Career Pathways Out of Poverty

Career Ladder: Helping Inner City Youth Through School to Careers
View the presentation here.

[Go to the I-Open Blog here to read the complete article.]

Invest in Tutor/Mentoring Programs - Connect Tomorrow's Leaders to Careers

What are “all the things we need to know, and do”, to assure that youth born or living in high poverty areas of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York City, etc. are starting jobs and careers out of poverty by their mid 20’s?

Q: Do you have a group of people in your community asking this question?

Support Urban Youth Through School to a Career

Learn about the four steps your community can take to accelerate economic prosperity in your neighborhood. Get started by building local career pathways for urban youth to ensure a life-time of success for tomorrow's leaders.

Mentoring Kids to Careers
View the presentation here.

How To Get Started

Step One: Map the Pathways

Are there people in your community creating graphics like this (right) to illustrate the goal of helping kids move from first grade through high school, post High School and then into jobs?

Read the complete article at the I-Open Blog here.

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Author Daniel F. Bassill, D.H.L., President & Founder, Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, has been leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in Chicago since 1974. Today's article focuses on the questions he has been asking in his own on-going efforts to help Chicago youth benefit from well-organized, long-term, tutoring/mentoring programs. 

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Ensure education, economic and workforce development services such as knowledge sharing, communications and engagement for a network of community and economic developers. Send your donation to I-Open by clicking on the secure PayPal donate button below.

Indigenous Wisdom for 21st Century Leadership

Chief Red Cloud 1922-1909

Makhpia-sha Oglala

Photo 1897 David F. Barry

[Go to the I-Open Blog here to read the complete article.]

Have you ever heard someone - and in my experience it is rarely a person with an indigenous background, upbringing or understanding - say something about living in ways that honor the seventh generation?

It is a phrase I have heard repeatedly in some circles, spoken by people with very honorable intentions. It’s a phrase I used myself for many years without truly understanding its meaning.

In conversations about the future I would say things like: We need to consider how this decision will impact people seven generations from now.

And in so saying, I'd think that I had made a comprehensible statement capable of creating change when I saw heads nodding around me.

Rarely did I, or the people with whom I was speaking, have even the vaguest idea of how something we were doing now would impact someone 140 years from now, or have the slightest notion of what an effective way of judging our actions in that context would be.

The idea of the seventh generation sounded good, but did not really have much traction when it came to the way I lived my life on a day-to-day basis.

Then in the early 1990s I encountered the work of a woman who would later become a personal teacher to me for a very brief time - Paula Underwood - who was called too soon from this world...

Read the rest of the article at the I-Open Blog here.

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Author Ken Homer is the founder of Collaborative Conversations: Include More Voices - Make Better Choices. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area designing conversations for groups small and large. More information can be found at his website www.collaborativeconversations.com

Learn how conversations yield awareness and insight for 21st century business enlightenment. Meet Ken in the video Oral Traditions, below.

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Ensure education, economic and workforce development services such as knowledge sharing, communications and engagement for a network of community and economic developers. Send your donation to I-Open by clicking on the secure PayPal donate button below.

Q & A: the Wisdom of Peter Block

Connected communities convene to build trust and respect. 
Photo: Midtown Brews, 2009, Cleveland, Ohio USA

At the core, economic development requires people to engage in sustained relationships of trust, collaboration, and bringing ideas to action. Thinking, doing, and learning together.

Few people have devoted more of their time and thinking to the building of community in recent years, than Peter Block.  His best-selling books on Flawless Consulting and Stewardship reveal a unique mind at work.  It's been my privilege and pleasure to attend several conferences and workshops where Peter has presented and taught.

One key insight that Peter shares, is especially useful for us in supporting community and regional economic development networks:

"Questions bring us together.  Answers drive us apart."

What do we want to do together? Who needs to be with us to do it? What do we need to know, and have, to enable us to act? How will we know the results of our efforts, and learn as we go?

What do YOU think?

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Blogger Bruce Waltuck earned an M.A. in Complexity, Chaos, and Creativity (yes, really), is an Associate at the Plexus Institute and a Member of the New Jersey Association of Professional Mediators. Check out Bruce's, "Leadership, Abundance and Complexity in Human Systems", the #3 video at I-Open in 2013 (above). Learn more about complexity, change, leadership and dialogue by subscribing to Bruce's blog, Complexified and following him on Twitter at Complexified. 

Support I-Open
Ensure education, economic and workforce development services such as knowledge sharing, communications and engagement for a network of community and economic developers. Send your donation to I-Open by clicking on the secure PayPal donate button below.