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Future Makers

"Can you stand by and do nothing
because you cannot do it all?
If not you, If not me,
who will it be?"
— Ellen Stapenhorst, songwriter

"We did not inherit the earth from our fathers. We are borrowing it from our children."
— Anonymous

"We have to learn to think in a new way"
— Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell

Future-Makers is a youth empowerment program conceived by Syntony Quest and the Aurora Now Foundation of Tucson, Arizona. Future-Makers seeks to engage younger generations in a creative exploration about their communities and their future. Our societies need Future-Makers capable of creating life-affirming futures, moment by moment, through our actions and choices.

Through Future-Makers, youth, teachers, parents and volunteers get together to form local learning communities with the purpose of creating a collective image of their ideal future community. They learn, work and play together using the Future-Makers learning guide and are supported by a virtual team of facilitators.

The members of each learning community work locally to create their shared image based on their own lived experiences and inspired aspirations. Their image will evolve comprehensively through information gathered from their immediate context (e.g., family, neighborhood, school) and the sharing of their image with other learning communities via the Internet.

Future-Makers…

• Engages children and youth in thinking about their future and the future of their communities
• Inspires and motivates them to take responsibility for the choices they make that can bring into being healthy and authentic communities
• Provides opportunities for youth to understand the values of different communities across geographic and cultural boundaries, to discover universal commonalties and to appreciate the diversity of our human family
• Prepares the ground for the development of evolutionary learning communities.

In short, the Future-Makers program builds community at the local level and connects them at the global level. It connects youth from around the world with the purpose of learning about and co-creating healthy, collaborative, and environmentally sustainable communities. It seeks to engage youth across geographical, cultural, and ethnic boundaries in a creative exploration of the power of community to help shape a better future.

The design of Future-Makers is a work in progress and we need your financial support to develop the learning guides and to bring this empowering experience to diverse communities. If you are interested in learning more about this program, please contact Syntony Quest to request the full proposal.

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