I am a change agent and bridge-builder who is fully committed to doing what it takes to fully step into my highest path of service. I recognize that the bridge from a world of poverty, violence, and polarization to one of abundance, peace, and unity at the societal level is simply the “horizontal” version of the same “vertical” path we as individuals take toward becoming our higher—and truer—selves.  It is the same bridge, turned on its side and involving all of humanity.  In this sense, I can only make a difference at the societal level to the extent I am transforming myself via the vertical path.

I am starting my first book and thought I'd put the premise out there to see what folks think... --- More and more people are realizing that we have created a world that now threatens our very existence. At the same time, a vision of a better world for all is emerging. Realizing with great urgency that we need to fundamentally change our world in order to create and live in the new one, we find ourselves with a dilemma. We don’t know how. This book explores the terrain to be traversed and offers a concrete way to engage people across the country in building the bridge from a world of poverty, violence, and polarization to a prosperous Earth Community of abundance, peace, and unity. --- It is true, I really do have the people, a proven method with a long track record of succes, and the strategy ready to go. Tomorrow. Sounds grandiose, I know, but I'm here to say it CAN be done. This book will be all about it and I am writing it while launching the action program at the same time. Anyway...any thoughts on this premise?

I have been hired as a contractor to build a bridge. The bridge will span between this world and the next. On this side, the world is dark, fearful, and dangerous. On the other, it is bright, loving, and peaceful. There are many people building this bridge with me. I am only one, and there are more on the way. We all have different talents, tools, and pieces of the bridge to build. It will take all of us expressing the full array of our talents to build the bridge in time. It will take all of our tools, as well. Though we bring different things to this project, we all have one thing in common. We are all under contract by God. He gave us this project out of His love for us, that we might live in a world that reflects that love. That we might live, period. We know that the bridge needs to be built now, in order to save us from the world on this side. We need somewhere else to go when this one crumbles under the darkness we’ve created on this leg of our journey. We must create this bridge and the world to which it leads in order to continue our journey. We stand at the edge of this world, seeing a world of harmony across the divide. We have only to span it to live in that world. And so, we must do the work. We have received our call and signed our contracts. We have mined the raw materials for the bridge from our hearts. We have obtained the tools to build the bridge from our minds and from our experiences. And now, we are in diligent production, focusing clearly on our goal. We work so that we can take as many of our brothers and sisters across before it is too late. As we build the bridge with our hearts, using the tools of our minds, we build the beginnings of the world on the other side. After all, the bridge must lead us somewhere better. Somewhere functional, adaptable, sustainable. Somewhere different from here. Somewhere where our beliefs and behaviors support Life. Life, which is naturally functional, adaptable, and sustainable, does not need us. We need it. Come. Join in. There is nothing more important or more wonderful you could be doing right now.

I saw these two videos recently. They speak to the shift that is most definitely occurring. This is the shift that Future Search and Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation can enable.

The Future Search method is a healing process. It brings diverse people together to discover that they live in the same world and worry about the same things, understand their differences, take responsibility for themselves, find shared meaning and aspirations for the future, and make commitments that will help the whole create the future it envisions. By working directly with people who have different experiences, knowledge, needs, and information within a process that validates all perspectives and uses differences as information, not as problems, people experience a shift in their fundamental understanding of “what is” and their own place within it. Experiencing this kind of perceptual shift is common in all healing, and becomes the basis for new, healthier ways to handle the situation at hand, whatever it may be. By using this healing process across the country and focusing it on poverty, I believe it will heal individuals, communities, and the nation of long-standing mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds, which now need to be healed for the good of us all. It is a way back to wholeness, which we are all seeking. It is a way back to unity by finding our common ground, back to empathy by exploring our common fears and suffering, back to hope by uncovering our shared aspirations for the future, and back to our shared humanity by implementing plans we ourselves created from having done so. It is a way to connect