“A strong community helps people develop a sense of true self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being and doing.” -- Parker Palmer


Community Development offerings include:

Modern management frameworks were born proclaiming that organizations are the triumph of the human imagination. As made and imagined, organizations are products of human interaction and mind rather than some blind expression of an underlying natural order. They are the products of human imagination.

Future reality, in this view, is permeable, emergent, and opens to the mind’s causal influence; that is, reality is conditioned, reconstructed, and often profoundly created through our anticipatory images, values, plans, intentions, beliefs, and the like.

Human systems and communities are largely “heliotrope” in character, meaning that they exhibit an observable and largely automatic tendency to evolve in the direction of positive anticipatory images of the future.

Collaborative Leadership for a Sustainable Community™: (CLSC)

Collaborative Leadership for a Sustainable Community™ is a three-day program offered for community leaders, nonprofit leaders, educators, and political leaders. This effort has as its main goal to create a heightened sense of awareness around the many issues that community leaders must consider when they are focused on being sustainable. At the center of this experience is an experiential discussion based on natural systems that engages participants in reframing traditional paths of competitive engagement to become collaborative and holistic. Attendees will also receive an introduction to the principles of “Servant Leadership”. The experience also exposes participants to use of systems thinking when creating complex community strategies.

Collaborative Leadership for a Sustainable Community can be delivered as a standalone experience or it can be delivered for a community in preparation for developing an overall community strategy through an AIMCat™ (described next).

Appreciative Inquiry Management Catalyst™:

Environmental and economic shifts present many places of leverage for communities prepared and willing to act collectively. Collective action is based on a shared sense of the need for change as well as sense of their core strengths as a community. TAVA in partnership with AMCI is positioned to assist communities to “Lead from sense of their emerging future” through its jointly developed application known as AIMCat™ (Appreciative Inquiry Management Catalyst™). When community leaders provide positive images of their emerging future they create positive results.

TAVA and AMCi facilitate the creation of a community’s best case scenario (Vision) and strategic plan with support for implementation of the vision. AMCi and TAVA are now going through their own emergence into the future. We are bringing the principles of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to our AIMCat™ experience. For over twenty years AIMCat™ and AI have been developing on similar paths. Both have been engaged in facilitating change processes in major organizations and groups. Both have made the creation of a powerful image of the future one of the key elements of their change process. Both have established their work on solid psychological principles that engage people around activities that support the common good of society.

AMCi’s Strategic Management Process (SMP) has been in continuous use and refinement for over two decades. This highly participatory, psychologically-grounded process has been successfully applied, in whole or in part, in hundreds of highly complex situations, primarily in work organizations, government and communities.  AMCi created the SMP to empower teams to work fast and effectively. The methodology aligns people, process, and technology to promote sustained growth. The merger of the strengths of Appreciative Inquiry with the SMP process has created a new innovative process known as AIMCat™. This process engages people at the core of their positive strengths to create a collective vision that addresses their emerging future and produces a priotized strategy to manage a detailed action plan leading to their collective success.