7 Stages to Sustainability (7SS)

Shared strategy = collaboration & measurable results 365 days a year.

Stages 1-3: What we do in and with our communities

1. Build a team around your ideal future. Find and enroll your community of Partners In Empowerment (PIE): inspired citizens, organizations, business entrepreneurs, and others who are willing & able to address social and PIE environmental challenges in your focus area. Create partnerships in your empowerment.

2. Assess your assets. Take inventory. Look around you and you’ll be surprised to see how many sustainable human (friends or friends of friends) and natural resources are right in your backyard that can developed to create economic opportunities for people in need. You just need to speak to people and take stock and you’ll realize your network and resources are far greater than you ever imagined.

3. Make a plan. Work with your team to find the true, root causes of local problems, and barriers to a healthy, sustainable future. Outline local needs, your mission, goals, and then actions. Agree who is responsible for what and how you will share immediate and long-term responsibility.

Stages 4-6: What we do at The Global Summit, through 1PIE.org and other (on & offline) collaboration forums

4. Get the Basics. Educate Yourself and Learn from Others. Get the knowledge you need to make an impact. Help mentor and train those who are going to carry on the work. Get them the vocational training, education and technical support THEY need. Get technical support in project management to develop and deliver what is needed next.

5. Put the Pieces Together. Identify, exchange & invest in appropriate technologies and critical information in key areas-- Health, energy, transportation, construction, agriculture, water, IT, education, etc. Assess and evaluate the most durable, simplest, cheapest, LOCALLY appropriate technologies to add value to your inherent strengths. Do your homework - nothing is impossible!

6. Turn Assets into Income and Impact. Increase Access to Social & Economic Markets. Apply your existing resources (i.e. from stage 1, 2 & 3), new skills, knowledge and technologies (i.e. from stage 4 & 5) to develop products and services that value and protect the local heritage on a global scale. Build on small successes & harness the power of the private sector where you can.

Stage 7: THE CULMINATION

7. Deepen Impact & Build Long-term Self-Reliance – Make sure you have the structure and systems to ensure self-creating, self-repairing, environmentally and economically sustainable benefits. You can’t be there all the time, so projects need to run on their own. Reinforce, refine and deepen the mutually supportive multi-sector structures. Enhance the opportunities for synergistic exchange, social impact and economic self-reliance.