STIR Foundation plans for 2013

Prof. Paul de Blot wrote “everything I planned did not come true”. That is what the STIR Foundation experiences again and again also. We take a tremendous amount of initiatives, span our arc and eventually have to content ourselves with different results than we expected or planned for. We happen to be ambitious and really want to get this human centered sustainable stability and progress (sustainocracy) going everywhere. We place our expectations very high just to find out that time was not ready, it did not work or the results were much smaller or totally different than planned for. Is that bad? No, of course not!

We may not reach the planned objectives but what we do achieve is quite impressive. We have to remember that we are not conducting a business. We address the complex transformation of society from one paradigm to another. We experiment with creating harmonic relationships and working organizations in a dis-harmonic human world. This cannot be planned or anticipated, it happens. It all occurs unexpectedly, unplanned and totally dependent of the people and circumstances we meet on our path, the responsibilities people and institutions take with us or the small or large changes they make in our plans to make them really happen. Our common dot on the horizon remains our eternal challenge while we have to find and pave the route to reach it all by our selves.

2009 – 2012

When I look back at Juni 2009, when a group of 50 persons met in conference center Mennorode in Holland to announce our STIR mission, we have accomplished a gigantic amount of things indeed. We did this without budget, with some limited financial support of entrepreneurial individuals and some small amounts from institutional business sponsors. The growing crises and fear for problems of people and institutions helped to get discussions going, first at the level of individuals, later at institutional level too. Our working capital was always the united talent, commitment of participants, our vision and the input we received to make transformative change happen, often against all odds.

2012 became the vulnerable practical breakthrough of Sustainocracy, the new democracy. In February 2012 we played the sustainocratic “City of Tomorrow” challenge with 200 students in a technical High School, for the first time and just for one day. In Juni and October (formal kick off) we announced the very first complex sustainocratic project on city level: AiREAS for clean, dynamic cities.

In 2012 we went international with presentations in Madrid and Hungary. There was international attention for our work, the idealism but also the theory and practicalities.

2013

2013 builds further with plans that will not come through but make a lot happen. We know already now that by doing so, remaining open for change, adaptation, modification, etc while not loosing sight of our dot on the horizon (that represents our purpose), we will, by the end of the year, list again a large amount of successes that we cannot possibly anticipate beforehand. They just happen, but not before we stir our environment and relationships with our ideas, objectives and initiatives. That is the magic of STIR!

Our sustainocratic plans for 2013 and beyond are:

– Make AiREAS happen in the community of the city of Eindhoven (NL) by deepening the processes started in 2012, including intensive cooperation on Air Quality and Human Health with local civilian participation and initiatives on all levels.
– Spread the AiREAS approach throughout the Netherlands, Europe and the entire world (Air pollution is now one of the top 10 killers in the world)
– The STIR Academy is searching further for a location to create a mini-sustainocratic society that will serve as learning and meeting place for the local and global community.
– STIR Academy continues to build her renewal program of global education, especially for young people under the flag of “entrepreneur of your own life“,
– STIR Foundation organizes the “Europe of Tomorrow” challenge in probably Hungary in 2013, for European students, in the fall. We will continue where we left off on 12.12.12
– STIR Foundation will initiate projects of awareness, education and sustainocratic cooperation in Madrid (Spain)

– We will start an Energy & Quality of Life cooperative according to the sustainocratic model

– We take initiative City Fresh (Food, recreation, energy, sustainocracy and health) based on urban farming

– We start “something” with new mobility: from “having” to “using”.
– We start a city quarter related health initiative

– We will continue to give presentations on podia everywhere

– will give classes and lectures in high schools and universities around the world

– we will initiate training of sustainocratic processes that appear in the world for all the participating people and institutions.

Those are the plans that we can make thanks to the commitment of Marco, Nicolette, Luis and myself. Who knows what names will be there next year, maybe even yours, and what we will achieve then? And attention: everything we do is always sustainocratic, meaning that we demand participation of local government, business, science/education and the local population in each of the projects. That is what makes it all so unique and challengingly complex. But we do not go for less.

We wish you a Happy and Sustainocratic 2013!

Warm regards
Jean-Paul