Village Earth Presents at Sustainability Series - Denver

Join Village Earth in Denver for the Sustainability Series at Wynkoop Brewery. Tuesday, February 2nd, at 6:00 p.m. The Executive Director, David Bartecchi, will be presenting on Village Earth's approach to rights-based, community-driven development. Sustainability Series takes place at: Wynkoop Brewery's Mercantile Room, 1634 18th Street in Denver

11th Annual Gathering of Indigenous Peoples of America

Village Earth's Renewed Vision For Change

Village Earth (originally called the Consortium for Sustainable Development or CSVBD) was born at a conference  held from September 28 – October 2 , 1993 and attended by approximately 250 delegates from 40 different countries. The majority of those in attendance were from developing nations, and most of those individuals represented non-governmental organizations working in very grassroots and participatory projects around the world. The impetus for the conference was the recognition that the billions of dollars spent in the name of development largely was not bettering the lives of the people who needed it most. The conference, as well as the roots of the Village Earth approach, were heavily influenced by Agenda 21 which came out of the United Nations Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 1992. In particular, its recognition that poverty is not the problem, rather, lack of access to resources is the primary obstacle to building a better life for the majority of the world's poor. As such, the VE Approach transforms traditional role of the NGO from being a service provider (health, irrigation, education, etc.) to  functioning more as an “intermediary,” working to mobilize village leadership and planning and from that, develop linkages to resources institutions such as governments, single sector NGO's, universities and the private sector. In development circles, an NGO that works in this capacity is referred to an “Intermediate” NGO.

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.
 

If would like to join us in this effort, please contact David Bartecchi, Executive Director of Village Earth. david@villageearth.org

Opacity and “Development”

By George Stetson, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University

Leaving aside, for the moment, the questions of whether or not mainstream development actually works, what are the ethical implications of treating people as development-objects? Is it possible to get away from the inherent logic of “development,” which suggests that people are under-developed, and that they need us (the West) to develop them, to fix them, and in the end to save them.

I recently presented an academic paper in Montreal, Canada at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference to explain how Village Earth was doing something quite different than mainstream development. The key shift, I argued, was a move away from the logic of project-management to the logic of alliance-building, which opens up the possibility to work WITH people as partners and as co-subjects rather than as development-objects. More concretely, it then becomes possible for an NGO, like Village Earth, to strategically use its geopolitical position in the world to acquire resources, to advocate for, and to collaborate with our allies on their ongoing projects, ideas, and creations. To be clear, this does not imply that we at Village Earth cannot be involved in local projects like water, health, or micro-enterprise development, but that our involvement is based on the terms of our alliance, rather than on the terms (and logic) of development per ser.

One of the best examples is the Village Earth approach to participatory filmmaking. Children of the Anaconda, a documentary co-produced, co-filmed, and co-edited with the Shipibo in January of 2005, among other things, increased the bonds of trust and friendship between Village Earth and the Shipibo, leading to multiple projects, workshops, partnerships, and (this summer) to the First Indigenous Tribunal of Chiefs in the Ucayali Region. The act of making a film WITH the Shipibo, of literally giving the cameras to the Shipibo, so that they could present themselves to the world through their own eyes, was built upon a logic of trust and solidarity, as opposed to a logic project-management where outsiders assume the role of “expert” and “manager.” It is this same logic that guides the Village Earth relation with the Lakota on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The coordinator’s approach is much less about managing projects than it is about collaborating WITH the Lakota on multiple projects, ideas, and Lakota creations. The Adopt-A-Buffalo program, the videos about land issues, and working WITH Lakota tiyospayes (roughly translated as extended families) to recover land, I would argue, has been successful because of a move to dignify people as partners (and friends) rather than objects of development.

In my own work as a scholar, I relate this very logic to the ideas of Edouard Glissant, a Caribbean poet and novelist. For Glissant, all peoples of the world have a right to opacity. Glissant’s message almost counter-intuitive hinges on a critique of the West’s obsessive desire for truth and transparency. Glissant argues that reducing things to the “Transparent” is a potentially violent act of appropriation. Even the simple, seemingly benign process of understanding, by rendering all things transparent, by making the Other (other peoples, cultures, etc.) perfectly knowable, introduces the potential to control and dominate the Other. Glissant’s advice is simple, but radical: “For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.” Glissant invites us to stop reducing the Other to something that we (in the West) are fully able to understand, something that we render transparent and visible. Opacity is to respect diversity (even to celebrate it) without creating a hierarchy that inevitably is based on something Western or “modern.” It prevents us (as an outside NGO) from digging too deep into the inner-workings of local communities, reminding us that there are certain places that might be “off limits,” and certain questions that might be offensive.

