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Summary

The mission:
As a project, The Next Link: Building Sustainable Communities focuses its educational goals towards achieving a sustainable heritage and culture-friendly environment, whether simply in the classroom or within communities on both local and national levels. It seeks to do so by initiating a positive cycle of three phases: a) documentation, b) discussion, and c) proactive exercises. This cycle is imperative in fostering the collective action necessary for creating such an environment.
For those across the country in the high-school and university classroom environments, the film and its supplemental curriculum materials will yield a variety of insights into universal humanities themes, including but not restricted to: an understanding of our collective origins; a sense of place within the context of history, family, and society; the interdependence of human nature and ecology; inter-generational dialogue; and proactive solutions to humanities-based problems facing the local, national, and global spheres today.

The cycle:
This grassroots approach to empowering students and community members is initiated by The Last Link as it moves into the classroom and other viewing venues around the country. It puts the three-part positive cycle into motion as well as providing the groundwork for one complete revolution of its course, with the curriculum as the catalyst.

PART ONE: Documentation
The Last Link fulfills this portion of the cycle the first time around, providing documentation of a culture facing a variety of universal problems, including the threat to its lineage. In future cases, students will providing the documentation themselves.

PART TWO: Discussion and Education
Curriculum designed for a wide range of disciplines (for example Foreign Languages, Language Arts, Film/Video, Art, and Music) will facilitate discussion and debate on sustainable heritage and culture and related humanities topics. The film and its stories will provide context and act as a hub for conversation.

PART THREE: Proactive Exercises
Using the film as a prototype and the classroom discussions as material, students will venture into their own communities, as part of the curriculum, to document the variety of cultures and heritages present there. These works will be collected into localized community oral history libraries. Thus, the cycle is renewed. Through this and numerous other community service programs centered around the elderly population, vital intergenerational dialogue will be established.