with each other on our ultimate common ground—as children of God—to create a world in which our differences are known simply as avenues for us to experience more of the whole than we would otherwise be able to. These are things we’ve lost or forgotten and it is time to find them and remember. Doing so can only bring good things to all of us. For these reasons, this work is healing work. Most of the solutions to poverty we’ve grappled with as a society focus on the external world, which is only the manifestation of our inner worlds. Nothing happens externally that was not first born as a thought, and we’re the only ones here having them, so we must acknowledge that we’re the ones creating the world we live in. The question is: Is this what we want? Do we want all that comes as a result of poverty? I believe if we asked the whole nation this last question, we would find vast agreement—among the rich and the poor, the bureaucrat and the advocate, the employed and the unemployed, the young and the old, the conservative and the liberal, the black, white, yellow, and red, the professional and the layperson. This represents powerful common ground from which we could start if we could simply resist our tendency to begin from a position of conflict about our differences. When we focus first (and sometimes exclusively) on our differences, and think of them as problems or obstacles rather than information that will help us, we deny ourselves the opportunity to find common ground upon which lasting solutions are discovered. In our inner worlds, we have isolated ourselves from the problem and each other—it feels safer to us that way. As long as we isolate ourselves from the problem, we isolate ourselves from the solution, and therefore have no right to complain about how the ripple effects of poverty affect us. So, although our external interventions may be necessary, they are not sufficient. To attempt to fix on the outside that which is born in thought on the inside is a self-defeating endeavor, so long as what we continue to think about poverty points us in the direction of keeping it in place. As long as we—individually or collectively—feel that poverty is someone else’s problem, feel anger toward those living in poverty or toward those that we feel are responsible for “fixing” it, feel overwhelmed by and hide behind the complexity of the problem, and focus our energy exclusively on the differences we have, it gives power to the very things we don’t want to remain in place. What we focus on, we get. If we focus on an individual’s or institution’s ineptness or irresponsibility, we will be rewarded by ineptness and irresponsibility, and we ourselves are affected by it. If we focus on fighting something or someone, we will be rewarded by having that someone fight back, as well as many more opportunities to fight. This defeats our whole purpose for starting the fight in the first place; we started it so that we could resolve something, but we end up spending more energy on the fighting than we do on finding the solutions we so desperately want. The result for us is that we now have two problems—the original one and the one created by the fight. At best, this is a colossal waste of energy. At worst, it does harm to ourselves and others by way of anger, stress, and dis-ease that perpetual conflict creates. Somewhere in between, using fighting and adversarial approaches to create caring behaviors in others is just garden-variety hypocrisy. It would be one thing if we could get the results we seek by ourselves—we’d just do it. But, as long as we need others to get those results, it does us absolutely no good to ask for their help by throwing a punch. To think everything would be okay if only “those other people” would just get their act together is to forget that we are all “other people” to someone. When we’re all demanding from each other answers that no one has individually, it isn’t surprising that we feel angry and helpless—angry at them for not having the answers, and helpless because we don’t, either. On the practical level, whatever gains we might make with our well-meaning external interventions will be repeatedly subsumed by the power of these and other thoughts that keep poverty in place. We may succeed in raising the minimum wage, but if we continue to think that minimum wage jobs and the people who hold them are not valuable, we will leave in place other societal structures that sustain poverty. We may succeed in helping those living in poverty understand their responsibility in making their own way, but if we continue to think they alone can address the systemic and structural contributors to poverty, we are still only addressing part of the problem. We may be successful in our individual strategies, whatever they may be, but if we continue to think we can solve a systemic problem using singular, separate approaches (no matter how good they are), we will continue to do lots of noble work without seeing the kind of progress that work intends. In other words, unless we change our fundamental thoughts about poverty on a national scale, we will be perpetually running on the treadmill of progress—expending huge amounts of energy and money to ultimately go nowhere. Changing our fundamental beliefs from which our strategies are born will not only create new strategies, but it will also help create commitment