On personal responsibility

We as individuals, you and I, will have to learn to take control of and the responsibility for our own lives, our families, our neighborhoods and society at large.

We need to start listening to our own hearts and make use of the most amazing gift we have - the agency to chose and the ability to take responsibility for our own lives and actions. To stop blaming our background or surroundings.

Today's establishment have the tendency to see you only as a carrier of problems and spendings, in one way or another. May it be your need for socialwellfare, the quality of your chidrens school meals, special housing or snow removal. Nowhere does it suggest that you are nothing but a problem.
But be sure that politicians love you, every 4 years come electionday.

6 important questions:

1. What do you want out of your life - in your neighborhood?
2. What is most important to you and your neighbors - that you have in common?
3. What questions do you want to highlight and engage yourself in, in your own town?
4. How will you implement these changes?
5. What would lead to a better and more effective integration in your society?

6. What resources are unique in your neigbohood?

 No matter where you live, you can be a voice in the neighborhood or city on how the future will look like. The power of the future is not the property of either politicians nor local officials exclusivily. The power and the force is with you and your neighbors!

The future belongs to the individual or group of residents in a neighborhood that have such engagement  that they begin to work together. That engagement can, and will, start a chain of events that create the conditions for reaching the desired future. In short, your engagement will most definitly increase the pressure on expected change in Your society.

Capture the power and become an important voice that make the established elite interested and ready to listen to you, by taking your personal responsibility for your life, for your family, your society and get involved in your neighborhood.

If you engage yourself and some of your friends in your neighborhood, in the 6 questions above to start with, you can make a diffrence. Not only your own life but in the life of many others, old and young alike.

Together you can do what no politician or local official has  managed to create:

- A safe community

- Prosperous neighborhoods

- Self-respect among the residents

- An increased influence in the city hall.

Leif Ståhlberg
National Advisory Committee on
EU cooperation on urban development
(Social Development, residents perspective)