The headquarters of Oracle Commons is in Oracle, Arizona, one-hour’s drive north of Tucson, Arizona, at the 4,500 foot elevation of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

The Overview:

Extreme income inequality is a seemingly permanent new part of American life.  It has dried up the purchasing power of the vast majority of Americans.  There can be no economic recovery, locally, regionally, or nationally, so long as this new condition persists.

Consequently, the American workforce is heavily damaged and will remain so until the American public begins to connect these dots.

In the meantime, a new challenge looms: an urgency for Americans to improvise and adapt to escalating social and economic pressures that are shrinking their personal income and driving up their living costs; an ominous combination spelling extraordinary personal hardship in the near future.

It is no longer unthinkable that American institutions responsible for maintaining sustainable social and economic conditions have failed.

And, accordingly, there is no longer any time to procrastinate:  Americans need a new, comprehensive model of personal sustainability coming from outside the box.

A Time-Honored Voice of An Earlier America

John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, described the consequence of institutions that fail in their most basic responsibilities, by writing:

Acting in their private capacity, an embryonic effort by a few persons is now underway to grasp the ideal of a future better condition for the Oracle community, and, by example, for other communities seeking fresh initiatives to consider.

The core objective we see is to protect the social and financial sustainability of our next generation and our older Americans, using a broader-than-usual definition of the term “sustainability.”  The conventional use of the term is narrow and defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

To use the term “sustainability” in its broader sense would place the emphasis on our most vulnerable Americans and their critical need to learn to improvise and adapt to the pressures of shrinking income and rising living costs.

In this context, the role of Oracle Commons is clear: beginning in Oracle and expanding outward, it is to provide a virtual gathering place and learning environment for our next generation and our older Americans to achieve social and financial sustainability.

It begins with the discovery and pursuit of new advances in three fields:

• New Internet coaching workshops with coaching teams to address reorganizing the efficiency and cost of the way we currently live, reorganizing personal finances, upgrading 21st century workforce proficiency, becoming familiar with entrepreneurship, and building collaborative enterprises.

• Internet educational technology to connect these Internet coaching workshops to its student members at  their locations.

• Integration of I-Pads and similar devices that provide the optimum interface between the student members and the Internet coaching workshops by offering a combined medium of video, audio, researching by Internet, e-mail, and e-book readings.

Oracle: The Coordinating Hub

Early conceptualization calls for an Oracle location as the coordinating hub, including:

• A studio space in Oracle within which a physical coaching workshop environment (similar to the one shown in the photograph above) can be set up, and from where coaching teams can do on-line video presentations for their student members; some by live video coaching, and some using embedded YouTube tutorial videos (see www.khanacademy.org).

• Equipping the studio space for the development of educational content and its insertion into video presentations for delivery to the YouTube medium.

• Creating a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing area to invite prospective coaching team members and support staff for enrollment, training, and assistance  in integrating them into the expanding programming.

Broad Educational Content

Early conceptualization of educational content includes six broad segments:

• Exploring current work niches within the local, regional and national workforce worth exploring and geographic regions of the nation that merit attention.

• Developing a new perspective and skill-set that help lift the student members to 21st century workforce standards as desirable employee candidates of American corporations.

• Developing a new perspective and skill-set that help lift student members to an entrepreneurial perspective, either as potential new business owners, or as potential operators of non-profit organizations in the field of social entrepreneurship.

• Sustainability awareness to engage the student members in critical thinking about how communities under social and economic pressures will look and function five to ten years into the future. Sustainability coaching in how to realign one’s living environment by improvising and adapting to the social, economic and physical conditions that are shrinking personal income and driving up living costs.  The instruction will include local food production, environmental education, water harvesting, shopping discipline, borrowing discipline, personal finance, investing tailored for the economic decline, medical care, organizing collaborative activities, and dealing with food and fuel shortages, loss of social services, hyperinflation, rising social tensions, and civic action to influence local, county and state governments.

• Learning about the current dynamics of the regional and national economies and how the 21st century workforce is affected by these dynamics.

• Learning about the current dynamics of medium and large scale American corporations; in other words, looking at the regional and national economy through the eyes of the corporations to discover and understand their perspectives and actions.

Subject Matter

• Expansion of situational awareness: new source materials, new reading skills.

• Development of critical thinking and personal communication skills.

• STEM fundamentals (science, technology, engineering and mathematics and specialized follow-on courses).

• Writing composition.

• Preparation of business plans.

• Fundraising.

• Operational components: management, manufacturing, marketing, sales,, accounting, finance, management information systems, outsourcing, human resources.

• Advanced techniques for doing Internet research.

• Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint proficiency.

• Apple i-Work and i-Life proficiency.

• WordPress website construction and management.

• YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin marketing.

• QuickBooks and Quicken proficiency.

• Sustainability case studies.

Learning Approach

• The subject matter will be organized and delivered using actual case studies of organizations, groups and individuals to achieve instant relevancy.

• Relevant fragments of academic disciplines will be connected to the case studies to facilitate critical thinking, meaning making, and to enable each student member to construct his or her own unique perspective of the world.

• Accordingly, the instruction will be a pragmatic integration of actual case studies with specific connections to history, literature, philosophy, economics, sociology, political science and government, organizational dynamics, leadership, teamwork, accounting and finance, writing, marketing and sales, and overall functioning within the Internet.

• Role-play will be used extensively to deepen understanding and proficiency.

• Field trips and other gatherings will be used to widen perspectives, assist in deciding job preferences, and build confidence and determination.

• Arranging internships will be a high priority as a means to internalized learning and to improve job placement potential.

Building Long-Term Camaraderie Among Its Student Members

Oracle Commons will seek to remain in regular contact with its student members to monitor and assist them in their new sustainability practices including job search and placement, small business start-ups, later consultations, and periodic audits of personal finances.

Accordingly, the atmosphere of Oracle Commons is that of a welcoming and nurturing environment for the long pull, where lasting relationships can be fostered and maintained.  This is particularly important for employees in the 21st century workforce where, in many cases, the corporate environment is not nurturing and in which periodic movement to other corporations is the norm.

This welcoming and nurturing concept is the core of the social networking phenomenon, best exemplified by FaceBook, but we believe that a stronger and longer-term cohesiveness is possible within Oracle Commons, based on the dire condition of the American workforce and the close working relationships that can develop between student members, their instructors, and their peers. The ethos of Oracle Commons is to provide an authentic sense of long-term camaraderie within an innovative, life-long learning environment.