Testing Questions For ‘Genuine’ Progress & Improvement

Here is my own adaptation of a series of 'testing' questions and categories (stuff to think about before you go off and start to do something) that I found very eye opening and thought I would share.

Personal - Does it support:

• empowerment, awareness, creative visioning, values clarification, acquisition of essential literacies and competencies, responsibility, wellbeing and health maintenance, vitality and spontaneity (building & maintaining personal capital – personal sustainability)?
• caring, loving, responsible, mutualistic relationships with diverse people (valuing equity & social justice), other species, place and planet (home & ecosystem maintenance)?
  
• positive total life-cycle personal development and change?
  

Socio-Political - Does it support:

• accessible, collaborative, responsible, creative, celebrational, life- promoting community and political structures and functions (building & maintaining social capital & cultural [including economic] sustainability)?
• the valuing of 'functional' high cultural diversity and mutualistic relationships?
• positive cultural development and co-evolutionary change?

Environmental - Does it support:

• effective ecosystems functioning (building & maintaining natural capital & ecological sustainability)?
• 'functional' high biodiversity, and prioritized use and conservation of resources
• positive ecosystem development and co-evolutionary change?

General

• Does it support: proactive (vs. reactive), design/redesign (vs. efficiency & substitution) and small meaningful collaborative initiatives that you guarantee to carry through to completion (vs. heroic, Olympic-scale, exclusive, high risk ones) and their public celebration at each stage - to facilitate their spread - thereby making wellbeing and environmental caring 'contagious'?
• Does it focus on: key opportunities and windows for change (pre-existing change 'moments')?
• Does it explain: how it will effectively monitor and evaluate its progress (broad, long-term, as well as specific & short-term) by identifying and using indicators and being attentive to all feedback and outcomes (& redesigning future actions & initiatives accordingly)?

Adapted from the work of Professor Stuart B. Hill –-Foundation Chair of Social Ecology School of Education, University of Western Sydney