Sustaining the future
By AUBRIE GEORGE
The Cherry Hill Sun
6/5/2009

About 80 members of the Cherry Hill community have been invited to participate in a weekend-long conference that members of Sustainable Cherry Hill hope will lead the entire community in planning for a sustainable future.

Sustainable Cherry Hill is hosting a conference called “Cherry Hill 2020: Shaping a Sustainable Future” for three days in July. The event will be held in conjunction with Future Search, which is a network of volunteers that helps non-profit organizations become more open, supportive, equitable and sustainable through conferences.

For one weekend, attendees will shack up at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Kings Highway in order to collaborate on deciding what is important to the people who live in the community and what needs to happen to ensure that future generations enjoy the current quality of life or better, Sustainable Cherry Hill’s Executive Director, Lori Braunstein, said.

There are no formal presentations scheduled for this conference. What attendees will get out of the experience is what they create together by thinking, discussing and collaborating on ideas for a sustainable future.

Braunstein said that participants should come away from the Future Search conference deeply moved and committed to making their community a better place.

“It is not often that diverse community members have an opportunity to come together and to seriously work together to determine their own future,” Braunstein said. “The research-based Future Search process has been used successfully all over the planet to help communities solve problems, such as health care, poverty and sustainability. It is a true grassroots effort, made even more powerful by the assistance of professional, experienced facilitators.”

Braunstein called the event a “watershed moment in Cherry Hill.”

“The community benefits by having a diverse and dedicated group of members think deeply together to determine its future,” Braunstein said.

“This is the true sense of the word community.”

Attendance for this conference is by invitation only, and Braunstein said that coming up with a list of attendees to represent all aspects of the community was part of the challenge for SCH group members.

With the help of Future Search professional facilitators, SCH group members were able to come up with a list of key stakeholder groups in the community.

These groups came from categories such as faith groups, schools, government, small, locally owned businesses to corporations, youth and senior citizens, community leaders, environmentalists and more, Braunstein said.

“We are stressing diversity in all respects from race and gender to political point of views and side of town.,” Braunstein said, “The idea is to put together a microcosm of the community, or in Future Search lingo, have all parts of the system in the room.”

Braunstein said that a wide-spread, diverse sampling of group members will help the group engage as many aspects of the community as they can without gathering the entire community into one place.

“We’ll never have the opportunity to have every community member sit down together and agree unanimously on an agenda for the future,”

Braunstein said. “So let’s represent the whole with these 80 people.”

But the conference doesn’t stop with just those 80 people – the message is predicted to spread through means of the workshop’s final product – an agenda and an action plan.

After the conference, group members will have come up with a unanimous agenda of 8 to 15 items that aim to move the community toward sustainability.

The final morning of the event focuses on turning the agenda into a basic action plan.

“The idea is that once we decide the future we want, that we can start planning for it and making an action plan,” Braunstein said.

As a result of the action plan, task forces will be developed that include conference participants and will leave room for other community members to join.

The group of participants, as a whole, will be charged with the task of turning the general agenda and action plan into specific, quantifiable goals and tasks, Braunstein said.

“The Future Search is just the start,” Braunstein said. “The idea is that others in the community will hear about the Future Search and find their own niche within the framework of these task forces.”

Further down the line, each task force will have its own page on a newly designed Web site.

“The Web site will be the information hub for taking the agenda forward in an organized and inclusive manner,” Braunstein said.

Sustainable Cherry Hill is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to encourage, empower and educate the community to consider the world’s limited resources, and the way we live off of them, through the prism of ecological, economic and societal sustainability.

More information on Sustainable Cherry Hill and their endeavors visit, www.sustainable-cherryhill.blogspot.com.

If you would like more information about the upcoming Future Search conference or are interested in participating, contact Lori Braunstein at Lori.Braunstein@sustainableCherryHill.org.