Exciting & New & Filled with Potential (And Yes, A Little Scary…)

Last week I posted the list of all we accomplished this year. In that whole long list, there is one thing we hadn’t expected – something that became clear only when we not only considered what we had accomplished, but considered what’s next.

When we set our goals at the beginning of 2010, we had thought we could sustain the early phases of Creating the Future’s development through our consulting work. What we found, though, is that Creating the Future is taking flight more quickly than we dreamed possible. With all the accomplishments listed in that post, you can imagine how hard it has been to squeeze in time to do enough consulting to support all that!

In the past few weeks, we have had dozens of conversations with colleagues who have been intimately involved with our efforts, including many of the brilliant graduates of our immersion courses, as well as advisors from a variety of fields outside our own.

From those conversations, it is clear that Creating the Future is ready right now to develop and implement a full spectrum of programs, aiming all this sector’s work at our potential to create the world we want.  Those conversations have confirmed what we have been feeling for several months now – that building this organization’s programs by taking consulting jobs to fund the effort has inadvertently put us on the same hamster wheel we watch clients struggle to free themselves from.

Getting off the hamster wheel means taking the next step in this journey – focusing 100% of Dimitri and my time on moving this organization forward to change the sector that will change the world. No more consulting to fund it and then having no time to implement the work. Starting right now, Dimitri and I will be spending our time building the most amazing Social Change effort we could imagine.

Creating “Creating the Future”
Devoting our focus fully to Creating the Future will require a two-pronged approach for the near term.  First, we are beginning the search for 2-3 years of start-up funding, and we are confident that funding will be in place in the next 6-9 months. (If you know a venture philanthropist who wants to see this sector leverage its potential for social change, please connect us!)

However, the programs and potential at Creating the Future cannot wait until that funding is in place. Demand for every aspect of what we are aiming to do is strong enough that people are getting anxious to know why they have to wait. While this is a good thing, it is also highly frustrating for them AND for us. We could be making so much progress in creating change right now!

And so, until start-up funding is in place, Dimitri and I will be building this plane while we’re flying it – developing and running programs (some of which will generate revenues, others of which, like the #NPCons chat for example, will not), and starting a fundraising effort to maintain our initial work until the major funding is in place to hire staff and scale up.

Tomorrow we will begin that effort here at the blog, by engaging the kinds of discussions most organizations keep entirely behind closed doors – discussions of how to raise those initial operating funds (not the large pool of start-up funds, but enough to keep us going until that major funding happens).

For now, though, we wanted you to know that we are more excited than we ever dreamed possible. Committing to this work full time is the logical next step – a step that is simultaneously the most natural step possible and immensely new. And yes, a bit scary.

The comforting thing is knowing that thousands of people around the world are right here with us as we head into this venture. If we think 2010 accomplished a lot, we are giddy with the thought of what we will all accomplish together in the year ahead, as we head out at full throttle to Create the Future we want for our world.

With all of us together, there is nothing to be afraid of and everything to look forward to. And how cool is that?

Photo Info: We found the Possibilities Store in Trinidad, Colorado during our Midwest Tour last month