taxes to a nine-year-old.

My niece lives in Dallas. I live in New York. Every other week, we give each other the full download over Facetime. After she shared her bit, she asked about me. Unfortunately for her, I’ve spent the last year buried in U.S. tax policy. Given the timing of our call, we got into it.

I kept it simple: we work, we earn, we contribute to a shared pot that supports our schools, our roads, our social services—all the things that help us live well together. And some of that pot goes back to families to help them take care of one another. That much, she understood.

When I asked who she would count as her family — the people who would benefit from that shared pot — she listed them without pause: her mom, her dad, her step-mom, her step-dad, her grandparents, and me, her Chachu.

The harder question was how she'd prove some of these relationships to the government. She looked at me, not quite understanding. "Chachu, isn't me saying so enough?"

At nine years old, she cut straight to a core flaw in our tax system. The U.S. tax code defines family through filing status and dependency rules. But for so many people across the U.S., family is a verb. It’s the active practice of showing up for one another: paying a parent's bills, raising a sibling's child, sharing food and labor across homes. When the system can only see legal relationships, it misses millions of people — chosen families, non-romantic partners, multigenerational households — who provide care every day, excluding them from the very benefits taxes were designed to provide.

Working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we spent the better part of a year asking: what might a tax system look like that recognizes everyone who does that work?

My niece, operating outside of today's assumptions about what the system can and cannot do, could imagine it without blinking. We had to design the conditions that made that kind of imagination possible for the rest of us.

The imagination gap

Imagination is a powerful tool for transformation, but in policy reform, it’s tragically underused.

The result is policy changes that only move us incrementally forward. In tax reform, we noticed that ambition largely stops at restoring the expanded Child Tax Credit — a temporary 2021 policy during COVID-19 that increased financial support for parents with dependent children. While it’s better than what we have right now, it wouldn't go far enough to recognize or support the millions who provide care and keep families afloat.

Policymakers and academics do the rigorous and essential work of understanding the shortcomings of our systems today. Understanding what’s broken, however, is not the same from imagining what’s possible.

Throughout this project, I've been returning to Arjun Appadurai's The Capacity to Aspire. He argues that the capacity to imagine alternative futures isn't evenly distributed. Those with more power and resources have more practice doing it, and communities burdened by today’s systems do not.

We wanted to work with families most burdened by today’s system to exercise that muscle, and design gives us the tools to do that.

Five futures to free your thinking

We invited 25+ families across the country, chosen families, multigenerational households, kinship caregivers, blended and mixed-status families, to share their stories of today and to imagine beyond the present. Our conversations in peoples houses, over zoom, and in public spaces, began with participatory design activities to understand how families provide care, and how they navigate the system of today.

Across households, families described providing care that holds the social safety net together without any support from the state or relief in their taxes. By caring for aging parents, raising children across households, supporting loved ones financially, their labor, which disproportionately falls on women, low-income families, and people of color, actively keeps people out of hospitals, reduces the burden on public institutions, and keeps communities intact.

After grounding the conversation in their lived experience, we introduced five stories illustrating wildly different, speculative tax systems. To bring these stories to life, we built small worlds through illustration and narrative — giving families something they could see, feel, and react to. Because these worlds were so far from today, they suspended skepticism and invited imagination instead. The feedback shifted from criticisms of the current system to ideas, pushes, and builds toward what a completely different system could look like.

In one conversation, at a dining room table in San Francisco, we spoke with a woman who lived with her sibling's family, helping raise the children and contributing to the household's daily labor. After reading through our five future scenarios, she arrived at a more philosophical question: why do we need to prove care at all? Why should the right to be seen depend on proof?

That question, and dozens like it, is what cultivating civic imagination looks like in practice. Nobody was predicting the future. They were entertaining new perspectives, weighing tradeoffs, and imagining policy choices that would never emerge inside the logic of the current system. Their feedback, rooted in more aspirational thinking, gave us the opportunity to design a framework that would go beyond marriage, tax households, and dependents.

After grounding the conversation in their lived experience, we introduced five stories illustrating wildly different, speculative tax systems. To bring these stories to life, we built small worlds through illustration and narrative — giving families something they could see, feel, and react to. Because these worlds were so far from today, they suspended skepticism and invited imagination instead. The feedback shifted from criticisms of the current system to ideas, pushes, and builds toward what a completely different system could look like.

In one conversation, at a dining room table in San Francisco, we spoke with a woman who lived with her sibling's family, helping raise the children and contributing to the household's daily labor. After reading through our five future scenarios, she arrived at a more philosophical question: why do we need to prove care at all? Why should the right to be seen depend on proof?

That question, and dozens like it, is what cultivating civic imagination looks like in practice. Nobody was predicting the future. They were entertaining new perspectives, weighing tradeoffs, and imagining policy choices that would never emerge inside the logic of the current system. Their feedback, rooted in more aspirational thinking, gave us the opportunity to design a framework that would go beyond marriage, tax households, and dependents.

A new unit of recognition

When we started this project, we thought that people might want expanded definitions of family to qualify for tax benefits and credits. In fact, people didn’t need the system to understand everything about their family architectures. They just wanted their acts of care to be seen and supported.

What if, care, rather than legal relationships, could be the unit of recognition?

Across all the different types of caregiving being practiced, we noticed patterns that we distilled into five care modes: the Boost, the Buffer, the Pillar, Fully Responsible, and 24/7 Care. Drawn directly from how families actually practice care, they sit on a spectrum from discrete acts of support to fully holistic care: from someone who covers a sibling's rent during a rough patch, to someone who quits their job to provide full-time care for an aging parent. A caregiver might hold several modes at once, or move between them over time.

Today's system asks who you are to someone. These modes ask what you do for them. That shift from form to function is what participatory design and futuring made possible and it couldn't have come from evidence alone.

When you bring communities in as co-creators and give them the tools to imagine beyond today, the edges of possibility start to unfurl.

In tax reform, design made the system’s complex rules easier to understand, and therefore, easier to question. When families could see the logic behind who qualifies and who doesn't, they could engage with it directly by pushing back on assumptions, identifying red lines, proposing alternatives that worked within the system or went beyond it entirely.

Tax reform is just one example. The same approach applies anywhere policy is complex, consequential, and disconnected from the people it affects most: housing, healthcare, immigration. When you give communities the tools to understand a system and imagine beyond it, they can engage as active architects of their futures. That is civic imagination in practice.