Positive Futures Network

The Vermont Progressive Party is a third party independent of corporate sponsorship and organizes on a grassroots level. They seek social justice and political equality for all Vermonters and hope to provide a successful model for the United States political system as a whole.

Origins

In 1985, Bernie Sanders (now Vermont’s junior Senator) was elected mayor of Burlington, beating a conservative “old boy” Democrat. Bernie brought the best and the brightest in to City Hall and implemented many reforms that were simply modern good government. He empowered a range of citizens to have a direct voice in city government: from students, to the poor, to the elderly.

Progressives started running for the Burlington City Council and getting elected from the poor, student, and middle class areas of Burlington. They cleaned up the waterfront left trashed by industry, started city-wide recycling, and established a public/private partnership with a land trust to make low and moderate rental and home ownership available. The Progressive Administration started a women’s small business technical assistance program and an affirmative action ordinance for the awarding of city contracts. The city-owned public electric utility created nationally-recognized efficiency programs, developed a wood-burning electric facility, and provides Burlington residents with the lowest electric rates in the state. <ref> http://www.progressiveparty.org/organize/model </ref>

Yes! Magazine

The Positive Futures Network is an organization with the belief that we need deep change if we are to avoid the breakdown of society and the natural world. It was founded by David Korten and Sarah van Gelder. It works to raise awareness for an emerging society in which life, not money, is what is important.

This organization publishes YES! Magazine. It is a non-profit, no ads magazine that is printed on recycled paper and archives all of its articles online. Each issue of the magazine focuses on a theme of social justice, working to show possibilities and practical steps people can take for change. There is also YES! for Youth, which is designed to inpsire and empower students. This magazine is widely distributed and encourages all of its readers to become part of a global community of change-makers.

The Positive Futures Network has also published two books that discuss possibilites for social transformation. The organization focuses on sustainability and social and economic justice.

What is the Positive Futures Network?

The Positive Futures Network is founded in the belief that humanity is in the midst of an historic transition. The industrial era, which brought tremendous increases in technical and scientific prowess, has also brought a deepening social, economic, political, and environmental crisis. The roots of our collective predicament can be traced to a culture of alienation - deeply imbedded in the institutions of the industrial era - that denies our essential relationship to the larger whole of life.

Our hope lies in a cultural awakening now underway, as people from all walks of life realize that in the face of the massive failures of our dominant institutions their best hope lies in reclaiming responsibility for their lives, their communities, and our collective future. In doing so they are discovering the integral nature of their relationship to other people, to the natural world, and to the spiritual forces manifest deep within themselves. Together they are birthing what Pitirim Sorokin called an "integral culture." Willis Harman called it a global mind-change.