Collective Imagination Seed Swap: When a Place Reimagines Herself as a Living Whole

​What happens when collective imagination is sustained long enough for a community to begin seeing itself — and its place — differently?

Drawing from three years of work in Kiwaatule, Kampala, this Seed Swap follows a community journey from imagining a better neighbourhood toward perceiving the wetland, residents, land, livelihoods, culture and future generations as one living whole. Abdul will share how neighbourhood conversations gradually became a practice of listening to the place, making meaning together and acting on what the place is asking for. Through simple participatory practices woven into the story, we will explore what becomes possible when imagination moves beyond picturing a desirable future and begins developing our capacity to participate in bringing that future into being. It's a journey from collective imagination to collective governance to collective action.

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Host: Semakula Abdul is the Instigator of the Regenar Development Initiative in Uganda. In Buganda culture, his name carries the spirit of the pangolin — a keystone species and guardian of the forest. Like the pangolin, which cannot thrive in captivity, Abdul has fed his mind on unconventional ways of knowing — intuition, systems thinking, and indigenous wisdoms — rediscovering himself as a guardian of Buganda’s biocultural consciousness and escaping the colonial, mechanistic narratives that keep communities captive to extraction.

​That journey, from web developer to civic, social, and climate innovator, was always driven by one question: What is the root cause? The answer led him to studying Regenerative Development & Design, System Evolution, Value Adding Process, at the Regenesis Institute and Finance for a Regenerative Economy at the Capital Institute — and ultimately home, to Kiwaatule, a Kampala suburb where wetlands face extinction.

​There, Kiwaatule-2030 is weaving land, stewardship, money, and wellbeing into one living governance system rooted in Obuntu by awakening bioregional consciousness one neighbourhood at a time.

​Earlier he founded an IT agency serving customers in Uganda UAE and Europe after graduating with a BSc. Computer Science.