A broad outline of my vision and mission for the workshop and alumni community I love
About a month ago, the core organizational team behind the workshop I lead and its alumni community had our quarterly meeting. I shared my vision and mission. I thought everyone knew it, but when I finished, they said, “You have to share this message with the alumni community.”
I was wrong: everyone didn’t know it. It was my responsibility to share it. I didn’t want to impose my views on others, but my history having started many of the projects and exploring the frontier of leadership in this area, I could see how my views could help others see beyond their horizons.
Future vision
1 year: thriving online community, self-sustaining. A core team will still manage things like the online site and new initiatives, but alumni will interact with each other and start their own initiatives.
5 year: a prominent force politically, socially, culturally
10 year: will be helping lead a national and global reconstruction, building an economy no longer based on coercive, anti-democratic practices like polluting and depleting. We will have learned from the reconstructions that followed the US Civil War (which succeeded in a few ways but failed in many) and WWII in Germany and Japan (which succeeded in more ways). We may implement truth and reconciliation committees, like after Apartheid.
Results: more freedom, liberty, community, family, mutual support. Less isolation, anxiety, corruption. Foundation in health, safety, security, longevity.
3 months: Back to the here and now, our main challenge is being a small team. We have many skills and experiences, but not in building and growing an online community. I’ve experienced allure and appeal of online communities led by people who love making them happen, sending appealing emails, making participation fun and easy, generating cross-talk. Our core team doesn’t yet have someone like that.
Three options: 1) one of core team steps up and develops skills and experiences we don’t have yet. 2) Someone from alumni team steps up. 3) We tread water, continually bringing in new workshop participants until someone joins, growing organically in the meantime.
Roles
I see two big roles this community can fill. One is the one I just described: one or more people to build and grow the online community. The other takes some background to explain because it’s big and historic.
The US was built on all being created equal, democracy, liberty, and freedom, at least in intent. It missed on slavery, which it (mostly) fixed through amendment. That fix was believed to solve some tyranny, but part of that solution exacerbated the problem. In particular, people believed that replacing some human labor with machines would decrease suffering. Instead, it delayed the suffering resulting from polluting and depleting for the couple hundred years we took to raise concentrations of plastic and other pollutants to where they hurt people globally today and to drain resources that billions of people rely on, like the Oglalla aquifer, topsoil, and rivers that no longer reach the sea.
We live when new pollution and depletion hurts people without their consent today. In this regard, not the US government nor any other protects life, liberty, and property, and they violate the principle of leaving enough, as good in common for others. These roles are part of the original intent of the founders and drafters of the Constitution, as well as Enlightendigenous thinking.
The result: governments worldwide, especially the US, don’t meet the bare minimum necessary for democracy or our own values. Meeting that bare minimum of disallowing polluting and depleting means not reverting to the Stone Age but to create “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Back to my vision, the second role is to follow in the steps of Enlightendigenous thinkers, the US founders, Abraham Lincoln, and all those who worked with them, some who made the history books and others who didn’t. This role is to be the next Abraham Lincoln: to restore a nation from its internal inconsistency and reach the bare minimum it knows is necessary but isn’t reaching for liberty, freedom, and democracy. Only with them can we overcome racism (and its subsets: antisemitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, etc), tyranny, corruption, and addiction. They all lie downstream from unsustainability, through its necessary results: imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, or collapse.
If we could end all of those things but kept living unsustainably, we’d recreate them. People mis-perceive me to be focusing narrowly on the environment, as if I were missing all those problems they see as more urgent and important. They are effects. If you want to end an effect, step one is you have to stop causing it. If you want to end imperialism, colonialism, racism, and most problems people cite to me when they say “Yes, sustainability is important. We’ll get to it soon, but first we have to solve …”
Our project is working on all of those effects. Those who aren’t even trying to live more sustainably, let alone learning to lead cultural change to restore lost values like those embodied in sayings like do unto others as you would have them do unto you, live and let live, leave it better than you found it, and love your neighbor as yourself, are causing the problems they want to solve, however unwittingly.
Our Project Today
Many workshop alumni have found it transformative, though not all. I see our project like Airbnb, Lyft, or Uber when they started. Airbnb was a few people who knew how to build a bare-bones site, then getting friends to throw a mattress on their floor when someone used the site to book a room. Objections must have seemed overwhelming, especially the risks of robbery, theft, property destruction, rape, assault, and more. Who would have believed it could become viable, let alone redefine an industry. It offers more listings than the top five hotel brands combined. Uber and Lyft give far more rides than taxis.
Airbnb isn’t better than Hilton or Four Seasons. It created a different service. Its founders didn’t start with skills or experience like customer services, legal, community relations, and others necessary for long-term success. They learned some themselves, hired for others, failed many times, but overall succeeded.
Our workshop and growing community is like early Airbnb. We will redefine industries, and not just environmentalism. We will redefine industries opposing racism, imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, corruption, addiction, and slavery, as well as those promoting liberty, freedom, and democracy. Yes, the workshop needs refining and the team needs new skills and experience, but we deliver value to participants unavailable anywhere else and can deliver on a brighter future for culture and humanity. We will grow to deliver these things. It will take work but that work will be fun and rewarding. We will also generate more than enough revenue to sustain ourselves paying salaries as an ongoing business. We will create legacies that will endure generations, even centuries.
Next steps and hurdles
Our two biggest hurdles: 1) We have not yet hit critical mass: a minimum number of participants and alumni to make the community self-sustaining. 2) We lack at least one person with the skills, experience, and passion to build our online community to where it sustains and grows on its own.
It’s healthy and no problem for us to tread water—that is, to keep organizing events and bringing more people in through the workshop. Still, I can’t wait to see when we overcome these hurdles and see runaway growth in number of participants, all collectively growing liberty, freedom, democracy, health, security, safety, family, community, and other lost values.
Retry later