Throughout our 100th anniversary year, we are encouraging people everywhere to share their dreams for the future – including young dreamers among us. Our “100 Dreams, 100 Minds, 100 Years” anniversary project began by asking schoolchildren in six different countries around the world to share their dreams for the future by creating artwork and writing about it. The results can be enjoyed by viewing a documentary film called “One Day”.

More than a few years ago, I started my career as a high school English teacher and my passion for students to have educational experiences that will broaden their thinking has never waned. At Steelcase, we believe in the power of learning and insights that it can uncover.

I hope you’ve taken the time to watch the film… and now that you have, you’re probably thinking – I know some brilliant young dreamers, how can we participate? Great news, to make it easy for children everywhere to share their dreams, we’ve created a “100 Dreams Classroom Guide.” Inside the guide, you’ll find complete instructions for a simple project that can help children envision the future — how the world can change and what they hope to accomplish as adults. The guide also provides several options for sharing the children’s work, including uploading it to Steelcase’s anniversary Facebook page.

We designed the guide for teachers to use in their classrooms, but it can just as easily be used by a parent or any other adult who wants to encourage and capture the dreams of a child. We hope you’ll find the guide useful. We encourage you to use it, and please tell teachers you know and your friends about it, too. Our celebration will be continuing all year long so we’d be happy to hear from 2012-2013 classes as well.

Each child’s dream can give insight into his or her promise as a person and what the next generation might accomplish by working together. Thank you for helping a child share a dream, and please also consider sharing your own dreams on our Facebook page. We’d love to hear from you.

Guest post written by Steelcase, Chief Administrative Officer, Nancy Hickey

“I have to go to work now.”

For many of us, that’s a common phrase. We say it routinely, without realizing that the words “have to” cast a shadow on what is in reality a prized part of most of our lives. Particularly for knowledge workers; work is an opportunity to bring out the best in ourselves and others, to uncover our deepest aspirations, to unlock the promise that exists within each of us, to turn ideas into reality, to ultimately move the world forward.

When we asked people of many ages, enterprises and geographies to help commemorate our centennial by imagining the future, work is implicit in most of their dreams as an essential, abiding component of a meaningful life. Susan Szenasy, for example, expresses the vision of a future in which “work and life have come to be valued as a holistic understanding of what it means to be creatures that value connectivity, accomplishment, creativity, and beauty.”

Like Susan, many dreamers expressed the belief that the work is here to stay, but the work of tomorrow can be more fulfilling than the work of today. “I see a peaceful, powerful transformation of how we work and play, educate and amuse. Empowerment of the individual. The sharing of dreams and beliefs, knowledge and creations,” says Donald A. Norman.

Which is not to say dreamers believe work will or should ever become effortless. Ten-year-old Chloe in Denver, USA, has already reached an important realization: “What would life be without challenges? That just wouldn’t be any fun.”

A hemisphere away and several generations removed from young Chloe, Abdulrahman Al-Jeraisy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, shares a similar insight gleaned from a long life and career: “We come to understand there is a struggle in every dream.”

Work is changing rapidly due to advances in technology and globalization, and there has never been a time when insight and innovation were more in demand. At Steelcase, our focus is studying work, workers and workplaces, understanding evolving patterns, and leading with solutions that can effectively stage the drama of unprecedented accomplishment that’s fast unfolding in our ever-more connected world.

There’s a lot to be done. Let’s go to work!