What Dreams May Come

Planning for an uncertain future

Derek DeHart
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read
Photo by Dyaa Eldin on Unsplash

The future of DACA is uncertain. It’s a harsh reality that we’d be irresponsible to ignore. The DACA Time team believes that the United States will find itself on the right side of history when it comes to Dreamers and their rights to prosper, but the political climate with regard to immigration in general is tempestuous and the threats against DACA are unfortunately very real.

On the flip side, there is overwhelming support for Dreamers throughout the United States, both at the grass roots level and in the highest political echelons of our country. Amidst sometimes harrowing developments, we publicize major success stories week-over-week in the DACA Digest, and it’s not uncommon to have to prune some of the less far-reaching accounts of support due to their sheer volume.

And now we have the DREAM Act in the House and the Senate — and the American Hope Act, as well — gaining momentum within our legislature, promising real pathways to citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who are American in every way except for certain documentation.

We are at the precipice of time when we could realize both the worst- and best-case scenarios for DACA in some sequence. For example, DACA could be terminated in response to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal threats only to find its termination quickly made irrelevant by legislation.

It could happen. It might not.

How do you plan for that?

Why plan at all?

If DACA Time is going to sustain itself as a viable nonprofit social enterprise, we have to have some sort of forecast for our organization.

Long-term plans (and sometimes short-term plans) are almost always wrong, but they’re nevertheless a valuable framework for identifying future needs and communicating the trajectory of a venture. If we want to try to plan on, for example, hiring an Executive Director sometime in 2018, we need to understand the steps, within some sequence and timeframe, that would need to happen — beginning now — in order for us to enable that hiring.

SEA Change compelled us to write a month-over-month, year-long plan to help us do just that.

It was hard.

A Vast Continuum of Possibilities

By articulating and documenting a plan as concrete as the goals and activities we’ll target each month for a year, we’re forcing ourselves to collapse a daunting number of possible futures into a single, relatively concrete timeline.

For our SEA Change plan, we had to make explicit a couple of major assumptions to express how we’ll move forward after the accelerator concludes: we built the plan assuming, first, that we will get no funding from SEA Change itself and, second, that DACA will continue to exist in its current form until at least this time next year.

Planning for an entire year under those assumptions was challenging but at least possible. Assume no drastic changes as the months progress, and everything more or less falls into place.

But that’s hardly realistic, is it?

What if we do get funding? What if DACA ends, but the DREAM Act passes? What if the American Hope Act passes with DACA intact? What if…what if…what if…

We could go crazy trying to account for and imagine everything that could happen while ignoring the things that need to happen right now for us to fulfill our vision.

And, really, isn’t that the point of having a strong vision statement? If the imminent landscape of DACA and Dreamer success changes (and it probably will in some way), our vision won’t. Our strategy may change — and we may need to reassess our mission as it pertains to our vision — but the core of why we’re doing what we’re doing won’t.

We’ll still exist to do what we can to help Dreamers prosper. That is, until the world doesn’t need for us to exist.

And so, that’s why we plan. We can see what is right now while acknowledging that we cannot see what is to be. We know what success looks like a month from now and what it looks like a year from now, but we also know that what’s in the middle is likely to change.

How our plan enables us to adapt and learn from that change is what matters in the end.

DACA Time

We're building a secure platform to simplify the DACA application process for new and renewing applicants, and we want to include you in our journey.

Derek DeHart

Written by

Tinkerer and Product enthusiast | Social Enterprise geek | Co-Founder of DACA Time

DACA Time

DACA Time

We're building a secure platform to simplify the DACA application process for new and renewing applicants, and we want to include you in our journey.

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