3DN existing organizations
Following is a comment in response to a question from Daniel Bassill of the Tutor/Mentor Connection:
By David Braden (1809), Tue, 27 Feb 2007 08:44:08 PST Comment feedback score: 3 (* * *)
- Daniel,
- let me try to explain it a different way - and please forgive me if I have misinterpreted anything about your program.
- I understand your mission to be providing a tutor/mentor for every child that needs one. There are two ways to accomplish your mission. You can increase the number of tutor/mentors or decrease the number of children that require tutor/mentors.
- The groups interested in helping you with the second approach are those advocating early childhood education, improving schools, teen pregnancy prevention, parenting training, after school programs, job training, drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration, increased jobs through economic expansion, and others. Each of these groups is "invested in what they are already doing" and also a competitor for a limited pool of funding/donors.
- What we would hope that a Network Weaver could accomplish would be to have each of these groups look up from their own work to see how success of the work of others could help fulfill their own mission. Each of these groups has multiple ways that they can accomplish their mission more efficiently through cooperation. We (collectively) can increase the number of donors and amount of donations, groups can reduce their overhead by sharing resources and combining programs, and we might be able to reduce solicitation expense in the way United Way has done (or expand the mission of United Way).
- I am advocating a new way of looking at problems. I see them as a lack of adequate connections within the value flows. The solution then is to create the new connections required. I have some ideas on how that might be accomplished but I find it counterproductive to compete with you and these other fine organizations for the attention of donors or the public at large. Instead, I propose that we expand the conversation to include everyone - take a look at what new connections are possible - an perhaps together we can build a world in which:
- Every child born to participating parents will be held, spoken and sung to, and otherwise receive the stimulation they need as infants and toddlers to allow them to learn at capacity.
- Every participant will have access to preventive medical care.
- Every participant will have adequate nutrition, clothing and shelter.
- Crime and violence will be reduced because potential criminals will have the option of participating and because the participants will be less vulnerable to victimization.
- There will be a flowering of art, music, story, and entrepreneurial spirit, because participants will not be forced to work long hours at menial jobs - they can choose to pursue their passions while they participate.
- Every such new structure will, in part, achieve abundance in food by instituting production systems that align with biological processes - increasing biological diversity - meaning that participants will live in cleaner and more biologically diverse environments - that are both healthy and beautiful.
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