Mission
To promote the Village Earth approach to sustainable development worldwide, which adheres to the concept that communities already posses the seeds of their own development, and that the optimum approach to development employs a "bottom-up" (listening rather than dictating) participatory process.
We facilitate sustainable community-based development by connecting communities with global resources through training, consulting, and networking with organizations worldwide.
Background
Village Earth was born in 1993 at an International Conference on Sustainable Village-Based Development in Fort Collins, Colorado, where more than 300 participants from 30 nations created the Consortium for Sustainable Village-Based Development (CSVBD) and gave it the mandate to implement and train others in the strategies discussed during the conference. Since its inception Village Earth has trained and consulted with hundreds of individuals and organizations in countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Bosnia, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico, Columbia, and elsewhere.
Values
- We believe that communities must be empowered to access and manage the resources they need to be self-sufficient and sustainable.
- We trust and value the ability of local communities to shape and create their own vision for the future, as well as the path to move toward it.
- We believe that transparency and participatory decision-making is central to the goal of social justice and sustainability.
- We believe that working toward ecological sustainability must be a priority for all societies to ensure peace and prosperity for all peoples.
- We appreciate and respect the diversity and differences among our constituents and our collaborators.
Activities
Village Earth achieves its mission through a number of activities, including:
- Training individuals and organizations in the Village Earth approach to sustainable community-based development.
- Consuting with individuals and organizations to help promote more equitable bottom-up approaches.
- Providing external and participatory evaluations of development programs and projects.
- Networking organizations around the world to ensure greater cooperation and communication.
- Making appropriate technology resources and inforamation available to community-based projects through our 1050 volume Appropriate Technology Library.
- Initiating sustainable community-based development projects
Affiliations
Village Earth has a direct affiliation with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) at Colorado State University (CSU). IISD and Village Earth partner to make accessible the people and resources of CSU to community development projects around the world.