I bring in Glissant to highlight that the logic of project management, based on transparency and reduction, might not only be inefficient but unethical. Anyone who is involved in development should consider the ethical implications of rendering people transparent and manageable. Is there inherent violence built into questionnaires, excessive planning, analysis, diagnostics and, in general, the process of acquiring information so that it is possible to manage projects? This is not to deny the seriousness of poverty, but only to consider the human dimensions of development planning and project-management. The shift from project management to alliance building in these Village Earth projects is promising precisely because it gets away from treating people as (transparent) objects to be developed. Rather, it dignifies people as empowered subjects, recognizes and celebrates diversity, and inspires relations of alliance, friendship, and solidarity.

Winter 2009 Newsletter

As many of you know, Dr. Maurice Albertson, one of the founders of Village Earth, recently passed away. Thank you to all of our supporters from around the world who sent their love and support. His memorial service had a wonderful turnout and was a really beautiful event in his honor. He was an inspiration to everyone at Village Earth and we are honored to carry-on his bold vision for the world.

Also, THANK YOU to all of our supporters who made our end of year fundraising campaign a great success!! This year we plan to continue to improve and expand our training programs, while continuing to work with communities as they direct their own path of development and work toward a sustainable future. And we hope you will be able to continue with us on this path as allies!

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Cambodia Evictions
By Drew McDowell, Cambodia Project Coordinator

It’s been 1 month since the eviction of the Dey Krahom community in Phnom Penh. During most of this time my ability to concentrate and work at a computer has been diminished, but I have been on the ground getting our school going again and helping our students the best I could.

After the eviction the school was an open oozing wound, literally and figuratively. The oozing is the sewage problem that has arose, and the wounds are sometimes emotional, and sometimes cuts on feet, etc. Neither of them received the usual attention we give because our problems were so mounting. A part of our daily jobs is to take care of problems, and often get involved in people’s lives on a very personal level. For the past weeks so many people around me all had serious problems occurring at the same time, and it hurt me badly to see the suffering and not be able to help like I would like to.

For those that didn’t get my initial email, on January 24^th the bomb was dropped immediately outside my school (I always say ‘our’ school, but this was personal). Maybe it could be better described as a staged series of bombs orchestrated by the government and developer 7NG. The morning of January 24^th, after sleeping on top of the desks for 2 hours, I woke to the sound of chaos, and as I walked closer to the edge of the slum I saw a mass of people aimed at destruction. A destruction of houses and lives.

As the reality unfolded, my priorities were to gather information, provide logistical support, emotional support, and try to think to the next hour, 6 hours, 12-18 hours... The luxury of longer term thinking was still far off. I had to take inventory, and every resource needed to be utilized, but we had staff out of town and lots of challenges. An Emergency Response was needed to the crisis that enveloped my every sensory, in panoramic view, in the form of loud noises from houses being bulldozed, piles of rusty nail filled debris that needed to be traversed to be able to go anywhere, and a blur of things happening; my phone ringing and receiving text messages, trying to gather and disseminate information, sunburn, students crying, pressure from the officials to clear everything out, anger coming out of my body in the form of tears, irritability, not knowing what to do next, moving people’s things out of their collapsing houses… It was a day far unlike any other in my life, and I have never been called upon like I was that day.

Life continued in a similar vein for the next days, until the trauma started to wear off and we could start to think about how to help on another level, when we began addressing getting kids back into public school, housing, hiring someone to cook meals, keeping our school clean, getting our sink fixed, and giving care to traumatized people… I’ve never been so focused. I didn’t talk to anyone unless there was something that needed to be said, like “can you…?”

To write what we did would take a lot of effort. We found housing for at least 6 families/people, we’re providing daily transportation to school for over 40 kids to come 20km from the relocation site, where they are homeless, give them breakfast and lunch, delivered clothing and other donations, provide a doctor, kid activities, day care, professional counseling, and a thousand other things, most I am not yet aware of. Our team leaders are amazing, and what we did could not be attempted without a mass of dynamic people. Many friends came at a time of need and their efforts were true kindness. We didn’t do it to be nice, but felt we needed to be there for them because their situation was so dire, and couldn’t not help. Many generous donations came in as well, some from people I have never met, and for that we are incredibly grateful. I hope to write thank you notes soon.

