Vision and Strategies
Our Vision
We have a bold vision that we call The Sakai.
It's in two parts. The first part is to reduce all of
the forms of preventable suffering and death a hundredfold
by the end of this century. This would mean a hundredfold
reduction of hunger, disease, war and torture, as well as lesser
causes such as accidents, drug misuse, poor health habits, and
many others. The baseline year for measuring progress is
2000.
The second part of the Sakai is to balance the world's
life-support systems, such as the environment, the global
economy, the political world and the infrastructures of
communities. This will also reduce suffering and give many
more people a chance at living a normal life. More.
Our Strategic Plan
What follows is a summary of some of our major
strategies. A book-length treatment of our strategies
and global plan is now online at MightyPlan.Org.
The world's beauty is marred by so many life-destroying
problems. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and believe that you can't make a real difference. But the
more you are saddened by these problems, the more you are likely to love and
value our strategies. Most of our strategies are upgrades over
what most people of goodwill are currently doing.
To put our solutions in context, we'll cite a statistic from
Independent Sector, an organization that tracks volunteerism and donations in the United
States. They state that in 2001 about 44% of adults Americans volunteered, and
the total hours volunteered amounted to an average of about four hours a week. Four
hours may seem high, but religious activities were included. In any case, we
picture our ideal participant building up to at least five hours a week of action,
and using the
following strategies to make the five hours go the furthest.
As you read the strategies, imagine how they can help you to do the
kind of good that you care about, whether it is alleviating the suffering of the
poor; renewing the environment; freeing the oppressed, or bringing about world
peace. Imagine how these strategies can multiply the good that you and others
already do.
1. Develop ongoing personal support for broad personal change. Many people
who want to do good or improve themselves eventually fail because they have no
ongoing structure to keep them on track and motivated. While they are
temporarily inspired by a self-help book, a workshop, a class or a motivational
speaker, they eventually lose momentum and focus. In contrast, our members have
ongoing personal support to keep them acting on a regular basis. Support
options include brief telephone Buddy calls, a
Goal & Growth Group or a
Grouping of Groups.
Ongoing personal support is our first strategy because having someone to
support you on a regular basis will make this program real for you. Imagine the
goals you could achieve and the good you could do with regular support and encouragement!
2. Create an attitude and an expectation to choose the best actions. If you
join Fellowship of the Dream, the same support systems that motivate action can help you
maintain an expectation to do your level best. On our Key
Concepts page we already
mentioned having the physician's
attitude. Enlarging on this idea, an emergency
room surgeon that faces an overwhelming number of emergencies will do little for those
who are too far gone and ignore those with minor problems in order to save those
who can be saved. In the same way, we encourage people to replace some
"nice" good deeds and some merely symbolic actions with high-leverage,
strategic actions. Yet this attitude shouldn't be taken too far. Even the
emergency room surgeon goes home and performs low-priority actions, such as
watching a movie, reading a book, or taking the dog for a walk.
When we talk about high-leverage actions, we don't believe that there is a
way to measure goodness and say one action is better than another. For instance,
we can't tell you whether an organization that save lives by teaching people how
to grow crops is better that one that indirectly saves lives through literacy
training. But many choices are like the choice between donating money either for life-saving
medicine or for high school band uniforms. In other words, would you rather one
child not have a band uniform or another child not have a life-saving inoculation?
Realize that our world is created by the sum total of individual choices like these.
While this high standard sometimes leads to unpopular yet life-saving choices,
the following strategies can create some win-win situations.
3. Use techniques that build capacity and structures that maintain capacity.
On our Home Page we mentioned the importance of building up your time, money and
energy so you have more for yourself and more for others. It may seem obvious
that the more you have, the more you can give. But we are talking about a deeper
reality. When people want to do good, they usually just think in terms of giving
time or money. Instead, we encourage people to see that building up their time,
money and energy is a part of giving. Just as you must breathe in before you
breathe out, you should think of building up your resources and helping others
in the same breath. They should be married together in your thinking. So we
encourage our members to spend at least an hour a week building up whichever
resource would allow them to give more, whether it is time, money, physical
energy or skill. The ongoing support structures mentioned above,
along with a goal-setting
material such as our Dream and Goal Sheet and some time-management or
money-management technique can increase your capacity if they are all used
together.
