C O N T E N T S

INTRODUCTION

ACADEMIC PROGRAM
MASTER'S DEGREE
TRAINING PROGRAMS

COUNTRY PROGRAMS

PROCESS OF CHANGE

LEARNING CENTER

ABOUT US

NEWS

FUN ITEMS

Introduction

Communities can be helped to respond proactively to the growing challenges of global change. Nongovernmental organizations and all levels of government can be catalysts and partners in this capacity-building process. Future Generations offers these organizations short-term training programs on community-based change.

These programs all start with and build upon the SEED-SCALE model. They are then customized to fit the needs of the trainees and the sponsoring organization or institution. Programs can include study tours, residential instruction, hands-on applications, intensive lecture style training, distance learning, or a combination. They can occur at relevant field sites, locations chosen by the sponsoring organization, commercial venues, or any appropriate combination of places. They can explore specific types of issues, such as primary health care, economic development, and environmental conservation.

The purpose of these training programs is to teach people how to direct the change that confronts their communities and to address community needs by drawing from their own resources. Communities learn how to take momentum and success and make it grow with each year with more sophistication in meeting community needs.

Curricula for training programs focus on best practice in the field of community-based change. The Future Generations system is described in the <Our Approach> section of the website. It is informed by extensive applied scholarship in community development, our continuing field trials at sites around the world, and by faculty, staff, and students involved in our Master's Degree in Applied Conservation and Community Development. This same evolving knowledge base provides the foundation for tailoring training programs to meet specific community and organizational needs.

For additional information contact:

Future Generations
HC 73 Box 100, North Mountain
Franklin, West Virginia 26807
Email: <info@future.org >
Phone: 304.358.2000

The General Framework

Today we have a range of tools to improve lives—from health services to economic options to actions to improve the environment to better ways of transport, the list has almost no end. Where we come up short is how to take advantage of these options, especially if we are poor. Individuals most commonly are isolated from the new tools—be they immunizations, information, affordable credit, or technology—because they cannot attain needed critical mass to access the resource. Historically humanity's most successful answer to achieving critical mass was to work through communities: create community-based change where improvements lift individuals in accord with local economics, ecology, and culture.

Future Generations has identified a replicable, rapid, and reliable process by which communities can take advantage of the tools of modern life. It is not a new process—for we identified the process by examining hundreds of case studies around the world—but it does seem to be a widely applicable system for finding locally specific solutions at the community level. With the system communities can take advantage of the diversity of available new "tools for better living."

Future Generations is teaching this system to communities in large field trials in China, India, Peru, and Afghanistan. These efforts often begin with entry points and early successes in such areas as primary health care, literacy, and income generation strategies, and quickly expand to address poverty, environmental factors, and social organization. We have developed a curriculum and ways to teach community-based change. The next step for interested communities and organizations is to identify sites and "classrooms" where this system can be taught.

As "an international school for communities," we are ready to partner with educational and other institutions around the world and share what we know of the curriculum and how to teach it. We welcome partners and collaborating institutions in a variety of countries that will become nodal points for the training and adaptation of this process.

The Future Generations system is a skill. The primary learning required is mastering how to work with communities. The learning is like learning to play a musical instrument. A cluster of concepts is taught, the student goes out and practices; a second cluster is taught; those are combined with the prior, practiced; and so forth. These leaders then mobilize communities—the training they conduct with individual communities is extends the skills package that they learned.