Today the last family will move out of our computer lab, but we still have extra students living in the school and no great solution to their housing problem. Patience often is a good strategy, and they will find solutions. We’ll be here for them and do our best to make sure they continue with their education, and are stepping with aid as appropriate. Every Aziza student’s family that was evicted has received some assistance from us.

The people that were evicted fall into 4 categories, from a housing perspective; owners with house numbers, unrecognized owners, renters, and people from the market (market stall owners). By now, the vast majority of the owners who were recognized have taken a house at the relocation site, 20km from Phnom Penh. They didn’t want this house, and many have simply put a lock on the gate and left it empty while they have found a place to stay or rent close to their jobs in the city. They are the lucky ones. There are 335 families from the latter 3 categories living without a roof over their head, in terrible conditions, and the situations is getting worse as their resources are depleted. The future of the people living homeless is unknown, and they feel they need to camp in front of the developers office, as instructed, in hopes that they will be given some compensation, such as a small plot of land somewhere undesirable. Included in this mass of haggard souls are some of our students. Beautiful, intelligent, hard working, committed to a better future, and trying to keep it together through an unbearably tough time, sleeping without security or hygiene. Some of our students living there are high school girls, and I worry about them the most. Actually, I try not to think about them because it is so sad. Their situation was tough to begin with, then a mob of men came and broke down their house while they scrambled to salvage their personal belongings, and now they are camping far outside of town with no toilets or running water.

Other stories turned out better, but in our research of the effects on students education in the aftermath of the eviction (to present to the government), when questioning just the people camping at the relocation site, we found 45 students had dropped out of school because of the eviction. Others went through a tough time, but are getting back on their feet. It will be a life event for all who went through it. We have received some generous donations that made our assistance possible, but will need lots more to continue to help them. Thank you for caring. It means the world to me, and was crucial to getting me through a tough time.

Click here to view a Photo Essay of the evictions.


To make a donation directly to this project, click here.

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Lakota Bison Caretakers Cooperative

By David Bartecchi, Pine Ridge Project Coordinator & Executive Director

This January, the Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative launched retail sales of packaged grass-fed buffalo meat raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative (LBCC) is a 100% Native American owned and operated cooperative association on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Its membership is made up of small family buffalo caretakers who respect the buffalo and the land.

Buffalo raised by members:

• Live on open ranges, never in feedlots

• Eat wild grasses their entire lives

• Are Free from antibiotics and hormones

• Respectfully harvested in the field

Members of the LBCC are committed to the restoration of the northern plains ecology, self-sufficiency and strengthening the sovereignty and self-determination of the Oglala Lakota Nation and all indigenous peoples. To the best of our knowledge, the LBCC is the only Native American run cooperative of small family buffalo caretakers in the United States.

Village Earth helped to establish the LBCC starting in 2007. The LBCC was officially incorporated in South Dakota August of 2008. The LBCC has partnered with the Fort Collins based Allied Natural Meats, LLC. which will function as its fair-trade distribution partner. The LBCC currently has the capability to ship wholesale orders throughout the country. However, at this time, the LBCC and Allied Natural Meats, LLC are only set up to do online retail sales in the Fort Collins, Colorado area but plan to be selling national via mail order soon. For more information please visit the LBCC website at http://www.lakotabuffalocaretakers.org.

The Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative (LBCC) is a 100% Native American owned and operated cooperative association on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Its membership is made up of small family buffalo caretakers who respect the buffalo and the land. Members of the LBCC are committed to the restoration of the northern plains ecology, self-sufficiency and strengthening the sovereignty and self-determination of the Oglala Lakota Nation and all indigenous peoples.

The roots of the LBCC come from the Adopt-A-Buffalo program initiated by Village Earth, a not-for-profit organization based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Adopt-A-Buffalo was started to support Lakota families to utilize their legally allotted lands, over 60% of which was being leased out, primarily by non-tribal members. Through this initiative, Village Earth helped recover over 2000 acres for buffalo restoration, releasing over 82 head of buffalo onto these lands. Some of the families Village Earth worked with were just getting started, others were already raising buffalo on their lands. Over the years, these families helped one another care for their herds. In 2007 the Lone Buffalo Project, the Knife Chief Buffalo Nation, and the Black Feather's began discussing the possibility of forming a cooperative to help market their natural grassfed buffalo. By August of 2008 the cooperative was officially incorporated in the State of South Dakota and by November their labels were approved by the USDA.

