AN INVITATION TO ASPIRATIONAL FUTURES AND INTERGENERATIONAL COMMITMENTS
We launched California 100 in July 2021, with a daring question: How can we envision a dramatically better future for our state, and how can we expand our capacity for research, policy innovation, and collective imagination to make those visions a reality?
Over the last two years, we have benefited from the wisdom and engagement of hundreds of dreamers and doers across California—from an intergenerational Commission that reflects the talent and diversity of the state; to dozens of researchers, advisors, policy innovators, community organizations, and young leaders; and hundreds of participants in our listening sessions, Youth Futures Summit, and our deliberative democracy exercise that directly engaged everyday Californians. Throughout, we collectively grappled with big ideas to build better futures—not only for ourselves but also for our children and our children’s children.
We are excited to bring all of these strands of work together in this document, a Vision and Roadmap for the Next Century that is grounded in a set of core values that speak to the aspirational nature of our effort.
The California We Seek reflects the collective views, hopes, and commitments of the California 100 Commission, and builds on a mountain of work that is unprecedented in its scale and scope with respect to envisioning and building better long-term futures.
Our vision and roadmap proceeds in four parts. We begin with core values, which are essential to help us stay grounded amidst periods of massive uncertainty and rapid change, and can help guide us in our journey to build better futures. Next, we take our core values and venture to imagine a preferred future for the state and all its people, with an aspirational set of visions that can motivate people to come together and take bold action.
We then lay out a set of pivotal moves, which offer strategic approaches to realize our visions, with ways to design and build systems that stay true to our aspirational values and our commitments to intergenerational progress. Finally, we offer breakthrough solutions, which are provocative, intriguing ideas that reveal the limitations of our current system, and compel us to enact transformative solutions that serve all of California, and all Californians.
We ask you to treat this document, not as received wisdom, but as an invitation to explore and engage, and to bring your curiosities as well as your expertise, passions, and commitments.
We invite you to engage, improve upon, and even disagree with the breakthrough solutions we have sketched out, and to offer your own transformative solutions by emailing info@california100.org.
We also encourage you to formulate your own vision and roadmap, working in partnership with a variety of organizations and community members, young people and elders alike. We invite you to utilize the various resources we have produced, including our many research reports, innovation briefs, Youth Futures Manifestos, and toolkits that aim to democratize the work of strategic foresight by making it more inclusive and accessible.
California’s future is what we make of it. We invite you to join us, and to continue dreaming, designing, and building a brighter future for the state and for the communities you hold most dear.