A Leadership Laboratory on the Future of the Northern Great Plains

 

The Meadowlark Project is a Leadership Laboratory on the future of the Northern Great Plains.  It is organized by Northern Great Plains Inc, a Fargo-based non-profit that has partnered with Sustainability Institute for this project.  The purpose of the Meadowlark Project is to create living examples of how the northern Great Plains region can be a place of opportunity for all people.  The Meadowlark team is a diverse group of 30 leaders from the business, non-profit and governmental sectors in the northern Great Plains who are participating in an intensive 18-month social change project designed to find new ways to address long-standing, systemic problems in the region. 

The systemic problems being addressed by the team that hinder the advancement of the region include:

  • continued migration of rural youth, both non-Native and Native, from rural areas to larger cities in and outside of the region in search of economic opportunity and cultural acceptance;
  • ongoing racial divisions that prevent the region's Native American and Latino populations from contributing their full potential to the economic and societal health of the region and perpetuate a view that the Newest Americans are needed solely for jobs others won't take;
  • hidden and insiduous poverty that traps families in a paycheck-to-paycheck existence and a dependence on federal or state programs for survival;
  • growing drug and violence problems in rural communities that come from isolation adn despair;
  • reluctance to change cultural norms to match the changing work environment; and
  • a belief that the region should accep whatever the market determines and cooperation between governments, the private sector and civil society to build an economically, socially and environmentally stronger region is taboo.

The objectives of the Meadowlark Project are threefold.

  1. The project will result in four to five living examples that demonstrate how the region can make the kinds of deep changes that really affect the way our economy or society functions and thinks.
  2. Meadowlark will establish an ongoing social network of current and future corporate, government, education and civic leaders who will have the capacity to continue working together in the coming years to affect the region's future.
  3. Through ongoing public dialogue connected to the work of the Leadership Laboratory, Meadowlark will create a new public awareness of the policies, beliefs, habits and practices that are preventing the region from reaching its fullest potential in a 21st century economy.

The Sustainability Institute was hired to co-design and faciliate the U-Process methodology, a rigorous mehod that will help the team achieve clarity and connection, a new operating consensus, breakthrough innovations and solutions to the systemic regional problems identified.  The process comprises of three major stages: observing the current reality carefully and in depth; retreating to allow "inner knowledge" to emerge; and acting swiftly in order to bring forth the new reality.

Read more on the U-Process and Change Labs

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Nancy Gabriel

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