Have you ever known that something needed to change, and that you could be part of making it happen? We are witnessing unprecedented inequity in a time of unsurpassed wealth. Unequaled ignorance during an age of limitless knowledge. We seem unable to act at a time when we are able to move farther and faster than ever before. We are in despair and seeming apathy, at a time in human history when we desperately need to have hope in, believe in and care for each other. We are increasingly isolated and shallow when we have the ability to be deeply connected and rooted.
We have all the answers to our collective and mutually impacting human problems at our fingertips, but are too disconnected to be as effective as we could be, in using them. So much good stuff happens when we can get enough of us moving in the same direction! The key to changing all of this lies in each one of us, right now, right where we stand, taking a look around each from our own perspective and first, seeing a vision of what could be. The kind of community that can sustainably support all of its members. Then second, doing what we each can do from where we are, to change the way we do community. This is the only way we are going to adjust the systems that are keeping us down even though they were originally designed to help us live our best lives. Systems that consistently interfere with each other and create chaos, fragmentation, ineffectiveness, and learned helplessness.
DMG (Do More Good) Social Benefit Housing and Community Development Corporation grew out of a research and development project centered around solving homelessness. The Momentum Project, Funded by the Government of Canada studied best practices, community resources, and community systems challenges. What emerged from that research is a vision and a plan for a way of doing community that will help us sustainable solve our most persistent community challenges. Nothing new and earth shattering! Just doing what we already know how to do in a different way than we are doing it now!
We are talking about starting a movement of community impact, that creates opportunities for all of us, socially and economically. It can combine and deploy what already exists to:
Help fix and prevent social issues which impact all of us.
Support and lead to solutions to the root causes of homelessness and its contributing factors
Turn helplessness and despair into hope, healing, and success.
Provide economic opportunities to increase sustainable local resources and contribute to thrive-ability for more community members.
Start a chain of action that will spread through Alberta communities, and beyond!
Provide targeted builds that meet emerging needs and take advantage of sustainability opportunities.
Increase local cross-sector collaboration for broader opportunities, returns and local benefit.
It begins with looking at buildings and properties that are currently not in use, could be leveraged as part of a collective action plan and hold the potential for us to achieve our vision of community care with social and economic investment returns. Sites like the Michener North Grounds in Red Deer on a large scale, and other properties in this or other communities on a smaller scale. Projects that can accommodate a holistic, sustainable mixed use and mixed income approach to provide for current and emerging community needs in a process we like to call Collaborative Intentional Development.
It is paired with creating a collaborative mindset and community "engine" to combine and collect resources as we combine visions and find mutually beneficial ways toward our various mandates. Finding connections through core causes and the roots of both dysfunction and change. Because going back to where things went wrong can lead us to better directions and practices.
It continues by creating local investment opportunities and community collective impact for forward-thinking and socially-minded individuals, organizations, and corporations. These will pair with the municipal, federal, and provincial assistance, financial or developmental, that are available to access. Our plan includes working with Provincial and Federal Governments to leverage and re-purpose existing properties as well as buy and renovate local buildings into mixed income, mixed use, housing and business spaces.
It leads us into a higher way of being. A holistic, generous, compassionate, abundance mindset that sees everyone as important. Acknowledging all community members as worthy of our collective efforts to create an environment of success, with something to offer when they have an avenue to thrive-ability. With accountability to the prosperity and experience of everyone else.
It requires vision, leadership, faith, optimism, creativity, collaboration and commitment. It demands an abundance mindset that recognizes we have enough, amongst and between us, to meet every challenge and solve every problem, if we are willing to do the work. It needs all of us to do what we can to be the change we would like to see.
DMG exists because there are people who believe that this can happen. We are a collective of people and organizations who share a common vision that stems from our individual mandates. Mandates that come from the roots of the dysfunction we see, but which can lead us into a new way of doing community.