Executive Summary

Future Search Conference: APRIL 16-18, 1997
Eighty people representing city-wide agencies, education, government, business, youth development, religious organizations, research institutions, health care, and funders, gathered for a 2-1/2 day visioning and action planning conference organized by IMAGINE CHICAGO. The conference focus was: Scaling Up our Impact on Chicago's Future; How to Create and Sustain Vital Communities for Children.

The conference attempted to bring the "whole system" of Chicago into one room to discover common ground and map out collaborative action. Participants created a shared vision of the needs of children in Chicago, common hopes for a more positive future, and ways organizational impact could be expanded through new collaborations.

Visions of the Future - Goals Which Came From This Conference
The following ideas were generated and work groups organized by voluntary task forces of different organizations represented at the conference:

1. Create a "Children's Bill of Right's", involving children from throughout Chicago in a year - long bottoms-up process, leading to a 1998 conference to draft a "Children's Bill of Rights".


2. Create a structure for a "collaborative community/Urban Villages", which include all of the organizations and individuals needed for children to have the support systems they need to grow to productive adults (health, schools, education, parks, universities, business).


3. Create a citywide partnership for quality learning opportunities.


4. Accelerate the paradigm shift - making children partners and leaders and recognizing their potential.
5. Create a neighborhood health care initiative on the West side.


6. Create an "Urban Village" arts program with cultural community workers working in local parks to help people express through performing and visual arts their images of Chicago's future (Urban Gateway's, Imagine Chicago, Pegasus Players, HUD Cultural Center).


7. Create a weekly forum (40,000 kids) at United Center to focus on inspiring messages for youth - and tie to local community gatherings that build vital connection to mentors/jobs.

• Paradigm shift from "fixing" by external interventions to development/capacity building of youth
  • requires family and community development efforts,
  • requires partnerships and collaborations across sectors.


• Mediating institutions in transition
  • traditional institutions (schools, government, churches, families, business, media, funding providers) still trying to extricate themselves from old paradigms.
  • loss of traditional power. What is new purpose?


• Changing family structures
  • children having children,
  • grandparents raising children,
  • non-traditional family structures,
  • one-parent families,
  • stories told by commercial sector, not by family and church.
    
    
• Media's increasing influence on children:
  Role changing from selling cereals to kids to reporting on child abuse, violence, sex, drugs (and children participating in same) and targeting children as significant consumers.
  
  
• Loss of structure for children
• no coherent sense of meaning,
• increasing social isolation,
• lack of transference of value,
• loss of clear boundaries (what's good, what's
  bad, etc., lack of positive role models).
  
  
• Community Safety
• Physical Emotion
• Housing, family stress.
• Schools, image of teens as "bad kids".
• Health care/access sense of hopelessness for the future.
• Basic needs (food, clothing, shelter).
• Racism.
• Integrating children with disabilities.
  
  
• Redefinition of what education means
  • developing children, not fixing (seeing children as own experts)
  • defining new standards
  • involvement and service - volunteerism,
  • institutional standards,
  • teacher professionalism,
  • changing image (kids, teachers, etc.).
  • new knowledge
  • technology,
  • research in learning,
  • hazards of "over programming" children.

• Jobs,
• 100% voting,
• Safety - children cannot learn with "bullets flying",
• Environmental health,
• Family support,
• Justice/fairness,
• Equitable school funding/learning opportunities for all children,
• Racial togetherness,
• Mentors/role models for all children who need them.