TheCenter

(“If not this, then what?  If not us, then who?  If not now, then when?”)

By ‘franchising’ High Schools into dual-purpose Community Centers,

owned by the district’s residents,

run by Elders and Educators mentoring Students,

to augment Social Security

and provide Student Scholarship in return for service to the community,

we can pour vast unprecedented wealth into our Schools & Neighborhoods.

(…not to mention our personal bank accounts.)

JUST ASK YOURSELF…

(As you read this, I’d like to suggest that you populate it with faces, places, and choices familiar to you.

Put it alongside the post office, library, and town council in the town of your childhood. …and that of your kids.)

–Ask yourself the questions, don’t just read them–

Do the math.  Take a flight of fancy or two

Here goes…

What great leap of imagination does it take

to see our Senior Citizens, Students and Educators

running High Schools as Community Centers?

…

How much government, foundation, and charity money

would this union of Elders and Students qualify for?

…

How difficult will it be to get the Fortune 500

to throw at it sponsorship monies of Olympic proportion?

…

How much less than retail will this smiling group of kids and grandparents

be able to negotiate on every good and service not donated outright?

…

Who will be able to resist a ‘Council of Moms’,dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting-clothes,

trained in tax law, and sent door-to-door

to solicit tax-deductible memberships, sponsorships, and donations?

…

Just how big a budget could a community amass if it organizes itself

to aggressively pursue every group and individual funding avenue available to it?

…

Teens. Senior Citizens. Educators.  Are there three more

over-qualified, under-utilized, over-patronized, under-appreciated segments of our society?

…

Who needs time more than our Teens? Who has time more than our Elders?

…

How much will our quality of life benefit by keeping our Elders in town* and actively involved

while funding our youths’ post-secondary education in return for service to the community?

*(I wrote this so long ago that our Elders still had pensions, motorhomes, and retirement communities in Myrtle Beach.  Sad.)

…

Where on the Fortune 500 will a company sit

if it is a Top 5 Employer in every high school district in America?  Not even the government…

…

and perhaps most importantly:

…

If this were part of our world, would your life be better today?

…

“Are you starting to get a handle

on the scope of what’s here?”

Do the Math:  Every High School.  Every Teen.  Every Senior Citizen.  Every Citizen.  Every Voter.  Every entertainment, sports, education, social services, and banking deposit dollar in America.  An economic engine of unprecedented size driven for good by an un-opposable union of our kids and elders, freeing those in between of the staggering burdens of education and social security.  Generate vast wealth at the local level.  Empower.  Make ‘Community’ again the building block upon which human beings build their lives.  Export.

 

(What’s here is just the tip of an iceberg I’ve been working on my whole life.

Following are some graphics from my many attempts to draw attention to this over the years

as well as the “Five Steps which fix almost Everything” that were the centerpiece of the Educators & Elders email.)

“Where else is there a plan

to get us anywhere beyond Tomorrow?”

The above is, at the very least, an extremely efficient use

of an awful lot of very valuable, vastly under-utilized resources.

This union of young and old is how it always used to be, farmer to farmer, steelworker to steelworker. Technology has stripped us of the notion that we have anything to learn from our Elders.  BIG mistake.

I like to think the above gives us something nobler around which to build our world.  It lets people back in, brings us together with our neighbors, and changes the rules of the game, encouraging what is best in us.  Vast feely-touchy wealth voted on and spent at the community level will give each and every one of us a sense that we matter.  Trust your fellow man and build from there.

 

Five Elegantly Simple Steps

That Can Fix Almost Everything.

1. ‘Franchise’ every high school in America into a full-service ‘Coca McDisney’ Community Center, owned by the district’s residents, and run by Elders mentoring students to augment social security and provide student scholarships in return for service to the community.

2. With access to classrooms, libraries, computers, sports facilities, pools, band rooms, auditoriums, broadcast studios, restaurant-sized kitchens, and motor pools, plan a full range of cultural, civic, recreational, educational, and athletic programming.

3. Consolidate under the umbrella of this community-owned organization the senior, youth, family, welfare, health, education, and other charitable and government-funded programs in the district.

4. Create for each citizen, starting at birth, an “Individual Entitlement Account” with yearly statements and their name on it, as a repository for all payroll deductions and government payments toward healthcare, unemployment insurance, and social security, withdrawing funds only for healthcare, post-secondary education, unemployment, and retirement.  Then deposit these “IEA” funds, and the cash flow generated under #2 and #3 above, into a community-owned bank run as a division of the Center, using the deposits for the betterment of the community in the form of housing, student, business, civic improvement, and economic development loans.

5. …and, were the above to be the major component of nation building we represent when we send in the Suits and/or Boots, might not this un-opposable union of young and old be possibly the best, if not last, hope we have for Peace on Earth?

Baghdad as well as Boston.

Just thinking…