Challenging Questions
Looking holistically at how Imagine Chicago’s work intersects with various fields, one might argue that the organization’s strength lies not so much in its uniqueness, but in its ability to weave together complementary strands across fields that clearly have a lot to say to each other. Imagine Chicago’s most distinctive contribution lies in its emphasis on the "front end" of the change process: inspiring hope to act in the first place. By highlighting the importance of hope, vision, and creativity, Imagine Chicago reminds citizens across diverse communities, political perspectives, and strategic change orientations that catalyzing change – in individuals, institutions, and communities – requires first and foremost cultivating hope in those who must participate.
The following questions must be kept in mind if the public learning processes you hope to engender are to lead to positive, sustainable change:
What constitutes "high quality" intergenerational interviewing? And how can we tell if it has made a difference?
How can the individual transformation generated by the interviewing process lead to change on larger levels? What specific relationships, practices, and institutionalizing strategies must be put into place to ensure that individual change carries over into the public realm?
What practices and supports must be in place to keep young people meaningfully engaged in community change efforts? What work must be done with adults to enable genuinely reciprocal partnerships with youth?
How can communities sustain the energy, enthusiasm, and passion generated by positive visioning processes? How is hope kept alive when visioning confronts very real inequities and deprivations? How can hope infuse and nurture the implementation of specific action for community change?
Answering questions like these will not be easy, but there is, happily, a growing community of individuals and organizations who are committed to tackling them. Imagine Chicago enriches this community.
- Melinda Fine, Ed.D., is principal of Fine Consulting, an innovative consulting practice that provides high quality research, evaluation, and strategic guidance to nonprofit education and advocacy organizations, foundations, research institutes, and educational media organizations. She has fifteen years of experience advising national and local education and youth development initiatives, and actively worked for five years "in the trenches" as a young person on various social and civic causes. She has also authored a book and scholarly articles on programs, practices, and policies to foster young people’s civic and ethical thinking and action. Melinda can be reached at <melinda.fine@nyu.edu>.