An Integrative Economy is human-capacity driven and depends on people with high-functioning skills and characteristics. It is predicated on wholeness—knowing one’s self as a physical, emotional, thinking, sexual, and spiritual being. These are people who are self-directed, self-responsible, creative, and capable of being active participants in life. These are all the citizens of the United States.
The development of a high-functioning person is the work of the new employee category emerging in an Integrative Economy: Human Capacity Development Professionals. Grounded in self-responsibility, a person learns to build and use this framework throughout their lifetime with the guidance of local, community-based HCDPs who work in their homes.
The Framework
In its broadest definition, the Whole Person Framework enables each person to know themselves as a physical, emotional, thinking, sexual, and spiritual being, and shows people how to live life as an ongoing process of building these five core areas to their optimum capacity. In more detail, the framework has sixteen integrated areas—self-responsibility in nutrition, exercise, feelings, thinking, communication, relationships, sexuality, family building, community, environment, work, play, financial responsibility, special challenges, spirituality and values, and finding meaning. Every area impacts the whole.
Becoming a Whole Person
The daily lifestyle knowledge each person needs for a Whole Person Framework does not just happen. It must be fostered and guided throughout childhood and over a lifetime. Only in the last thirty to fifty years have we begun to truly understand the capacity to be a whole human being and the information each person must learn—child development, physical strength and endurance, and emotional intelligence are just a few examples. Now we must take the steps to implement the framework in all our lives. That is what Integrative Community Ventures and its professionals are focused on doing.
Why It Matters
For so long we’ve asked children, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”—and they answered with a job title. That focus on the job title became each person’s primary relationship to the industrial economy. Times have changed. Jobs are disappearing, and the hours we spend at work will shrink as technology does more. So if you don’t define your self by your job, what do you define it by? The answer is wholeness.
For the new Integrative Economy, the question becomes, “How is your wholeness coming together?” Children’s ability to answer reflects a new story: wholeness, and the capacity to take responsibility for all aspects of their lives. The long-range outcomes are high-functioning people capable of participating in, strengthening, and building a sustainable, local, community-based society—and with it an Integrative Economy. As jobs shrink out of the old economy, people gain time to build their wholeness—strengthening their families, their communities, and the environment they depend on. A thriving economy ensues.