to some of the individual strategies we’ve been working so hard to make work; it will give them the support they need to finally take hold. Changing thoughts and the more embedded ones we call beliefs require an experience or set of experiences strong enough to dislodge our current beliefs. Sometimes this takes a long time. Sometimes it happens in an instant. Many times, the change happens somewhere in between. Most of us have experienced this continuum in our own lives, when our own minds were being changed or when we’ve seen other people’s minds changed. Though a law may have us “fake it ‘til we make it,” being told to change our minds may make us change our outward behavior, it usually creates sufficient power to change our beliefs only after we’ve “faked it” long enough to make it rote. We can certainly tell someone or an institution that they are affected by poverty, that they have a role in the problem and in the solution, and that they and everyone would benefit from its solution. We can write about it, support our positions with data, politicize it, and speak with passionate conviction, but it is unlikely to change many minds. Because it is impossible for any of us individually to experience what it’s like to have the experience, knowledge, needs, background, or influence of the whole, the closest we can come to such an experience is to have the whole system in the same room—supported by a neutral, empowering process—actively working as a whole to map our shared history, interconnectedness, differences, shared fears and aspirations, and to tap into our individual and collective capacity to create a future better than the one we will have if we do nothing different. This experience happens in a Future Search session. Though there are many examples of convening diverse groups around complex, high conflict issues, we never seem to stick with it long enough to get past our differences—where common ground is waiting—and on to the task of collaborative planning and action. Future Search’s main goal is to keep the group whole long enough to get past its differences. We experience for ourselves that our own experience is significantly limited when compared to the whole. We hear, feel, see, and create things in a Future Search that we would have no way of experiencing in our isolated or adversarial environments. This is where the true magic begins—when we’ve identified, validated, and acknowledged our differences, and in so doing, have also exposed our common ground, we find that we are now motivated to work together to create a future that benefits all involved. We consciously and publicly acknowledge our differences, and we either use them to help us frame what we’d like to act upon or we literally put them aside. When we put them aside, we do so knowing we don’t have enough support or energy for these ideas to create the kind of commitment needed to move forward on them. By neither denying or invalidating these differences, they serve as boundaries to what we can hope to achieve together, but they do not divide us. At this point, just acknowledging and documenting our differences without having to defend them helps us more clearly focus our action planning on only those things we agree on. It is comforting to know we aren’t wasting our time planning action for things that have little support and therefore little chance of success. From here, it is quite energizing to move into the action planning segment of the Future Search experience. People from multiple stakeholder groups who have the most energy for a particular planning goal work together to flesh out its action components, and often these cross-functional groups create ongoing task forces who are responsible for the plan’s implementation in the community. Since people rarely resist plans they make themselves, implementation and follow through are among the many benefits the Future Search experience brings that other approaches do not. How many times have we used approaches that produce perfectly rational plans that no one wants to or can implement? Using Future Search as an experience- and action-based mechanism to change our thoughts and beliefs about poverty and to create new plans for addressing it may not ultimately get us all the way home, either. But I believe the chances are infinitely better when we engage the whole system in solving a whole-system problem than when we attempt it from our individual corners of the universe. When we allow, validate, and inventory all voices, experiences, knowledge, needs, and information, we have vastly more information to work with than any discrete part of the system could possibly have. When we are all involved in developing the plans that we ourselves will act upon, we create stronger commitment than any “outside expert” could ever produce. At the very least, we will gather together in rooms across the country with the goal of creating more prosperous conditions for us all, and it will get us closer to that goal, whether in terms of material things or spirit. From the financial and moral perspective, our country cannot afford to remain on the treadmill any longer and from the spiritual perspective, our individual and collective psyches can no longer reconcile the gap between what we all want—peace, love, and abundance, and what we create—war, hate, and poverty. This work is healing work.