While the members of the LBCC seek to earn some income from their herds, their overarching goal is to restore the buffalo, restore the native ecology on Pine Ridge, and help renew the sacred connection between the Lakota people and the buffalo nation. By purchasing meat from the LBCC you are supporting these goals. We also invite you to visit us and the buffalo on Pine Ridge.

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Update from Guatemala
By Ann Jefferson, Guatemala Project Coordinator

Here’s a little update on the Women’s Association of San Pablo Xucaneb’, the Mayan village where we have been working since 2002. Last summer we began building on the land managed by the Women’s Association. Now we have a little house made of wood, the standard building material in this area of Alta Verapaz. It is all finished, except it has no furniture yet, and it’s the most wonderful little house you can imagine. Everything in it except the nails, the tin roof and the lock on the front door is completely handmade of local pine, some of it taken from the Association’s own land. The husbands of the women in the Association provided most of the materials and did the work. And out behind the house they made a lovely little all-wood latrine over a hole they proudly told me is “two meters deep!” That should last us awhile.

MOL.E.R. wants to use the land and the house to demonstrate some of the new techniques that are being employed in rural areas of the developing world. We will soon be working with an organization that comes to villages in Central America to show people how to build closed-box stoves with chimneys, combining the advantages of cleaner air, home heating, and fuel efficiency. This will be a departure from the norm for these villagers whose usual practice is to build a separate little structure for the kitchen and to have an open fire there which does heat that part of the home, but at a high cost to women’s and children’s respiratory systems. The kitchen is women’s workplace, and they and the kids are there nearly all day long, especially in the winter when it’s cold and the kitchen is the only warm place to be.

In addition to helping us build our house, your donations have gone a long way toward paying our technical assistants. Adriana Lázaro, the Cobán coordinator of MOL.E.R. for the past 6 years, continues to spend a day a week in the village, providing assistance with micro-lending, crochet classes for interested women, and management of both the scholarship program we have been operating for five years and the one-acre lot where the women plant vegetables for their families and for sale in local markets. She has also been working with a men’s group in the village to help them go through the bureaucratic process of legalizing their group so they can apply for various programs made available by the Guatemalan government and non-governmental organizations that work in Alta Verapaz.

We also get assistance from a technician who is a member of a different Q’eqchi’-speaking village in the area. Macario Can Pop, who has been trained in community organizing, serves as a translator, supervisor of the scholarship students from his village, and advocate for members of the Q’eqchi’ community around Cobán. We would like to hire Macario to visit Xucaneb’ once a month to help the Women’s Association, but this would mean paying him Q.150 each time (about $20) and we’re not sure we can afford to make that a regular monthly commitment. His work is needed though, and Macario is not only a native Q’eqchi’ speaker and trained community organizer, but has demonstrated his commitment to the Alta Verapaz Q’eqchi’ communities, so it would be a boost to the Women’s Association if we could contract his services.

We also pay $100 a month to our office person, Aliria Ruiz, a struggling university student and computer whiz who manages the office in Cobán, and does all our bookkeeping. Aliria also tutors scholarship students when they need help and visits the village from time to time.

One outcome of the project is that the members of the Women’s Association are learning to understand, though not often speak, Spanish; as a result they have a better understanding of what’s going on around them and are beginning to feel more connected to the world outside their village and more able to move about in the larger community. For one thing they have a bank account, which was a big step. Next they’re going to work on learning the alphabet and how to sign their names. Only two of the older members, about 12 women, can sign their names; the usual way of authorizing documents is with a thumbprint.

So that’s a quick sketch of what we’re up to at the moment, or would like to be up to if we could afford it. To those of you who have donated to the Guatemala project, I want to convey the deep gratitude of everyone involved with the project: the U.S. coordinators, Flora Terán (Colorado) and me; our employees, who desperately need the work; and the members of the Women’s Association who open every meeting with a prayer and never neglect to put in a word for their Northamerican sponsors.

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For more information about the upcoming Peru Solidarity Tour, click here.