4. Encourage nonprofit organizations to help their volunteers and donors
build capacity. The attitude shift that was just mentioned can have a huge
impact on the nonprofit sector. Currently most nonprofit volunteer recruitment
creates win-lose situations. That's because when a charity needs more volunteers
it normally advertises. This action draws from the volunteer pool in that
community, leaving fewer volunteers for the others, who must increase their
advertising budgets to meet their needs. This develops into an expensive
competition for a limited number of volunteer hours. The same win-lose approach
produces a competition for limited donor dollars, too.
A better long-term strategy that could increase the overall volunteer pool by
half a trillion dollars a year is for the nonprofit organizations to offer
time-management and money-management techniques to some of their volunteers and
donors. This high-leverage training, combined with strong ongoing support, will
create more time and money for the volunteers and donors. This, in turn, will
increase the appreciation and loyalty of the volunteers and donors to the
charity that offered the training. This will likely lead to more time and money
given to the charity. Some volunteers may not want to undergo training since
they may not feel as good about learning as they do about direct helping. But
the more the charities make the case that this is a source of long-term good,
the more this strategy will become widely understood, accepted and welcomed. (More details on this.)
5. Climb the Ladder of Empowerment. Most people understand the proverb
"Give fish and you feed people for a day, but teach them to fish and you
feed them for a lifetime." But there are two high-leverage concepts that
are even more powerful than this proverb. Please read the ladder from the bottom
up:
People quickly understand the Ladder of Empowerment; but tools like
the Helping Inventory
allow you to systematically review and
study your helping to determine how you can help others move up the Ladder.
Our sister site, All-Around.Org, also has brief Skill Modules that distill the basics into a few key ideas and
methods that you can practice. Some of these are Rung Two learning materials,
such as our Active Listening, Personal Mission, Assertiveness and Conflict
Resolution tools. Others are Rung Three tools, such as All
Around's Many-One-New
Problem-Solving Method. The program's structure builds in Rung Four,
as well.
When you realize that most organizations currently operate on the bottom two
rungs, you can begin to have an idea of the vast amount of good that can be done
if individuals and organizations learn to use all four rungs.
6. Give more help to those who help others. If you help people who are likely
to help others, your "investment" of time goes further and does more
good. On the other hand, if you empower people who are negative and destructive,
they are likely to use the newfound power in ways that harm themselves and
others. Saadi, an insightful mystic, put it this way: "Merely doing good to
the evil may be equivalent to doing evil to the good."
This concept sometimes makes people uncomfortable because it requires people to
make a judgment. While it's sometimes hard to judge people and causes, our
strategy of helping people through ongoing relationships (see #1 above) minimizes
the chances that you'll help the wrong kind of people or causes
-- or fail to help
the people who are more deserving of your assistance.
(More.)
Another reason some people struggle with this concept is that they feel they
should love everyone equally. But while everyone deserves unconditional love and
help, the form the help takes must be tailored to the person. For instance,
selfish people should be helped in the context of a relationship that will help
them mature, in addition to helping them get some of what they want. Some people label this idea of
giving preference to certain people as elitist, unfair, judgmental or
regressive. But being committed to perfect equality is like feeding a
180 pound man and a 50 pound child the same size dinner. The superficially fair-minded person would be ignoring the
fact that different people have different needs. That's why the world will get
better faster if you use discernment to individually tailor the way you help
others.
7. Follow the Golden Rule...2.0. For most of human history, the Golden Rule
was enough of a basis for fairness: "Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you." But today, plenty of people are fair in their personal
relationships, yet take more from the environment, the economy, the community
and other life-support systems than they put back. This wasn't a problem back
when most people interacted face-to-face in small towns and communities, and
when the population was small relative to the planet's size. But now imbalances
in the environment, economy, politics and other systems are accumulating at a
faster pace and have broader negative consequences.
These increasing withdrawals from our life-support systems cost everyone more
time, money and energy to fix. But the burden is especially hard on the poor and
the disadvantaged, not to mention future generations. So we have developed what
we call "The Golden Rule 2.0:" Put back into each of your life-support
systems at least as much as you take. Otherwise, for instance, if everyone took
from the economy more than they put back, this system would collapse in whole or
in part, and cause people great hardship and distress (no matter how much extra
we put into the community or any other life-support system!)
