Where do you find people engaging their environment, building collaborations, and generating ideas to create the next-best-thing? A place for entrepreneurs, experts, and curious explorers to meet, work, and do sounds like something every community needs. We thought so, and we are working to make one.
In remarks he offered at the Economic Fuel 2012 Awards Ceremony on April 27, 2012, Greenway Principal David Narum noted that “Right now, the future is an idea. And as someone once said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’”
The fact is that a lot of people have ideas, but not everyone does something with them. Each one of the Economic Fuel award winners chose to make the entrepreneurial leap to go beyond daydreaming, beyond sitting on a couch saying “someone should do something about that, or someone should come up with a product that . . . .”
After reading the previous posts in this series, what issues have risen to the surface for you? Do you feel there is a need for a more enhanced town and gown relationship in our region? Or are you still left wondering what all the buzz is about?
In the last four posts, we introduced the concept of town and gown, reflected on ways to integrate students with constructive, real-world learning opportunities and practical business opportunities, and made a call for a revolution in learning that encompasses the latest knowledge on the brain and education.
What’s left? It’s a big subject, with lots of perspectives. We offer just a few suggestions for ways forward from here.
Sir Ken Robinson, famous for his TED Talk on how schools kill creativity, notes that “We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, Town and Gown issues are not just a challenge, they also present significant opportunities for economic development, community building and positive change. These ideas are being developed in our backyard through partnerships with Humboldt State University, but they are applicable in rural towns that have colleges and universities all across the country.
“Without question, the most abundant, least expensive, most under-utilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity.” (Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA, The Art of Chaordic Leadership)
One of the key functions of the Link, currently in development here at Greenway, is to create the conditions that support human ingenuity, to motivate people to become active designers of ventures, and to develop a culture of knowledge sharing as we work together to build ventures, create jobs, and grow a greener regional economy. An important part of this effort is the development of partnerships and the creation of value-adding connections. One critical partnership is that between “town and gown”—between communities and regions and the institutions of education located in them.