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Overview
Monadnock Institute for Community Advancement and Sustainability (MICAS), operating as a non-profit organization, is a combination of educational foundation, media center, think-tank, and community resource networking organization. Our mission is to network and gather a broad coalition of regional community stakeholders to create a more sustainable world, both locally and globally, through shared visioning, shared resources, and shared action. The Institute’s focus is supporting dialogue, education and collaboration on on issues relating to:
- Local and sustainable economies
- Sustainable agriculture and local food development
- Alternative energy, safe energy, and energy preparedness
- Environmental protection and sutainable resource management of water,
land, air, and biodiversity
- Green business development and micro-enterprise
- Youth and elder empowerment
- Media diversity and freedom
- Meaningful and plentiful work
- Citizen democracy and individual freedoms, including freedom from want, fear, hunger, and political and ecological oppression
- Educational relevancy and reform
- Reconciliation
- Fair taxation
- Affordable housing and urban redesign
Current Challenges
Our community and region face unique challenges concerning jobs, taxation, budget crises, housing, and social safety net funding. We are also impacted by many broader challenges, chief among these are “peak oil” (estimated by many to occur by 2007); health care & Medicare for retiring baby boomers; the devaluation of the US dollar worldwide; global climate change; and light of manufacturing and high tech sector jobs overseas. Any one of these challenges has the potential to erode our economic and social well-being. Plans to address these crises need to be instituted on a community-wide level. Individuals, schools, colleges, businesses, government representatives, agencies and community groups will need to band together to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
Proposed Solutions
To empower constructive conversation and action in these areas, MICASaims to support the development of the following resources and initiatives:
1. Community Network
MICAS is working within the community to build a network of sustainability resources to build capacity and collaboration on a variety of sustainability initiatives. We liberate the untapped social capital of our region by developing community asset inventories and a comprehensive Internet-based network of individuals and organizations who can share ideas and resources, and publicize needs and opportunities.
2. Community Education
MICAS facilitates community members to develop the awareness and creative responses that will help sustain our community and planet. This will happen through networking existing educational courses, as well as co-sponsoring, creating new courses, lectures, and collaboratories. Already the Monadnock region has a strong foundation with resources such as the Antioch New England Institute and Antioch Center for Environmental Education programs.
3. Community Dialogue
MICAS is an opportunity for people to gather to engage in a deeper level of conversation than normally happens in our social and political spheres. Our central question is, “What future do we want to inhabit?” MICAS helps develop core competencies and collaborative capacity through sponsoring courses in nonviolent communication, consensus-building, citizen deliberative councils, visioning, and youth empowerment.
4. Community Media
MICAS will utilize audio, video, radio, television, the Internet, and print media to educate, promote programs, and create a resource library and to disseminate courses, lectures, and programs to a regional audience.
5 Key Functional Areas of MICAS >
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