Designing Our Future Together
Connect and Propel Tampa Bay, Inc is a non-profit focused on the future of our community. The purpose of Connect and Propel Tampa 2019 is to create the opportunity to design and develop a clear vision and future for Tampa by engaging and activating our diverse community and leveraging the breadth of our assets to build economic, social, and environmental well-being for all.
The organizers (Mike Echevarria and Sherri Sutton) brought 50 leaders together from Tampa Bay to brainstorm and vision how to bring the best of Tampa forward and create a North Star for Tampa. This is not political, biased, ministerial, bureaucratic, racial, administrative, legislative, governmental, etc. It is a conversation with all stakeholders represented, including our youth. This Steering Committee Group is leading the direction to bring eight hundred people together in a summit for a conversation about what is possible! The summit will create work groups of 
individuals from all sectors who will work together to bring their hopes for Tampa’s future into fruition, and build the future we know we are capable of creating!
Participating in this summit will be Dr. David Cooperrider, the world’s leading expert on whole system change. He has used this process with small and large systems using a framework called Appreciative Inquiry. Dr. Cooperrider uses a 4-D process – Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver – to identify the positive core of the whole system and bring the best of what is forward. His process identifies what is working and what the whole system is doing well in order to focus on the opportunities for the whole system to move forward together towards their desired future. This process does not focus on fixing problems, but instead focuses on the future and the path to collectively get there. It is a call for collective action and it creates working groups that plan and work to create results with the voices in the entire system.
This process does not focus on fixing problems, but instead focuses on the future and the path to collectively get there.
Dr. Cooperrider successfully used this process in Cleveland to achieve great results over the last ten years, and will amplify all he has learned working with whole systems in Tampa. Dr. Cooperrider lives in this region for part of the year and is committed to helping us connect and propel our region starting with Tampa in 2019. You can visit Dr. David Cooperrider’s website to learn more about his work and Appreciative Inquiry.
Eight hundred people will be invited to the summit. The invitees will come from all walks of life and represent the diverse makeup of our community.
These are the diverse voices that will discover, dream, design, and deliver our best future together.
We invite you to join the conversation. The focus on the summit will be Tampa’s future. Some of the topics that may be discussed include:
✅ A resilient and sustainable infrastructure that allows us to be viable and functional regardless of the circumstances
✅ A clean, inviting, and protected environment
✅ A healthy population
✅ Affordable housing
✅ Sustainable prosperity for all
✅ Communication and understanding between diverse cultures and beliefs
✅ Education that propels for the future
✅ Development of arts
✅ Enhancing multimodalities of mobility/transportation throughout our communities
We will develop concrete goals and plans to act on the consensus and ideas reached by the participants at the summit. These plans will bring diverse people and needs together for long-term, positive action. We have an aggressive goal to interview over 5,000 voices in our community and to share the results of these interviews at the summit, so we can begin to talk about and work on what is important to our community, creating a North Star that allows us all to move in the same direction.
The summit will be held on November 4th, 5th, and 6th at the Convention Center. Join us in creating a new way to communicate, invoke change and propel our city into the future of the community we all want to live in! Join the conversation! Be Interviewed! Apply to attend! Sponsor the event!! Let’s all connect and propel in Tampa together!
Click below if you would like to learn more, volunteer, sponsor, be interviewed or attend this amazing gathering ⤵︎
