Community Development

Inquiry and learning in service of directed action

The Foundation is committed to the development of sustainable, intentional communities wherever Skookum employees live and work. Our projects are intended to increase community capacity, cooperation, sustainability and efficiency. Projects are defined within the Foundation itself through the conversations we conduct with a wide spectrum of the community.

The Community Development Mission

We want to improve the effectiveness of our community debate and choicemaking. We have no time to lose to deal with the truly high value questions which confront us. We believe we are only as good as our capacity to be trustworthy, open, truthful, intentional, inclusive and collaborative. And so, through our activities, we seek to build these qualities every day.

We set up the table, organize the room, put the food out, and invite the key people for robust, positive conversations on the most important topics we can find. We help construct reality-based, strategic 15-20 year outlooks, while raising our smarts by inviting talent from the rest of the world who bring edge-of-the-art research, practice and experience. And when needed, we are ready to back our mouths up with some money and human resources to assure that things get done.

The Strategic Leadership Team  Guides and leaders for the community effort.

The Elders  Fifty people who can hold the questions, vision the future and stand for the changes.

The Projects Over time our inquiries and what-ifs create emergent patterns which suggest ideas for appropriate projects and, occasionally, a truly creative, mad scheme. These ideas make their way to the Leadership Team in the hands of one or more Elders. Should that body agree, we craft a project and the guiding Elders become members of the Leadership Team.