Creating the Future’s Community Engagement planning work will continue on Friday, July 11th at 9am Pacific time. To participate in that meeting (or to just watch) scroll to the bottom of this screen for details.
If you are just tuning in to our Community Engagement Planning process, welcome! To prepare you and provide some background, the following will be helpful.
Our Work to Date
The process we are using for this discussion comes from the causality framework we use for everything at Creating the Future. First we describe the future we want the plan to help us create. Then we establish the conditions that will lead to that success. From there, the actions described by the plan will aim to create those conditions for success.
During Meeting #2 (you can watch that here) our planning narrowed the focus of our discussion. In Meeting #1 we had talked in the aggregate about what we hoped such a plan would accomplish. In Meeting #2, we first listed all the various groups we intend to engage.
- Creating the Future’s board members
- Creating the Future Fellows
- Potential fellows
- Participants in our online communities for consultants
- Participants in meetings
- Recipients of our general newsletter
- Podcast listeners and guests
- Potential funding partners
- Potential demonstration partners
During Meeting #2 the group chose to focus first on Creating the Future’s fellows. We defined the ultimate end results we hoped to accomplish by more deeply engaging our fellows. What could such engagement make possible for our fellows, and for our own work?
What would engaging our fellows make possible for the fellows themselves?
• They would get re-inspired
• Reinforce their skills
• Build confidence
• Provide a safe environment when they don’t feel confident
• Build community
• Help transition beyond the honeymoon, to the real world
• Help with new language
• A place to share / rant when things aren’t going well
• A place to normalize and provide support for each other
• Deepening of their practice as a way of being
• Reducing the feeling of dependence on Hildy as they are practicing and being supported by other fellows
What would engaging our fellows make possible for Creating the Future’s work?
• Our fellows are a pool of tremendous talent and skill and resource and connection
• Catalysts – our fellows are the ones helping others transform their work and their community
• Our fellows are the ones conveying the practice into the world
• Our fellows potential to engage others in this work.
• The ability to move the mission forward beyond the founders
The group then spent time determining the conditions that would lead to that success. They talked about safe space, about humility and vulnerability, about sharing stories, about the need for practice with new language – about the need to practice overall. The group also talked about the need to meet people where they are, addressing our fellows at every point along the Continuum of Potential, creating a range of pathways for their participation. (For the full list of all the conditions we listed, click here).
This Upcoming Meeting #3
At Meeting #3, we will turn those conditions into actions, asking, “What actions can we take to create those conditions, for our fellows and for Creating the Future?” We will calendar and assign those actions, creating a list of who will do what, by when. And if there is time, we will begin the cycle all over again with the next group we want to engage!
Friday’s meeting will be where the rubber hits the road, and that is always a lively discussion. We hope you’ll share your thoughts with us during that conversation!
The video for Meeting #3 will appear right here when the meeting begins at 9am PT on Friday, July 11th (if we’re a bit late, please be patient. Between technology and trying to gather people from around the globe, sometimes we aren’t precisely on time). To participate via Twitter, please tweet to us using the hashtag #CTFuture. We look forward to seeing you!