Our Vision Plan
We are at a moment in our collective histories where a radical re-imagination of living in our places is necessary to both survive and thrive. We are tasked with transforming systems of domination and exploitation into collaborative, equitable, and regenerative lifeways. For this reason we imagine Place Corps operating in many places, as an agent of change.
Our place-specific transformational learning and leadership opportunities inspire and train youth to know, love, and serve themselves, their communities, and the earth to create regenerative just futures.
Through the socio-emotional learning at Place Corps, rising leaders are prepared to be critical, creative thinkers that thrive as lifelong students. Our pedagogy is interdisciplinary, experiential, and collaborative while actively engaging with the ecology of place as a living institute.
We equip youth with the skills and next steps to be successful entrepreneurs, innovative vocational workers, and effective community leader-collaborators. Our curriculum revolves from knowing, loving, to serving while attending to:
Mission Driven Leadership + Entrepreneurship
Politics, Ethics, + Aesthetics
Practical Life Skills
Creative Praxis
Communications
Our vision plan noted below acknowledges Place Corps’ current actions that strive to bring our organization and our work as designers closer to realizing our vision of radical imagination and liberation for a regenerative future for all through the work we do at Place Corps.
Place Corps designs transformational place-specific leadership programs. Our curriculum is informed by and aligned with the pillars of the Just Transition adapted by our affiliate The Good Work Institute and articulated by Movement Generation, ensuring that participants learn through a decolonizing lens that centers oppressed voices, and develop practical skills that advance the Just Transition.
Place Corps’ organizational structure is an emergent, fractal operating system that prioritizes democratizing the workplace and driving social equity with systems of shared leadership and transparent compensation that address past and present oppression and unjust extractive practices of the patriarchy and white supremacy.
Place Corps programs exist as design solutions to positively impact their places through a pedagogical and methodological approach of applied learning with stacked functionality to develop mutually beneficial relationships for greatest impact referencing a lineage of whole-systems design principles.
As a small organization that at this moment is predominantly white, it is our responsibility to actively, continuously dismantle our racist heritage. It is our privilege to be in solidarity with historically unheard voices, to listen, learn, take action, fail forward, and repeat.
Below are specific ways in which Place Corps is currently addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our programming and as an organization:
Committed to growing and diversifying our leadership teams
Centering sources and texts from BIPOC
Creating Scholarship for BIPOC
Opportunities for BIPOC participant leadership
Collaborating with BIPOC speakers, guest educators, and workshop leaders
Allying with partnering organizations to support distribution and production of farm produce to benefit BIPOC communities
Decolonizing place-based learning and agriculture
Empowering social justice civic engagement
To see examples of how these actions were taken in our 2020 year, see here.
5. Place Corps’ is developing an organizational and programmatic environmental justice plan. The revolution is intersectional. Updates will be shared here.
