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Overview What is it? Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation (PCPN) is a new program that uses Future Search to create strong communities across the country, and in the process, change the way the United States thinks about and addresses poverty. PCPN works with local sponsors to build local leadership capacity, engage the entire community in planning and action to create conditions that maximize the potential for all community residents to prosper, and provides the opportunity for the community’s local work to help shape a national effort to reduce poverty. In this way, local action and results produce local benefits and also serve as a means to a larger end. How does it work? Using the Future Search method as a foundation and the network of trained facilitators as a “delivery mechanism,� PCPN will engage the “whole system� in communities across the country in discovering shared history, meaning, and aspirations for a more prosperous future—common ground—and in creating practical plans for creating prosperous conditions the whole community supports and commits to implementing. Because everyone participates on equal ground, the Future Search methodology affirms the dignity of each person, faithful to the spirit of democracy, and supports the creation of plans no individual could develop or implement alone. Around the foundational Future Search engagement method, PCPN wraps a complete package of:
How is it possible for local work to influence national policy? Future Search “Prosperous Community� sessions will convene in communities across the country. Each community reaps the benefits of creating common ground, shared commitments, and concrete action strategies among broad stakeholder groups, including local, state, and Federal policy makers. Higher-level policy issues that are outside the communities’ control and that hinder their ability to create sustainable prosperity will naturally emerge during these community sessions. These discoveries will be used as the basis for subsequent “Future of Policy� Future Search sessions, in which the policy makers from all of the individual community sessions will convene using the same methodology to develop action plans for developing enabling policy. For every eight community sessions, one policy session will be convened, establishing a cycle of community-to-policy planning and action that bridges the gap between the community—where the issues of poverty are directly experienced and the implications of policy are felt—and the policy making engine, which is typically isolated from community-level realities and the implications of its policies. As these cycles continue, lasting change at the national level is inevitable.. |
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