Village Earth's Renewed Vision For Change
The Village Earth model serves as tightly woven set of organizing principles for a specialized subset of Intermediate NGOs, referred to in the literature as “Grassroots Support Organizations” or GSOs. Rafeal Boglio, in his 2008 article in the Journal of Community Practice, describes some of the features that distinguishes GSOs from other NGOs. “They foster the long-term empowerment of impoverished populations by assisting them in decision making and the mobilization of resources and political power. This core approach is what defines these development NGOs as grassroots support organizations (GSOs).1”
At its core, what differentiates the Village Earth Model from that used by most other NGO's includes:
- Strategic focus on the empowerment of entire regions, ethnic groups, and/or people's. The boundaries and populations being defined by the people themselves. Working towards systemic change vs. short term “fixes.”
- Long-term commitment to those regions and to working as allies with communities as they work to identify the core barriers and opportunities to their empowerment, creating networks to resources and building local institutions.
- A holistic, community-driven approach that, by nature, simultaneously traverses numerous sectors at once. For example, simultaneously implementing small scale infrastructure projects, organizing cooperatives of agricultural producers, building a political base to influence local elections, and creating networks to international advocacy groups. Whatever direction the community guides the process, the GSO should seek to provide support in a responsive and reliable manner.
Organizations implementing the Village Earth model work with communities as allies, clarifying a vision and a strategy as they go, learning by doing, making mistakes along the way, but always learning from those mistakes and moving forward. Our vision for the future is to continue to ally with communities around the globe and develop this model through this work but also to develop a support network for other Grassroots Support Organizations around the globe.

