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Prosperous Communities, Prosperous Nation:
- Starts at the community level, where the people know what supports, strategies, or solutions they need to fully address local poverty and increase prosperity for all.
- Engages the "whole system," to include broad participation, including residents, members of multiple sectors the community itself identifies, including local, state, and Federal policy makers.
- Was created for the express purpose of helping people go beyond problem-solving to make systemic improvements in their communities. It has been employed with virtually all social, technological, and economic issues in North and South America, Africa, Australia, Europe, India and South Asia. People achieve four outputs from a single session--shared values, a plan for the future, concrete goals, and an implementation strategy.
- Uses a methodology thatis proven to enable cooperation in complex situations of high conflict and uncertainty. The method relies on tested principles for helping people collaborate despite differences of culture, class, gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, and education. Because it is culture free, requiring only that participants share their experiences, it has helped thousands of people carry out action plans once considered impossible.
- Is proven to produce positive outcomes. Hundreds of communities have created action plans and high commitment to implementing the plans they create using this approach already. Participants often start implementing plans they claimed were unthinkable before and achieve long-lasting outcomes.
- Creates broad responsibility for action. It differs from so-called "town hall" meetings because participants walk away with plans that they created, they supported, and that they can realistically implement together.
- Bridges the gap between communities and policy. Among the broad stakeholder groups, PCPN includes the participation of local, state, and Federal policy makers in continuous cycles of community-to-policy planning and action.
- Builds community-by-community to create national impact. As cycles of community-to-policy sessions continue, several thousands of residents in dozens of communities across the country and hundreds of policy makers--all focusing on addressing poverty and creating prosperity in new ways--will have actively participated, making lasting change at the national level inevitable.
Taken together, these characteristics translate into several "at leasts" that are not seen in other approaches, any of which differentiate this program from others.
- We would at least have the whole system working on the issue, which is systemic itself.
- The plans that affect the whole system would at least be created by the whole system using information from the whole system.
- The high level of commitment to implementation that has already been demonstrated will at least increase the likelihood that the plans lead to real change.
- The community-to-policy cycle will at least ensure that the people making the policies have the opportunity to directly experience community realities before going back into their policy community to develop policies intended to enable sustainable community prosperity.
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