What do you get when you combine a proven method for creating system-wide collaborative action on important societal issues, the ability to deploy hundreds of trained facilitators to enable communities across the country, a strategy for linking and leveraging community-level results to create national change, and a neutral non-profit organization from which to launch all this? You get a “Movement Machine” for creating positive change on a national scale. The Future Search Network’s new program, Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation (PCPN), is a “movement machine” focused on creating prosperous communities and in the process, fundamentally changing the way the U.S. thinks about and addresses poverty. Having demonstrated for two decades that Future Search creates ripples of collaborative change on a wide range of issues in communities across the globe, FSN is now ready to demonstrate that it can create national, systemic change for addressing poverty by applying the method nationwide in a cohesive, organized way. Several national organizations are seriously considering using PCPN as a way to help them achieve their missions for improving the lives of families, children, and communities living in poverty. They see it as an enabler for their organizations' mission (e.g. as a transistor that plugs into their mission that powers it up.) Beyond the fact that FSN has the method, the people, and the organization tailor-made to create systemic change, it is taking this step to launch a national endeavor because: • There is no national “mandate” to reduce poverty, despite the increasingly high stakes the nation faces if it does nothing different. The health of the economy and the ability to ensure national security is threatened in proportion to the prevalence of poverty, and yet we have not made addressing it a national priority. • The “American Dream” is at stake. Despite working full-time, many people are still unable to provide the basic necessities for their families. As more and more families find themselves in this circumstance, the harder it is to honestly claim that our founding principles are valid. This threatens the very foundation upon which our nation was founded. • Poverty is a systemic issue that affects everyone, but we have not approached it systemically. Systemic problems require systemic thinking and action. Since no one sector (e.g. the government, faith organizations, human services, education, etc.) or individual (e.g. persons living in poverty) can solve a systemic problem alone, expectations that they can or should are unrealistic. Therefore, our current approach as a nation is fundamentally flawed. • Dozens of organizations and communities have stated their concern and commitment to action for addressing poverty, but have no feasible avenue or vehicle with which to act. Many organizations want to address poverty, but few have the capacity, method, or reach to create the kind of systemic change necessary to do so. FSN’s PCPN program offers these combined abilities as a resource to organizations and communities in this situation. The bottom line is this: We know as a nation we have a problem that needs to be solved for the good of us all. We have the methodology that provides the structure for creating system-wide commitment and action. We have the people to deploy to support communities nationwide in the collaborative work that needs to be done. It has the track record proven to create ripples of lasting improvements. It has the neutral organization that allows it to act as an unbiased enabler for communities of people to create the future they want. And, it has a strategy for tying it all together in a way that creates a whole that is larger than the sum of these parts. So, we have a systemic problem that affects us all and a mechanism that engages the whole system to solve it. What we need now are people in communities interested in creating prosperous futures for themselves and the corporate, public, or private sponsors to fund the work. If you would like to explore how you can be a part of this exciting endeavor, please contact me at nancy@futuresearch.net or at (540) 937-4897. Find out more about Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation at: http://www.futuresearch.net/prosperouscommunities/index.cfm

[This is me speaking to a national faith organization about a concrete way to enable communities and the nation to create prosperity for all.] There is a fundamental flaw in the way we think about and address poverty in the U.S. and beyond. The systemic, complex nature of poverty requires systemic thinking, planning, and action. Yet, over the last 40+ years since the “War on Poverty,” we have approached it with individual strategies initiated and carried out by individual sectors of society. No one person, organization, political party, program, or sector of society has the answer, nor can any of these individual parts understand “the whole,” be responsible for it, or act to solve it alone. This means the answer is not IN any one place; it is AMONG us. It means we need an approach that brings diverse people together to discover they live in the same world, worry about the same things, understand their differences, take responsibility, find shared meaning and aspirations for the future, and make commitments and act to create that future. It means we need to fundamentally change the way we interact and solve problems as a society. Several years ago, I managed a large project to develop a model to change the way we think about and address poverty. During the project, I learned about the structural and systemic nature of the problem. I also recognized that we have never approached poverty systemically. As the project ended, I began feeling a deep calling to be of service toward a solution beyond “giving fish, teaching how to fish, and studying the pond.” I wanted to CHANGE THE WATER. Luckily, I knew of a way to do that. I am just getting started in my blogging, but trust me, you will be seeing alot more on the national, community-based action strategy to change the way the U.S. thinks about and addresses poverty I am leading. This action strategy, in which anyone reading could concretely participate in and/or help get fully launched, is called Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation (http://www.futuresearch.net/prosperouscommunities/index.cfm). It is a special program of the Future Search Network, 350 members on every continent and home of Future Search, a proven, whole-system action planning method. FSN members are united by a motivation to serve society while cooperating and learning together. Our mission is making the world a better place—more open, whole, and sustainable for everyone. We have been offering Future Searches worldwide in any language or culture for whatever people can afford. My hope is that by bringing information about this program (my calling) into the blog-space, people everywhere will become involved and together get this "movement machine" rolling.