To see more about upcoming training opportunities, visit:


For online courses, click here


For the Community Mobilization Intensive Workshop, click here

New Village Earth Video on Our Philosophy and Approach

NEWSLETTER FALL 2008

A Message from the Executive Director

By Mark Horowitz

Year end greetings to all of Village Earth’s friends throughout the world! The past year has been very satisfying for me as Executive Director. There were a number of significant events during the year, including:

• A very successful Village Earth fundraiser – the 90^th Birthday Gala for Maury Albertson - was attended by over 260 people. The keynote speaker was Dr. Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers without Borders. Dr. Amadei was the first recipient of the newly created Albertson Medal for Sustainable Village Development.
• The launching of a close relationship with Engineers Without Borders, in which we will be providing training for their chapters, based on two pilot trainings we held in Santa Barbara and Champaign-Urbana.
• The development of a new four day Community Mobilization Intensive Workshop, and the completion of a major grant to enable Village Earth to expand our reach and services throughout the world.
• Our Pine Ridge project received additional bison calves to continue building the herds of the Lakota Bison Caretakers Coop members. In addition, the Coop was recently incorporated, a milestone in its development. We were also awarded a grant from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation to expand our strategic land planning work on the reservation.

Village Earth is now at a take-off point, with an invigorated Board, a new Executive Director and a very successful fundraiser. We are already preparing for our fundraising event next year, and we hope that many more of you can join us. I wish you all a great New Year.

Mapping for Change on Pine Ridge

Land issues on Native American Reservations are extremely complex and masked by layers and layers of bureaucracy. The old axiom, knowledge is power, is the name of the game. But the game has changed with the advent of computerized mapping such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) which has created a common platform for the exchange, creation, analysis, and presentation of geographic information. In the past, geographic information was stored deep in filing cabinets, hard to comprehend, and controlled by a few gatekeepers. GIS has now allowed us to democratize this information making it more accessible and more understandable. Decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon recognized the importance of this early on when he said, “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be organized.” Edward Said mirrored these comments when he said that “the slow and often bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory which is at the heart of decolonization is preceded--as empire had been--by the charting of cultural territory."

Village Earth's work with the Oglala Lakota on Pine Ridge is a good illustration in how mapping can be a powerful tool for decolonization, but to understand how requires a look back at the history of land issues for Native Americans. Between the period of 1492 to 1887, Native Americans were left with a territory that consisted of only 150 million acres of land. Furthermore, the practice of communally managing lands by some tribes was viewed by the Federal Government as a non-productive and irrational use of resources. To address these interests, the U.S. Congress passed General Allotment Act (GAA) also known as the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887. The purpose of the act was to liquidate Indian land holdings by dividing the land into 40-160-acre allotments to heads of households. After all the allotments were issued, remaining tribal lands, which totaled over 60,000,000 acres, were opened up to homesteaders. Along with the liquidation of nearly 2/3rds of all “surplus” Indian lands, the GAA also created several contradictions for the use and inheritance of the remaining lands that would have deep implications for virtually all aspects of life for Native Americans:

• It broke apart communally managed lands into individually owned parcels destroying the ability of many communities to be self sufficient on already limited and marginal lands.

• It disrupted traditional residency patterns, forcing people to live on allotments sometimes far from their relatives, eroding traditional kinship practices across many reservations.

• Forced Fee Patenting, introduced with the 1906 Burke Act, amended the GAA to give the secretary of the interior the power to issue Indian allottees determined to be “competent,” fee patents making their lands subject to taxation and sale. According to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, nearly 27,000,000 acres of land was lost as a result. The affects of this are still felt today.

• Indian allottees determined to be “incompetent” under the Burke Act were not allowed to live on or utilize their allotment, instead it was leased out by the Federal Government to oil, timber, mineral, and grazing interests.

• Under the GAA the land allotted to Individual Indians is not really owned by them, rather it is held in Trust by the Federal Government. This means the land can be used by the allottee but not sold. This situation has severely limited the ability of Indian landowners to develop assets on their lands including housing, business, and other infrastructure because they are not able to use it as a guarantee for loans.

With financial support from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, we are developing a “land recovery atlas” of the Pine Ridge Reservation to provide the information necessary to clarify the steps to identify, consolidate, and utilize their lands. It contains instructions and diagrams on how landowners can use the descriptions from their “interest reports” (a Tribal land title created by the Federal Government) to locate maps of their lands, instructions and procedures for consolidating lands, and how to remove lands from the Federal leasing program, partition lands, and create wills. It also contains maps of the current leasing patterns as well as maps of the traditional communities that were broken apart by the Dawes Act and federal housing programs. In conjunction with a series of strategic land-planning workshops, one-to-one consultation, and by training a corps of local land-planning consultants in each district, we hope to help reverse some of the damages created by 120 years of exploitative land policies on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Summer Solidarity Tour to Peru

By Adam Hafnor, member of FACT at Colorado State University (CSU)

This summer myself and six other student activists from CSU were lucky enough to travel to the Peruvian Amazon with Village Earth to experience first hand the community work being done in solidarity with the Shipibo nation. From the moment we arrived we were greeted as if we were royalty, which is really a testament to the way that the village adored Village Earth. The community had prepared a ceremony to welcome the seven CSU students. Throughout the week, we were able to truly be immersed in the Shipibo culture and we were also able to share parts of our culture as well.

