Village Earth

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Consortium for Sustainable Village Based Development AKA: Village Earth
Founder(s)	Maurice L. Albertson, Edwin F. Shinn, Miriam Shinn
Founded	1993
Headquarters	Fort Collins, CO
Area served	Worldwide
Focus	Rural and Indigenous Communities
Method	Community-based Sustainable Development
Website	http://www.villageearth.org

The Consortium for Sustainable Village-Based Development (CSVBD) DBA: Village Earth is a publicly supported 501(c)(3) non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Fort Collins, Colorado. The organization works for the empowerment of rural and indigenous communities around the world with active projects with the Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the Shipibo-Konibo of the Amazon region of Peru, India, Cambodia, and Guatemala. Village Earth is associated with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) at Colorado State University. Village Earth is also the publisher for the Appropriate Technology Library and the Appropriate Technology Sourcebook, a low-cost rural development resource initiated by Volunteers in Asia in 1975 but transferred to Village Earth in 1995.

The roots of Village Earth's approach to community development stems from the reformist tradition of development which emerged in the 1970s to address the increasing income gap and migration between the rural and urban areas created by neoliberal development and intensive farming policies characterized by the green revolution^[1]. To address this situation, reformist approaches attempt to achieve greater equity, sustainability, and local self-reliance through an integrated multi-sector approach emphasizing the use of "appropriate technology" the creation of local participatory institutions. ^[2].

While the roots of the Village Earth approach can be traced to reformist traditions of development it combined many practices used in community development programs around the world in a new way. In particular these include:

1. A sustainable livlihoods approach which recognizes the multi-layered and interrelated survival strategies of rural families and communities and seeks to build on assets and eliminate underlying constraints trough an ongoing process of participatory reflection and action.
2. The identification of a critical mass of 35,000 to 50,000 people networked through clusters of local institutions to promote regional self-reliance without compromising local autonomy.
3. The development of multi-sector service centers to link local institutions to local, regional, and global resources.
4. The creation of mutual agreements and clarification of roles between internal and external activators (locals and outside community workers).

Philosophically, Village Earth differs from many traditional development NGO's in the following ways:

1. Rather than simply treating the symptoms of poverty and powerlessness, Village Earth engages in a long-term dialog with communities to reveal and transform the underlying, and often inter-generational causes poverty. This approach differs from the approach used by many NGO's who often define the problem, draft the proposal, and project timeline prior to their engagement with communities ^[3]
2. Rather than focusing on problems impacting communities, it starts with a community's long-term vision for the future. According to Village Earth, if communities only focus on "fixing" problems, they may not actually be transforming the underlying structural contradictions afflicting them. By first clarifying a long-term and shared vision for the future, communities are free to imagine an entirely different future and begin working to create it [1]. This principle goes against theories of development based on modernization which locates the concept of development in a continuum of progress, mostly based on Western cultural and economic concepts.
3. Village Earth believes that one of the core obstacles for most large NGO's is their size. The associated centralization of Bureaucracy has a tendency towards top-down management and the professionalization and of staff as critiqued by Max Weber. According to development scholars such as David Korten this tendency is in direct competition with the need to be responsible and accountable downwards to rural communities ^[4]

[edit] History

The CSVBD was founded in 1993 as a mandate from participants of the International Conference on Sustainable Village-Based Development September 27-October 1st, 1993 at Colorado State University. The purpose of the conference was to find ways to cause sustainable-village-based development (SVBD) to occur in Third-World villages to help meet the needs of the world's rural poor. ^[5]

[edit] References Cited