Kids 2020 website is now live!

We have opened parts of the Beta 1.0 version of the Kids 2020 website. We appreciate any feedback you would like to share with us. Of course, the site is very limited at this time. We are only a small group of volunteers.

Many, many thanks to Hans, Marcel, Gwyn, Sierd, and Rob. They have shared their expertise and shown their dedication to bringing Kids 2020 alive online.

Kids’ Well-being Int'l Conference in Belgium

We are excited to participate as speakers at the International Conference - Innovation in Education, Raising the Well-being of our Children - in Leuven, Belgium.

In August 2007, I came across Liesbeth Michiels in Utrecht. Liesbeth is an accomplished professional who wanted to make a difference. She decided to coordinate initiatives to increase the well-being of children. She founded Kids’ Well-being. This December 3rd and 4th, she will bring experts together in a conference to discuss innovation of the educational systems within Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.

Involvement, participation, and interaction are key drivers for the 21st Century. While our educational systems provide children with knowledge, there are still many questions left unanswered. Each country has different standards for education. And, there is a difference between education and learning. Another big question we have to address is “How do we help our children become citizens instead of consumers?”.

This is a wonderful opportunity for Kids 2020 to contribute to the dialogue and to engage participants in a series of workshops about the role that values play in our lives. During these workshops we hope to learn how to share our different perspectives on values. How do we each identify our own values? And further, how do we each use those values to guide our choices?

This will be very insightful as we continue to develop the learning programme for Kids 2020. What defines the well-being of a child in industrialized nations in the context of the 21st century?

Designing the Website

We're getting the designs ready for the website. Here's a sampling. We're open to feedback.

Intro:


Our promise:


The 7 Phases of the Learning program:


I met with developers last week here in Amsterdam to discuss building the content management framework and content management system. This seems to be a challenge because we want to use Open Source software. Finding working partners that fit the criteria for this limits our choice and makes the this project much more complex.

If you have any suggestions, please share them.

Kids 2020 is officially a legal foundation

Hooray! On 10 May 2007 at 10:52 am, we signed the charter for the Kids 2020 Foundation in The Netherlands.



This means that we are now committed to putting a potentially world-changing programme for 10 year old children into practice...

• to give children the tools and frameworks to constructively think for themselves in a systematic way and make values-based choices.

• to research & develop techniques and systems for capturing content, building community, sharing knowledge, and working out a new value system.

• to establish governmental relationships that translate our learnings into policy.


Our purpose creates unique value for specific groups:

Children: learning strategic skills and unleashing their ideas with purpose, vision and direction to create value for themselves and others.

Society: helping children learn how to take responsibility as contributing citizens rather than just as consumers.

Business: providing a vehicle for socially responsible investment that demonstrates clear commitment to a values-based, sustainable future.

Public Affairs: putting the health, education and welfare of a child as a sustainability strategy at the heart of every government policy in the world.


Our Guiding Principles:

• establish a movement – mobilising vast networks of expertise
• vision driven rather than goal driven
• sustainability built into strategy, choices, behaviour
• incremental stages and testing
• emerging and evolving – learning feeds development of model
• participation model – Peer-to-Peer
• grow a new value model
• dynamic system


Kids 2020 needs partners and resources to fulfill this. We're amazed at the groundswell of enthusiam for this project so far.