One of the first days we went fishing with several Shipibo fishermen and learned a few of the techniques that the locals use. We were able to tour a nearby university and also meet several members of the indigenous rights group ODDPIAP, which is a group focused on fighting for the empowerment of the Shipibo people. ODDPIAP from its beginnings has maintained a close relationship with Village Earth and one of the members of the group had even visited Ft. Collins during his work with Village Earth. We were all shocked to meet a Peruvian wearing a Colorado State University T-Shirt. During the trip we were also lucky enough to visit the site of a reforestation project that the Shipibo have been working on. The lands surrounding San Francisco have repeatedly been infringed upon and it was so encouraging to see the reclamation of village land and the positive actions being taken to return the land to its organic state. We were able to form a more comprehensive view of so many issues facing the Shipibo and the ways in which Village Earth is working in solidarity with the Shipibo people.

New Training Opportunities

Village Earth in partnership with the International Institute for Sustainable Development at Colorado State University are working to continually expand and update our training opportunities. We are increasing our range of training services to create specialized courses for groups like Engineers Without Borders and for service learning organizations that send young people abroad to do volunteer work and study programs.

One new workshop that we have developed is our Community Mobilization Intensive Workshop. This workshop has been designed for busy development practitioners, community organizers, and government officials interested in learning how to use a participatory approach in the work they are doing. The aim of this intensive workshop is to offer participants a basic understanding of several tools and principles that can be used to support communities in their efforts toward self determination and access to resources. We believe that for projects to be successful and sustainable, communities must be involved in both the planning, implementation and evaluation of those projects. Thus anyone interested in developing strategies to better engage communities in the planning, design and implementation of their vision and related projects is invited to participate. For more information about this workshop, please visit: www.colostate.edu/Orgs/IISD/Short_Course

We also have some new online courses to complement our Certificate Program in Community-based Development including Gender Equity in Development, Communications and Networking in Development, Participatory Project Preparation and Research Methodologies, and Community-based Forestry. Check out our schedule online to view upcoming course offerings for 2009: www.colostate.edu/Orgs/IISD/Online

Visioning for a New Iraq

This past August, Village Earth was invited to provide a short workshop in our methodologies to a group of 16 Iraqi students visiting Colorado State University. Village Earth facilitated a visioning session with these future Iraqi leaders to learn from them their vision for creating a new Iraq. Their vision included more transparency and social responsibility, realization of human rights, acceptance of diversity, but most importantly, they added, was to love each other. We could all stand to learn something from this group of optimistic young Iraqis.

The students found Village Earth’s empowerment approach consistent with their values and hopes for the future. When asked if these methods could be useful in their home communities they responded that they believed visioning was an important facet in democracy and added that they liked the Village Earth approach of both structural and personal empowerment as being the basis for inclusive, sustainable development.

Upcoming Events

November 19 – Join us for Giving Twice Night at Ten Thousand Villages in Fort Collins, CO. 10% of all sales from 4-7 p.m. go to benefit Village Earth.
For more information: www.villageearth.org

Visit the Village Earth Online Fair Trade Store

www.villageearth.org/Store/index.html

Do your holiday shopping quick and easy online while supporting Village Earth and indigenous artisans!

Lakota quillwork jewelry, Lakota leather medicine bags, Shipibo paintings, Village Earth t-shirts, Shipibo jewelry, Village Earth DVDs, Shipibo fabrics and tapestries. Appropriate Technology Library Holiday Sale (Nov 17-Dec 17, 2008) $100 off Regular Price The AT Library contains the full text and images from over 1050 of the best books dealing with all areas of do-it-yourself technology. Portable and easy to use on 27 CDs or 4 DVDs.

To order your CD or DVD set today,

call: (970) 491-5754

or go online: www.villageearth.org/Publications/ATLibrary/