WPIT Draft Business Plan

Preliminary Business Plan for World Peace through Inclusive Transformation

Description
World Peace through Inclusive Transformation – (WPIT) – is a commitment to have people around the globe understand differences and develop skills so that peace is available to all. The sustainability of world peace will emerge when enough communities appreciate diversity as an asset and have the skills to build personal and community value from interacting skilfully with differences.

Judith Snow discovered this reality as she worked to have people notice and appreciate the contributions of people who are labelled disabled. She taught the world that, rather than being problems to fix or hide, the differences we call disabilities create a context for relationship and community building, and for greater social and economic sustainability. Over time she developed a store house of examples of peace making through inclusion drawn from fields such as education, health care, community development and economics.

In the mid ‘90’s, Judith Snow realized that inclusion of diversities, if they are appreciated as gifts and contributions, creates the context for people to become peaceful.

WPIT was born when Judith Snow, Gabor Podor and Jason Wiles toured several states for seven months, speaking with and learning from others who were transforming fear of differences into passion to build social and economic sustainability.

At this time WPIT is conceived as an umbrella organization, seeding and guiding other initiatives that look very different from each other, but which have the common characteristics of being able to teach people and have them build from their differences in ways that foster sustainable relationship, abundance and peacefulness.


WPIT Projects Currently Under Development

World Peace Conference

This initiative is in very early stages of development. The aim is to reach world leaders who have the capacity to put peace on the world’s political agenda. The strategy is to hold a conference for the friends and colleagues who have the ear of these leaders – the relationship and trust to pick up a phone at any time and get heard by the leader.

WPIT will be one of the offerings at the conference, teaching people how the capacity for greater peacefulness is available everywhere through inclusion.


Creating Inclusive, Person and Community Centered Support

WPIT is currently developing an international community action research project with the aim of learning better strategies for supporting individuals with significant differences to participate fully in communities of their choice.

Currently service providers tend to segregate individuals, and the presence of supporters tends to turn citizens into helpers and volunteers instead of friends and colleagues.

Likely partners in this initiative are the University of Minnesota, Brock University, WPIT and various service providing agencies.

This research will also emphasize creating measures for highlighting how inclusion makes communities more peaceful.


Inclusion in Condominiums

Condominiums are a popular housing format in most urban settings. Often they include both owners and sub-leasees who represent a full range of diversities. Condominiums also represent an enormous economic player in that their maintenance costs and legally required reserve funds add up to $100,000’s of resources in any one building or neighbourhood. Currently these resources usually get saved or spent without impacting favourably the social and economic assets of the buildings or the residents.

This initiative is working with the resident Boards of Directors to inspire leadership and teach strategies for economic and social inclusion. These asset based strategies build social networks, bring financial security, build appreciation and utilization of diversity, and increase the value of hard assets.

We expect to be able to clearly show that as condominium owners experience social and economic inclusion they will also experience more creativity, autonomy and security, and that greater peacefulness will be a natural outcome of these benefits.


Personal Economic Inclusion

Everywhere the physical, cognitive and emotional differences that are called disabilities are considered to be in the sphere of charitable activity. Consequently individuals who are labelled disabled, their families and friends, are caught up in efforts to help, rehabilitate and support. Although a great deal of money is expended on behalf of “the disabled”, the affected individuals and their networks generally experience deep poverty. This in turn reinforces their isolation, dependence and vulnerability.

Excellent work has been done and much more can be done to have individuals and their networks be included in the financial flow and in fact to generate abundance.

Efforts in this area will continue to focus on teaching individuals and communities how to use abundance generating strategies. A parallel focus is to change policies that are unnecessarily limiting. An example of a simple and inclusive strategy is to support an individual to file an independent income tax refund claim, instead of being claimed as a dependent by their parents, which can liberate tens of thousands of dollars over one lifetime, and make other income generating strategies more feasible.

This project under WPIT will require an extensive policy research and development capacity as well as a community outreach effort to continue to work with mainstream accountants, financial experts, etc.


POISA

The Peaceful Open Inclusive Spaces Alliance – POISA – arises from the experience that communities, work places, schools and in fact the world, can become more peaceful when people of diverse backgrounds come together in ways that draw on diversity as a social asset rather than a liability, and where people are free to create and shape their own activities.

Peaceful – having the capacity to resolve conflict to the benefit of all concerned
Open – participants shape their own agendas and activities
Inclusive – diversities among participants are welcome and drawn on as valuable resources
Spaces – locations, contexts, and rules and principles that give participants a safe and facilitative bounded area within which to generate their activities
Alliance – agreements between organizations and individuals to work together to create and preserve a valued experience

The future of POISA is to teach people that inclusion makes peace possible, to foster the sustainable development of real examples of POISA and to have strategic buy in around the world so that people will come to expect their world to be made up of such spaces.

On the ground POISA is community development:
- the development of a community’s principles of Open Space
- supporting the community’s invitation process to become more diverse
- capturing the learnings as the community becomes more peaceful
- facilitating the story telling that deepens the community’s ability to be diverse and peaceful

There are no current examples of POISA projects, although similar projects have been worked on it the past http://www.inclusion.com/iaic.html are anticipated. During this summer at the Toronto Summer Institute for Inclusion an international body of participants envisioned the creations of POISA principles and some initial projects. The truth is that this kind of community development is long term and intensive. Unless sustainable resources are committed this aspect of our work remains a dream.



WPIT Market Strategies

The work that led first to the understanding that diversity is a context for liberating contribution in communities, and then to that inclusion is a context for peace making, originated in decades of seminars, keynotes and other talks and conferences carried out by Judith Snow, herself a person with quadriplegia. It is apparent that especially in today’s environment of electronically facilitated social networking, the way to get the word out about peace is literally to get the word out!

