Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future (BK Currents) - Softcover

Stout, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605098825 ISBN 13: 9781605098821

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

It’s an unfortunate fact of social organizing that, despite even the best intentions, groups convened to effect positive change often fail to empower people from all backgrounds to speak up or to tap into a positive and inspiring collective vision. Longtime social justice crusader Linda Stout details a practical process that enables everyone—even those commonly marginalized—to work together with honesty, passion, commitment, and joy to create a positive, energizing, and sustainable vision and to make that vision a reality.

Stout shows, in practical terms, how to bring a group together, build trust, ensure that each and every voice is heard, create a positive vision, and develop an action plan that leverages everyone’s abilities to bring that vision to fruition. Used successfully by more than 120 organizations—and illustrated here by dozens of practical examples and exercises—this process creates hope for change, even among those who’ve stopped believing that change is possible. This comprehensive guide will serve as a template for anyone seeking to create a better, more just tomorrow.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Linda Stout is founder and director of Spirit in Action. She previously led the Piedmont Peace Project in North Carolina, which won the National Grassroots Peace Award, and is the author of Bridging the Class Divide.

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introduction
Creating a Different Future

This book is for all of us looking for a different, more fulfilling, and sustainable way to work that creates real and lasting change for ourselves and future generations.

In Collective Visioning, you will learn how to create a vision with others of the world you want to live in and how to work together to make it happen. This is a guide to how to change your community, your organization, your faith group, your school, and beyond. I know collective visioning works for many different kinds of people and organizations because I’ve used it with so many different groups: small gatherings of junior high school students in New Orleans after Katrina, urban immigrant communities, activists in Iowa, hundreds of churches and spiritual gatherings, students at Ivy League universities, networks of educators, and folks working (with stunning success) to get out the vote in North Carolina, among many others.

In my work for justice over the past thirty years, I have seen many amazing accomplishments. In the chapters to come I will tell you the stories of how some of them happened. At the same time, I know that many things have continued to get worse for many people and that there is greater poverty, homelessness, and economic and environmental crises than we’ve seen in many decades. Yet I hold enormous hope about creating a future that works for us all.

Understanding the value and power of collective vision-ing for the future of our communities and our world is critical to our ability to inspire others to move to action. Many of us who have worked for change have been focused on problems and creating strategies and plans to address these problems. By always focusing on the problems, we get locked into patterns of negativity and critique, not allowing ourselves the ability to look at the bigger picture or set goals that inspire and help us and others through the hard work of change. Our focus is on what we are against rather than what we are for. People who join in the struggle for change often come from a place of anger and fear. This makes emotional sense given the urgency of current problems, but it isn’t sustainable for the long haul.

Authors Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson point out in their book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, that the majority of people in this country hold positive values: a concern about the environment, peace, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. At the same time, their research found that a lot of these people are turned off by movements on both the right and the left, which they see as extremist, negative, and judgmental.

As a result of these perceptions, many people who care about the environment and social justice stay away from organizations in favor of individual actions such as volunteering, carrying a cloth bag to the grocery store, recycling, donating food, or working for a food bank on holidays. While all of these actions are important and worthy, we need efforts that inspire people to address the larger root problems we face.

When people vision together, they get excited and become much more invested in creating the future of their dreams. They begin to take more ownership in their organization, school, or community and take on responsibility for the plan they create together. They begin to say “we” and “our” and feel that they are a critical part of the process. They volunteer to do more and are more accountable than is usually seen in groups that are not grounded in a collective vision and action plan. People develop a deep sense of community and connection. The work comes from a place of joy and hope.

In Spirit in Action, my current organization, we have experienced this many times in the work of building networks. It’s amazing to see how many people step forward to help when times get tough. They also help each other, sharing resources and skills. These are much more connected and deeper networks than most. Those in a group share a sense of being part of a community, a family, even though people in most of our networks are scattered across the country.

When we ground our work in a collective positive vision, the process builds a strong and connected community. Not only are we more successful in winning the issues, we transform ourselves, our communities, and beyond. We look at what we need to do in a more cooperative, resourceful, and inclusive way than when we are focused on just fixing problems. While we take into consideration urgent and current issues, our ongoing action, based on a collective vision, is strategic and intentional. Not only does visioning guide our work, it inspires and motivates people to stay in it for the long haul despite the hardships. It leads us toward lasting, proactive, positive action for change.

We need to work together to come up with a collective vision for what is possible, identify seeds of hope already planted, and then learn how to make real and lasting change. We need to acknowledge and heal from our fears—the fear of others, of global warming, of terrorist attacks, and of losing our identities—and learn how to transform these fears into real action for change.

Most of us will need to relearn what it means to live in a community, that is, a diverse community that goes beyond our usual circle of friends or those who think just like us. If we understand what we can gain from being part of deep, connected, and diverse communities, we can learn how to work in a way that is joyful, fulfilling, and life sustaining.

I’ve witnessed this kind of work, and sometimes I’ve been part of making it happen. I want to make it easier for you to be part of it, too. When people vision collectively, their achievements are amazing. For example,

• In North Minneapolis, people have a vision of reclaiming and rebuilding their neighborhood from a place of violence and decay into a place of community involvement, beauty, and safety. Their vision is to have all children born in the community be prepared for college when they graduate from high school. Not only are people from the community committed to this goal, but also elected officials (including the mayor), artists, businesspeople, and many others are working together to make this vision a reality. They have already bought many foreclosed homes and rebuilt them as sustainable green homes and have rebuilt businesses owned and controlled by community people. They have also created a youth art center, an arts park, a youth-run bakery, and a community theater with youth involvement and training.

• A poor community in Tallulah, Louisiana, fought for over ten years to close down one of the most abusive, oppressive prisons in the country—a prison that incarcerated young people. After community members won this important fight, the state immediately voted to reopen the prison as an adult penitentiary. Not until the community members turned to visioning—“What do we want instead of a prison?”—were they successful in getting the state to vote to close down the prison with the idea of turning it into a community college.

• Children in New Orleans changed the way new schools are being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina to include community gardens, green space for outdoor classes, restorative justice circles, and cafeterias that serve healthy food and have hand-washing stations.

I will tell you more about how collective visioning worked in New Orleans and Tallulah later in the book.

Imagine if these examples were all seeds. What could happen if our whole country worked together collectively to grow these seeds into nationwide and worldwide actions?

Imagine if we could mobilize to elect leaders dedicated to real democracy, leaders who...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605098825
• ISBN 13: 9781605098821
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Berrett-Koehler; https://www.dc.com/tv; ; 1333 Broadway Suite P-100; Oakland; CA; 94612; USA
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