We believe the most significant frontiers of civic engagement are inside us, calling us to challenge our limiting beliefs and being courageous enough to step fully into what has heart and meaning. The projects we’re working on that tap into passion and possibility are yielding some very practical benefits for our clients and partners.
Civic Imagination
Many social change leaders talk about the need to change the story we are telling ourselves. We totally agree! Stale stories keep us stuck in well worn grooves – such as our only options are to cut spending or raise taxes. (Short term, maybe — but longer term, we have so many other options we can explore.) But a key to inspiring beleaguered leaders and community members to embrace new stories and new possibilities is to expand the modes of connection. We need our right as well as left brains, our intuition as well as our rational minds, our hearts as well as heads. Civic imagination is about engagement that uses new modalities – art, nature, humor, self-expression – to open up latent capacities waiting to be tapped.
Participatory Prosperity
So much of our economic discussion is passive – waiting to see if someone else is going to create the jobs, growth, and programs that we want. Yet there are abundant examples of how people can “prime the pump” by taking action. It’s not just a story of individual initiative but collective initiative to envision and manifest collective prosperity.
Appreciative Advocacy
The field of appreciative inquiry starts by finding what’s working in a system and building from there. It creates a different level of possibility than “problem solving.” What if passionate advocates could also start from a place of what’s working and how they want to build on that? What if we could get them out of the marketing of crisis that seems to create short-term awareness but ultimately depletes all of us over the long term? What if there was a way to be “for” something without siphoning off precious energy to be “against” someone?
