Scanning the Horizon: Trends, Developments,
and Innovations Impacting
the Future of Child and Family Services
Regional Results: A Briefing Report
Public sector re-engineering, changing funding streams,
privatization, technological advancements, and neuroscience
developments have the potential to dramatically alter the way
nonprofit providers do business in the future. But, human service
agencies have yet to systematically contemplate the impact these
emerging trends will have on how they plan, organize, and deliver
their services in the future.
The scenario planning project focuses
on the application of scenario planning, a tool commonly used in the
private sector to address change, as a methodology for human service
nonprofits to identify, understand, and manage the changes facing
their field.
Taken together, these two reports provide the framework for
initiating the process of scenario planning within nonprofit human
service agencies.
Scanning the Horizon: Trends,
Developments, and Innovations Impacting the Future of Child and
Family Services
[TOP]
Contributor(s): Patrice A. Heinz
View a .PDF of this report.
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In his book, The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz
argues that scenarios as a planning tool work because
“people recognize the truth in a description of future
events … [the description] resonates in some ways with what
they already know, and then leads them from that resonance
to reperceive [sic] the world.” Schwartz further instructs
that observations about what is occurring in the “real”
world must be built into the story being developed by
scenario planners—and the only way that can occur is to
“sample evidence” from the world around us.
This report is our attempt at sampling the world in which
nonprofit child- and family-serving organizations operate. It
includes historical data and projections or forecasts
gleaned from census reports, surveys, articles,
publications, and personal interviews with nonprofit
leaders, observers, outsiders, and fringe thinkers. |
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It
provides, we hope, a framework of information that local,
regional, and national planning groups can use to explore a
central question: What will the future look like a decade
from now for children and families, and the nonprofit
organizations that serve them?
Gauging the future requires that
we first identify the core segments of nonprofit businesses
mostly likely to be impacted by emerging trends. For the
purposes of this report, we have identified five, and
phrased them as questions:
- Who will be the clients
of nonprofit organizations? Information we explore in
this topic includes population statistics, the changing
profiles of the American family, child well-being
indicators, children in foster care, and economic
indicators.
- How will services be
designed? Our discussion here focuses on the emerging
impact of science, medicine, and biotechnology on
traditional child and family services.
- How will services be
delivered? Our examination centers on revolutions
occurring within the technology field and how the future
of technology will influence nonprofit service delivery
mechanisms and structure.
- How will nonprofits be
funded or financed? We investigate patterns of
charitable and foundation giving, venture philanthropy,
government financing, and other sources of financial
support for nonprofits.
- How will government and
society impact organizational capacity? We consider
emerging public policy priorities, shifts in political
philosophy and practice, increased demands for
accountability and transparency, and other policy and
workforce issues likely to affect, in some way, the
abilities of nonprofits to continue their work in the
next decade.
We conclude our scan by offering a synopsis of the economic,
societal, and environmental trends that futurist Marvin Cetron and science writer Owen Davies believe will reshape
the world in the next two decades and beyond.
Thought
admittedly widening the scope beyond the immediate operating
environments of U.S. nonprofits, we present the information
in the hopes that nonprofit child and family service
providers will come to understand that what changes the
larger world around them, will fundamentally change their
world within.
A word about our research and compilation of results: we
took Peter Schwartz at his word, literally, and sampled the
environments around nonprofits. No environmental scan can
legitimately and authentically cover every topic, report
every emerging trend, or consider every possibility or
implication.
Within the scope of our experience, and the
expertise of our informants and sources, we attempted to
identify those trends and indicators that we believe will
have the most significant impact on nonprofit child and
family services.
We present this report admittedly knowing
that critical, now-just-emerging issues will be left out of
the reporting and discussion contained here. (Indeed—as
this report was being developed, Congress’ intervention in
the Terri Schiavo right-to-live-or-die case raised profound
implications for public policy intrusion into family privacy
matters, the expanded role for religious conservatives in
formulating public
policy on a variety of issues, and the influence of Congress
over the judicial branch of government.)
That said we
anticipate this document will be a “work in progress” over
the next 6-12 months and welcome any additional observations
on the exceptional, the notable, or the brilliant in the
world surrounding us. |
Regional Results: A Briefing
Paper
[TOP]
Contributor(s): Patrice A. Heinz
View a .PDF of this report.
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The Scenario Planning Project was conceptualized on the
belief that nonprofit executives, confronted with enormous
challenges to deliver effective services to children and
families, all too frequently deal with those urgent concerns
at the expense of contemplating future operating issues or
opportunities. Public sector re-engineering, changing
funding streams, privatization, technological advancements,
neuroscience developments—each of these alone or in
combination with others has the potential to dramatically
alter the way nonprofit providers do business in the future.
But human service agencies have yet to begin systematically
contemplating the impact these emerging trends will have on
how they plan, organize, and deliver their services in the
future. |
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This project focuses on the application of one tool commonly
used in the private sector to address change—scenario
planning—as a methodology for human service nonprofits to
identify, understand, and manage the changes facing their
field. Funded by a consortium of foundations (The Surdna
Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, GE
Foundation, and the Philanthropic Collaborative), the project
has two primary goals (1) introduce the tools of scenario
planning to nonprofit executives and (2) identify a range of
scenarios to help nonprofits think about the future and the
strategies they need to pursue.
This Briefing Report summarizes the results of five regional
scenario planning sessions held April through July 2005 in
St. Paul, Miami, San Jose, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Nearly
100 nonprofit agency executives and representatives from
business, education, philanthropy, health care, and
technology participated in meetings held in those five
cities. (See Appendix A—Regional Participants.)
Each
received hands-on training in the methodology of scenario
planning and participated in developing one of 19 scenarios
conceptualized to profile the question: What does the future
look like for children and families and the nonprofits that
serve them?
One publication was produced to provide a
framework for discussions at the regional meetings:
Scanning the Horizon:Trends, Developments,
and Innovations
Impacting the Future of Child and Family Services.
We have organized this report into four sections: Scenario
Planning Terms—the definition of several key concepts used
in the scenario planning process; Overview of Regional
Methodology—a description of the general process employed
in each meeting; Analysis of Key Factors, Drivers and
Uncertainties—a discussion of the priorities regional
participants felt most likely to impact the future for
children, families and nonprofits; and Regional Scenarios—a collection of the 19 stories developed in the five
meetings, and the indicators that may foretell whether those
scenarios are emerging.
Two appendices complete the report:
Regional Participants (Appendix A) and a list of Regional
Priorities (Appendix B).
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(c) 2009 - Alliance for Children
and Families:
www.alliance1.org |
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