The Golden Rule 2.0 is an upgrade of the Golden Rule and is in the same
spirit as the Golden Rule. But following it is harder since you have to monitor
your impact on each of our life-support systems. But it will be worth it since
when people begin to follow this 2.0 version of the Golden Rule, much suffering
and loss of life will be prevented. In addition, we all will have greater peace,
health and security.
The Ecological Lifestyle Assessment will give you
many examples of ways that
caring and generous people unwittingly decrease the stability of our
life-support systems. The assessment also helps you pinpoint the changes that
you can make in order to have the greatest positive effect on our life-support
systems.
8. Upgrade your approach to personal fulfillment. Although many people seek
happiness, they often fail in their attempts gain real fulfillment. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr., spoke about this when he said, "Most people die with
their music still in them." We believe that our strategies and
support methods can help you express your own unique music.
(Our Well Analogy Exercise
can help you focus on personal mission, personal vitality
and fulfillment.)
9. Learn to do more good. Many people generously donate their time and money.
Unfortunately most of them don't choose their charities and volunteer
opportunities so as to have maximum effect. This wouldn't be a problem if there
were enough volunteers, donations and resources to help all people in need, but
there simply aren't. Thus there is still tremendous suffering and premature
death. The Wise Giving of Time and Money resource can help you boost
your charitable and volunteer impact, especially if you use it in
conjunction with ongoing support to take action.
Through volunteering, donating and helping those around us, there are many
times when we have a heartfelt desire to help others. Unfortunately, many
efforts to help end up unproductive or even counterproductive. Sometimes these
unproductive situations can't be predicted, but in many cases people can learn
to recognize and avoid patterns of helping that are ineffective or
counterproductive. They can also learn methods that help guarantee that we won't
unwittingly harm someone as we try to help them. (A springboard to this process
is to discuss one story or article from the "Key
Stories" page of the All Around site during the
Interchange portion of the Goal & Growth Group, or as part
of a discussion series.)
10. Invite others to join the Fellowship of the
Dream or other superprograms. A high-leverage way to help others is to
introduce them to this superprogram. That's
why we ask participants who are comfortable with the program
and who have gotten results to pass it on to others. It's
even more powerful if the person who does the inviting
offers to be the support Buddy of the person starting out.
This member-supporting-member structure amounts to a chain
reaction of empowerment and world-sustaining lifestyles. Our
vision is that this chain reaction can rapidly spread
throughout the world and have a global impact from the
summation of individual efforts.
11. Support the Contest of Superprograms when it
becomes available. A
handful of superprograms will not satisfy everyone's needs and
tastes. So we want to motivate many program designers to
design other superprograms. These program designers include
people in the education, psychology and social work
departments of universities, people in the human resource
departments of certain major corporations, trainers, the
educational arm of certain religious bodies, and also many
well know self-help authors. To inspire some of these people
to create superprograms, our vision is to create an annual
contest in which individuals and organizations compete to
create the best superprograms on Earth.
Besides the honor of winning and the opportunity to serve
humanity, those who win will receive increased publicity and
marketing clout. Universities will value the prestige.
Corporations and authors will have greater ability to sell
products. Religious groups will appreciate being able to
eventually focus more on their spiritual missions. And since
superprograms can be offered either for free or for a small
fee, there is the opportunity to make money from the published
superprograms or spin-off products.
Each year the winning superprograms would be placed on a
website and translated into the world's major languages. That
way, from the very first year, there could be almost worldwide
access to superprograms. Imagine how much good would happen if
even a handful of universities, foundations, corporations and
nonprofits developed superprograms. Because superprograms have
the potential to create major change in people's lives and in
the world, we plan to call the contest "The Greatest
Contest on Earth." The more superprogram participants we
have, and the more donations we receive, the more we can build
momentum for a worldwide contest.
12. Openness to improvements. Just like the
U.S. Constitution which has an amendment process, we need to
be open to improving the methods and strategies. By
making a strong start, we expect to inspire others to build on
our strategies. We also expect to continually improve
our web site and methods. (Updates and changes to the
site are recorded on the Site History page.)
The vision and strategies will be made possible by people like
you. We encourage you to start right now, by reading the
Introduction and then the Membership
Steps.
