Clone of Our Strategy

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An Invitation to Participate in the MacArthur Foundation's $100 Million Problem Solving Initiative and Help Provide Supplemental Capacity Building Resources and Strategies!

Co-Founders, Sponsors
and Strategic Alliance Partners.
Welcome!

EXPANDING THE CIRCLE OF SUCCESS™

Helping Provide Greater Access to Successful Living Skills and Other Resources for Expanded Individual and Collective Capabilities to Address Social, Economic and Environmental Challenges.

We are inviting individuals and organizations interested in developing a collaborative response to the 100 million dollar MacArthur request for proposals to solve a major problem to collaborate in a campaign for Expanding the Circle of Success. That will include our project to establish a network of Community Economic Development Resource Centers to help introduce the unprecedented resources available for innovation, collaboration, job creation and sustainability through the Benefit Corporation model and forthcoming Equity Crowd Financing provisions of the US JOBS Act.

“Given the global social, economic, and environmental crises, what attitudes and skills can help us apply more positive, creative, conscious and sustainable approaches?”

Here are some of the answers we receive when we ask that question in our workshops:

• Awakening to our spiritual identity

• Realizing more of our inherent potential.

• Harnessing our creative mind power

• Flowing our energy to solutions rather than problems

• Remembering who we really are and why we are here

• Fulfilling our life purposes and missions

• Making a difference and leaving a legacy

• Maintaining a positive mental attitude

• Loving, serving and blessing others

• Applying creative thinking and problem-solving

• Manifesting stewardship over the rich talents and treasures entrusted to us by God/Spirit/Source/Creator

Loraine's visionary statement and the inspiring words from the song Earth by David Roth encompass our ultimate vision and mission of fostering personal, community, national and global transformation. We seek to accomplish that by providing expanded access to state-of-the-art resources for Community Economic Development training while incorporating CED principles of Self-Help, Empowerment and Capacity Building.

In our work as community organizers and community economic development specialists, the cofounders of Universal Stewardheirship, Inc. have conducted visioning, planning and strategic planning exercises for companies, non-profit organizations and communities. Two of the main questions we usually include and the top three answers to each one revealed through The Three Round Method of Brainstorming (developed by the National Center for Community Education and the CS Mott Foundation) are provided below:

(1) What are the greatest problems affecting the quality of life in the community?

Inadequate citizen involvement in community affairs.
Inadequate leadership throughout government.
Lack of community unity and cooperation and collaboration.

(2) What corrective measures can be taken to address those problems?

Develop more community-based programs .
Expand church and community involvement.
Provide access to resources that will enhance self-help, empowerment and capacity building for individuals and organizations.

In response to that feedback, successful prototype Community Resource Centers have been established for a Public Housing Authority, a Community Development Corporation and for a small city. As a result of the positive outcomes, we created the Expanding the Circle of Success campaign to help establish a network of locally initiated non-profit CAN DO! Community Economic Development Empowerment Resource Centers.

 Excerpt from Graduation Remarks for the CED Master’s Program by Charles Betterton

During one of the classes in the 1990-1992 Community Economic Development Master’s program at Southern New Hampshire University, we spent time discussing the root causes of the problems that threaten our society. We developed the following list:

The me generation Getting away from God Lack of spirituality Lack of common vision Absence of wisdom Focus on accumulation versus circulation Spiritual and cultural disintegration and the Lack of an appropriate value system and ways to express it.

The following month we considered potential solutions to these problems by reflecting on the values of community economic development which we described as including:

Spiritual underpinning, a sense of oneness Application of cooperative principles A focus on human development along with community development Retention of wealth in the neighborhoods Valuing community and the larger society Consideration and appreciation of multicultural differences in religion, values perspectives and communication and Enabling people and communities to empower themselves

Here are initial cover concepts for 2 books we will publish ASAP as part of our strategy to respond to and leverage the MacArthur Foundation's Competition to Award $100 Million to Help Solve a Critical Problem of Our Time. If you read the Say YES! to Success with Les Brown information below, you will see that we have been preparing for years to distribute 100 million dollars worth of development training resources to help Expand the Circle of Success and facilitate greater individual and collective problem solving capabilities.

Please Click Here for our Survey and Invitation to Collaborate

Click Here for a PDF with some of hundreds of newspaper articles on related projects

Award-winning Success Center Partnership developed for the Muncie, IN Public Housing Authority
(Click Here for a PDF of this award-winning prototype)

Let's Improve the World Now​ and Help Manifest Bucky Fuller's Vision of "Betterment for 100% of Humanity!"​

"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. The challenge is to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, with spontaneous cooperation and without ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone. How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?
R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller