Bedford2020

Initiative Objective

The Concept: a deliberate and skillful conversation to deepen and widen a community's approach to sustainability. Deepening refers to a cultural shift (values born out of a redefined relationship with nature/life). Widening refers to creative multi-stakeholder conversations on complex aspects of sustainability (nuclear energy, for example) both locally and beyond. To help the deepening process, the intention is to build a relationship with a local institute of learning that could provide knowledge and skills to cultivate awareness and refine understanding - connect the dots - of sustainability and its implications to the community. To help the widening process the intention is to provide capacities to the organizing core of a community to build alignment around its intention and goals to realize this intention along with skills for engaging the wider community in addressing the more complex aspects referred to above. This widening aspect also includes a conversation with a small group of communities that are similarly focused on this approach ( specialized network) as a way of building a model that could be offered finally to wider networks. The UN is clealry one such network while the twentieth anniversary of the fist UN Earth Summit in 2012 provides a focus.