Foundation For Our Future
new learning for sustainability
Shaping Our Future
An Opportunity to Shape the Future: Youth Leadership Institutes
"…when you see everything written down, you say hey, this is real, this is my future, this may happen….”
~ Amit, Glencliff High School
"I’m glad I did Shaping Our Future because it helped me realize the importance of teamwork. We had a chance to learn about each other. We had an opportunity to take leadership roles and get out there a show a lot of people that we can do most of the things that adults do."
~ Nittaya, Glencliff High School
View the Introductory Video (10 min.): "Shaping Our Future"
(requires a high-bandwidth web connection and QuickTime)
The Foundation For Our Future (FFOF) offers youth program leaders, high school teachers and others training and materials for conducting future scenario leadership institutes with young adults.
The purpose of Shaping Our Future is to foster and catalyze leadership qualities in young adults that will engage them in shaping a future that is peaceful, just prosperous and sustainable. Participants gain skills in understanding the complex systems that shape the world, learn to create new visions of the future by developing different scenarios about key issues, and learn how to use these skills to be leaders in shaping a sustainable future.
Who Can Be Involved?
We work with people involved in youth programs at non-profits, government agencies, corporations, high schools and colleges and churches. Training and resources are for people who work with young adults from 16 to 25 years old.
Why Future Scenarios?
Research done over the last decade illustrates that many of the efforts in environmental and sustainable education have little or no context for many of our young adults because they often lack a long-term future view. Concern about this led the Foundation For Our Future to develop a set of tools based on scenario thinking and planning to create youth based effort called “Shaping Our Future.”
Benefits to the young adults participating:
• develop an increased sense of
responsibility toward the future
• learn new skills with which youth can
actively shape their own futures
• ability to better connect present
choices and actions with future
outcomes
Shaping Our Future leadership institutes provide the opportunity learn how to influence the future by identifying trends, analyzing the implications and discerning plausible alternative futures. Young adults learn to gather and analyze information with regard to its future significance.
What Is Scenario Planning?
Scenario thinking and planning is a technique developed by corporate planners to help make better decisions. As the future is uncertain, what eventually happens matters a lot. Whether you are a large corporation, a small organization, or an individual, to choose wisely, it is better to have a strategy that would work well in more than one possible future. That is what scenario planning is for.
Scenario thinking and planning helps us better imagine and sort through the ways the future could unfold. Having refined, multiple perspectives of the future puts us in a better position to interpret current events and better gauge where they could be leading us. They form the basis for developing strategies that will serve us well across several possible future outcomes.
Since the technique has worked so well for companies dealing with these kinds of difficult challenges, we have adapted it to work with young adults and adults.
The Value of Shaping Our Future:
Young people need positive visions of the future to provide a hopeful context and perspective from which they can assess the violence, despair, cynicism, powerlessness and self-absorption often supplied by the news, music, movies and other cultural resources.
Young people act on their learning when they build strong connections between many ideas and events, when they can adequately reflect on their experiences, and when they engage in activities that integrate learning into everyday life.
- Shaping Our Future provides young adults with the skills and perspectives to deal with complex thoughts and ideas;
- Shaping Our Future strengthens creative problem-solving and critical thinking skills;
- Shaping Our Future helps young adults develop a keener sense of social responsibility;
- Shaping Our Future helps young adults see change as the norm;
- Shaping Our Future helps young adults learn to deal with long range issues and possibilities.
How to Conduct a Shaping Our Future Institute
The Foundation for Our Future can provide interested organizations with training programs, a facilitator’s guidebook and how-to video, a CD-ROM, and a set of online resource tools to provide them with the knowledge and skills to conduct institutes with the young people they serve. We can also partner with local corporations and/or foundations to underwrite the costs of the training and materials.
If you'd like to get involved with Shaping Our Future contact:
Jack Byrne, Vice President
Foundation For Our Future
1611 Harbor Rd.
Shelburne, VT 05482
tel: (802) 985-0789 x10
fax: (802) 985-3162
Interested in Doing Your Own Workshop? Resources for Facilitators
Shaping Our Future
Resources for Facilitators
Tools for Scenario Planning Workshops
