The "How-to" for Creating a World that Works for All

Do you want your community, region, or state to be a place where everyone is prosperous? Where children and families can discover and use their highest potential to create abundant conditions for themselves, the community, and everyone? You won’t find many people who disagree with this aspiration, no matter where you look.

The aspiration is the easy part. Studying the situation and developing plans to get there is a bit harder, but still relatively easy work. Fulfilling our own organization’s responsibilities to the community in the face of complex challenges is often difficult, but we manage the best we can. The hardest part is getting everyone working collaboratively to create the community everyone wants, but cannot create alone. We know that closing the gap between “us” and “them,” planning and action, and between fragmented and coordinated action is the biggest obstacle to creating the communities we want.

The folks involved with the Future Search Network's Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation program share the aspiration. We’re reaching out through this blog because we have a way to enable the “hard part.” We’re writing because, though we offer a proven mechanism for enabling the creation of your prosperous community, we can’t do it alone, either. We have the process; you have the community. We have the structure; your community has the content. We have the enabler; you have the need.

Here is a short description of our part of the equation, which is a new program of the Future Search Network called Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation (PCPN). PCPN is an integrated, national application of the proven Future Search methodology focused on creating prosperity for all.* PCPN offers an unusual combination of resources:

1. A systemic methodology and a national strategy that involves relevant stakeholders in taking responsibility for action across all sectors of society.
2. A mechanism for leveraging local action in communities toward national policy change.
3. A national Network of trained practitioners who are ready, willing, and able to execute the strategy at a moment’s notice.
4. A global track record of success in most of the world’s cultures—hundreds of examples, widely documented--supported for 15 years by a largely self-financed, self-organizing system.

Recognizing that creating prosperous communities is systemic endeavor that no one sector or level of authority can accomplish alone, PCPN unites people from all walks of life in communities across the U.S. to act. Its unique approach has the capability to greatly advance efforts to spread prosperity, document real progress, and influence national policy. The strategy includes continuous cycles of:

• Leadership Capacity-Building: Prepares local leader-teams in eight communities for engaging the whole system in creating and carrying out new “prosperity” strategies.
• Eight Local Future Searches: People from all sectors discover, plan, and act upon their shared aspirations (60-80 people in each community)
• National Policy Future Search: Policy-makers from each of the local sessions come together to create policy that enables communities to create and sustain prosperity for all.*
• Evaluation: Follow up with each community to learn what they are doing together that they could not do before, what new relationships have been established among community stakeholders, progress of the projects initiated during the Future Search, etc.
• Learning Community: Connects all communities with one another from beginning to end to share progress, challenges, plans, and learning, as well as plans and progress on the national policy session.
*Can be applied regionally, statewide, or nationally.

If you’d like to enable your community, region, or state in this way, we’d love to hear from you! If your interest is in leading a national “prosperity” movement, ask about how your organization can sponsor the participation of communities you care about, giving you the visibility and them the opportunity to influence national policy. Let’s explore possibilities and make something wonderful happen in your community and the nation.

To find out more, visit http://www.futuresearch.net/prosperouscommunities or call Nancy Polend, the PCPN Program Director at (540) 937-4897.