ROUND NINE: Where Are Our Dreamers?

I have a dream that someday we'll have a much bigger, much more focused, and much more effective community tackling the challenges we associate with childhood neurological and /or developmental disorders. And I have a strategy. One that has much to do with mobilizing parents and family members of the millions of kids with said disorders.

To execute the strategy? 

We’ll need to be more specific about who we are as a community and what our dreams are. We’ll need to be clearer about the work it'll take to get from here to there.

RE: the latter, some of my recent posts* have been on the snarky side in that I've called our nonprofit leaders on the carpet for doing a poor job of engaging us parents in their mission-specific work. That'll have to change, too --

Perhaps along these lines:

A few days ago, Cynthia at Reaching for the Stars sent me a wish list of about a dozen of her "human capital" needs, e.g., for a pro bono grant writer. (I pasted her entire list here.) My thoughts when I read it? Perfect. This is just what the doctor ordered. Openness from a leading CP organization about its "to do"s.

How come?

I'm sure a ton of our good ideas for improving outcomes as they relate to CP -- probably a majority -- never become official projects and never get acted upon. What a crime. Cynthia, though, has in a sense brought her would-be projects to life. She's given them forward motion and taken a positive step in the direction of getting them done.

Now, why couldn't the untapped and collective genius of our community-in-the-making help RFTS meet those needs? 

I believe it could. And then some. The same goes for meeting the brainpower needs of the hundreds (and hundreds?) of related organizations out there. In fact, I’d like for each of them to send me a dozen** of their "help wanteds" just like Cynthia did. I'd like to add them to this mind map and then invite our parents to have a look...

And consider pitching in. 

My bigger vision is to create an engine, of sorts, for turning our dreams for our kids into realities. My dreams. Cynthia’s. Yours.

As it stands, the map is a repository of requests-for-help /calls-to-action that some of our orgs have made public over the past eight (8) weeks. It's only sparsely populated and it's lacking in other ways. Do you see, though, how it or something like it could make it easier for us to more fully join in each other's dreams?

What if a million parents could browse through thousands of different "opportunities to help" and work an hour per month chipping and chopping away at them? Advancing our projects in ways large and small. How much farther ahead could we all be then?

*See Perturbed and Everything's Peachy. 

**Or more than a dozen. To inch my own dream closer to reality, I can think of more than a hundred things I'd like to do. I keep a detailed and running list. Many of the items on it could be broken down into small tasks. Hardly any of it would require a rocket scientist to complete...