WPIT aims to stimulate a multitude of self generated social experiments in diversity, inclusion and peace, and to do so must develop an energetic, sustainable presence on the web and beyond.

There also needs to be a sustainable, on the ground, connected network of young community leaders who learn as they experiment with making peace in their communities.

WPITs goals are to find and guide these leaders so that in a relatively short period of time there is a strong commitment to peace through inclusion, and to build initiatives with these leaders. Judith Snow’s goal is to be able to retire knowing her life’s work is nurtured and flourishing.

WPIT will be marketed through web, conferences, videos, written materials of all sorts, personal experience, education and any other word of mouth strategy possible.

A particularly powerful strategy is to use the millennium goals and the many professional and organized bodies that measure social and economic progress by engaging them in measuring the increase of peacefulness that arises from inclusion.

Other links to consider

Blog from research tour 08-09
http://www.peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com
Toronto Summer Institute
http://inclusionnetwork.ning.com/
Other work related to Inclusion
http://www.lasereagles.org/pages/default.asp
Projected WPIT Budget

WPIT’s long term budget anticipates the need to accomplish:
- seeding leadership and learning in each project
- creating and making sustainable each initiative, e.g. rerouting the already existing condominium expenditures so that they sustain social networks, which in turn generate social and economic assets that can sustain the condominium networks and seed other initiatives
- growing WPIT, the global initiative of building and sustaining peace, from the abundance of its projects

In the short term of two years WPIT itself needs to:
- sustain Judith Snow, some of her personal support assistants’ wages, and the costs of her doing work
- give WPIT an overall Project Manager, and the capacity to communicate, fund raise, and record and disseminate learnings
- give the early initiatives capacity to get grounded


Two Year Start-Up Budget Estimate

First Year Expenses Monthly Annually
Judith Snow, WPIT Leader
a) Personal Expenses $2500
b) Transportation 600
c) Personal Assistance 1250
Project Director
a) Personal Expenses 2500
b) Office/Communication Expenses 700
c) Fundraising Costs 300
Initial Project Seed Money
a) Project Leadership 3000
b) Seed Money: legal and accounting,
insurances, communication, etc. 200
c) Fundraising Costs 500
Total First Year Expenses $11550 $138,600 CND

First Year Revenues
General Fundraising $1000
Sales 100
Contract Revenue, Honoraria, Misc. Income 900
Income Return from WPIT Projects 300
Total First Year Income $2300 $27,600 CND

Excess of Expense over Revenue $111,000 CND

Second Year Expenses Monthly Annually
Judith Snow, WPIT Leader
d) Personal Expenses $2500
e) Transportation 600
f) Personal Assistance 1250
Project Director
d) Personal Expenses 3000
e) Office/Communication Expenses 700
f) Fundraising Costs 500
Initial Project Seed Money
d) Project Leadership 3000
e) Seed Money: legal and accounting,
insurances, communication, etc. 200
f) Fundraising Costs 500
Total Second Year Expenses $12250 $147,000 CND

Second Year Revenues
General Fundraising $3000
Sales 500
Contract Revenue, Honoraria, Misc. Income 3000
Income Return from WPIT Projects 3000
Total Second Year Income $9500 $114,000 CND

Second Year Excess of Expense over Revenue $33,000 CND

Two Year Projected Excess of Expenses over Revenue - $144,000 CND


Request for Seed Money for WPIT

Our estimate, admittedly rough, is that WPIT requires $144,000 CND start-up funding to create a solid base for doing work over the next two years.

Tentatively

Yes, it has been eight months since I last wrote.

At that time the Tour was done, “The Book of Judith” – the play was underway, Avalanche was about to be parked at Camphill Nottawasaga, and Gabor and I – when together – were getting ready to invite people to the July Toronto Summer Institute. At the Institute we met and planned with participants from the OM Reunion, Camphill and various international participants interested in Asset Based Community Development. Coming out of the Institute we created POISA – Peaceful Open Inclusive Spaces Alliance. We closed this blog – I thought – in favour of creating a new chapter of world peace through inclusion in the form of “creative stops” and other community organizing initiatives.

It didn’t go that way.

At the close of Jan. 2010 POISA exists mainly in Google Docs and as a section of a business plan. Gabor has left working with me and with any peace projects as far as I know. Camphill will have nothing to do with me and I am living in South Etobicoke. Both Avalanche and Bronte sit in a semi-abandoned state, advertised for sale.

Other leaders and interested people are gathering – all is not lost. At the prompting of one woman I wrote a draft business plan, and in doing so realized that there are several threads that I had been working on for years, and that these impulses are close to coming together. Erin Socall re-emerged, and is gently keeping me on task! A new WPIT is being born.

This WPIT is not a tour. World Peace through Inclusive Transformation is a commitment. WPIT carries me like a swift canoe, with its own instinct of where to go next. I am a rider, giving voice and passion to a direction that wants to emerge in the world. WPIT is part of a human evolution toward a planet-wide culture were all people are interconnected, communicating, being and working in support of vibrant life for all beings in the universe.

The biggest obstacle to the realization of this dream is our own individual and cultural hopelessness. We have loved, believed and committed before and been crushed down by ridicule and failure. Who wants to go through that again!

I do.

I want it and I can sense that Inclusion is a genuine potential for people. We have held in our arms for brief moments in many, many times and places. It can and has been real. We can find ways to sustain inclusion until it becomes the starship that carries us.

In the next entry I am sharing the WPIT draft business plan.

Judith