What
Tthe value of a college degree is under scrutiny in the face of a weak job market, people throughout the world are reconsidering long held assumptions about the purpose of education. In a world that is changing at an increasingly rapid pace, education must empower people to not only survive in change, but to thrive in it. These changemakers will need an education that prepares them to collaborate with others, reflect on what is best for themselves and society, and take action to realize the world they want to create. We are creating that education ourselves, together, through the new Changemaker Masters program.

Vision
How is the world going to be different with this program?
The global Hub Network and P2PU aim to weave together the most powerful learning network for changemakers the world has ever seen- a new Changemaker Masters which is open, free, peer-driven, and both local and global. The Masters is the first high-quality masters program defined by abundance, not scarcity. It will be the first of its scale and quality to be designed from the ground-up by its members. It is the first to be truly global, while also allowing its participants to complete their course of work and study in strong, local communities- in the context of their work- even while they are “in school.”

Mission
The mission of the Masters is to provide the community, tools, and framework for anyone to create their own high quality, challenging, and flexible social innovation education. Masters program participants will thus realize their inherent capacity to become a changemaker, allowing them to work with communities to address social problems in an empathic, systemic, creative, and collaborative way.

Who?

• Hand-pick the first group of 20 or so awesome people for the first class of the new "Changemaker Masters" program, then design the program for and by ourselves around our specific goals and needs... use that opportunity to test a structure and create infrastructure (including process) that can scale abundantly.
  • Possibly get a group of people together physically this Spring at Lake Norman in North Carolina (and linked in virtually) to kick off that conversation and make some early decisions together about commitment, the best structure to support each other, etc.
• IN:
  • Jeff Bordogna - mission: some ideas 1) nutrition? 2) the flexible house?
  • Alan Webb - mission: some ideas 1) "fundamentally shift the tide to using local wellbeing indicators instead of GDP as a measure of progress" 2) "creating a robust infrastructure and culture for communal living through all stages of life in the US."
  • Max Harper - mission: some ideas: 1) "bring design thinking to business process" 2) "do for the gantt chart what TED and Steve Jobs did for the powerpoint."
• Possibilities:
  • Laura White
  • Liz Bordogna - mission: "bringing montessori back to the group for which it was originally intended - the poor"
  • Alex Denny
  • Alex Sachon - mission: organizational process
  • Allison Basile - mission: coops?
  • Alison Fairbrother - mission: restoring faith in science in government?
  • Coy McKinney
  • Axle Brown
  • Erin Krampetz
  • Lucy Burnett
  • Bob (water?), Laura (biking culture?), and Debra Webb (yes, Alan's family)
  • Jessy Kate?
  • Phil Schmidt?
  • Amara - (equity in education?)
  • Renata - (nonprofit management?)

Structure (Some Draft Ideas)

• Some combination of independent study, group courses, and applied work
• Designed to be able to complete in 3 years part-time or 1 year full-time
• Build-in opportunities at local nodes (particularly Charlottesville and DC initially)
• Design fundamentally to scale and run indefinitely across all places and demographics and to minimize barriers based on anything other than willingness to learn.
• Participant designed and run courses:
  • Max, Laura, and Alan starting to work on the first course of the program in the first half of 2012: Design Thinking
  • May create a common track for us to follow together over the next few years, or may just start creating courses based on what we know we want to learn now and building tracks from that later.
• Sign up a “Practitioner Advisory Council” of 3 "experienced practitioners" to start whose role in the program is to be coaches and final assessors of our work... their role would be to help peer review the learning plans we come up with and also to sign off on our final work and badges, ultimately.  We thought that should be made an official role and they might be paid an honorarium.  Additionally, each participant would select an additional, personal advisor in their specific domain of focus. For example, some possibilities:
  • Nicholas Kristoff
  • Sheryl Sandberg
  • Johnathon Haidt
  • Edgar Cahn
  • Erin's mentor at Stanford?
  • The Elders
• Make clear to members of the first “class” we sign up how much we’re spending on those honorariums and the overhead of the program, and suggest how much they might want to each give to help us support meeting that budget.  Max talked about keeping it free but starting from the beginning with a "culture of tithing."  The good thing about that is that if we maintain that as we scale, we can use that to bring on more advisors and pay more honorariums.
• Build a culture that members of the program take on specific roles in the actual operation of the program.  Possibly organize peer training retreats for folks who want to play these roles to give them an opportunity to sharpen these skills before they start to play that role for their peers.  Specifically, some roles might include:
  • Local Coordinator (the connector and back-end support for local nodes)
  • One-on-one life coach to other members of the program
  • Curriculum Coach
  • Project Coach
  • Historian / Reporter (help document, share, and celebrate the work of the participants)

Requirments

• 1) The prime requirement of the program might be that each participant has to state an audacious goal for themselves (e.g. "fundamentally shifting the tide against industrial farming" etc.).  That also might allow us to have a three-tiered structure, depending on where each participant is starting and where they want to go:
  • Bachelor - goals: know your place in the world, understand and define the problem you want to work on, develop the basic skills to be a changemaker, state your audacious goal.
  • Masters - goals: get your project to an early prototype phase or make a novel contribution to research or work in the domain of your goal.
  • PhD - goals: actually achieve your audacious goal or getting past the tipping point [need a better name for this level I think].
• 2) Each participant must keep a "living transcript" for setting goals, holding each other accountable, and showing personal growth in key competencies areas throughout, supported by their peers as they go (Laura has created a rough draft of those skills definitions: https://docs.google.com/open?id=1I88NDBUPskrG-nrAuK1A7OgfVCaXdY79fxACephJ8CRw2PCE641A_SdYJmH-
• 3) A capstone or practicum project
• 4) Pass a review board with practitioner advisory council