Re-engagement networks and the NASA Shuttle shutdown
You may have read about the economic dislocations which will take place when the space shuttle ceases operations. President Obama was down in Florida recently to announce his plans for NASA after the shuttle.
You can imagine that the folks in Florida are trying to figure out "what's next?"
The scope of these dislocations overwhelms the capacity of the traditional unemployment and workforce development systems. Those systems have handled -- with relative degrees of success - the economic downturns embedded in the business cycle. But they are not geared for the deep transformations taking place in our economy today.
You can see the challenges, as I do, in the streets of Kokomo, or any Midwest auto community.
To address these challenges, we began to think about what a new system of economic adjustment -- economic re-engagement -- would look like. We designed re-engagement networks and set our challenge in a different light: In communities facing major transformations, we need to design and strengthen different types of re-engagement networks. This kind of thinking heads us in a different direction -- away from the transactional, social service model that provides the foundation for our current systems.
This traditional approach no longer works.
Here's some additional background: http://snurl.com/vw1xq
Today, we expect 250 people. We will be focusing our strategic doing session on developing "re-engagement networks", a concept we developed at Purdue to handle the transformations we are undergoing in places like Kokomo. Here's a card we sent to participants earlier this week. I've also included the slides I'll be using this morning.
