Why I started this development community

I have been living and working in Guatemala for the past eight years which has given me the opportunity to see humanitarian development up close, and to work with over 100 different nonprofits and donors. My work has created intense curiosity on my part in better understanding “What works in development?” This led to the formation of the Center for Sustainable Development (http://www.csd-i.org/ ).

Through teaching online courses at the Center, I've had the honor of working with students from over 60 different countries. What immediately struck me while working with this many different cultures, is that most of the students were working on projects that had very similar themes.

I have learned an incredible amount from these course participants; they've had excellent ideas for their projects and they've had access to information that I had not seen before.

These students are of all different ages and different professions: donors, executive directors, grant writers, field staff, business owners with a conscience, students, scientists, consultants and people who would like to transition into development work.

I began to realize that since such knowledgeable, talented (yet widely scattered) people were working on common problems -- that we should consider pooling our resources and begin collaborating with each other online to develop tools and solutions to the challenges we find in development.

Practical, simple tools and solutions that have shown evidence of having worked and that can be understood, implemented and maintained by a range of people types. These tools and solutions should be sustainable and impact-oriented. This led to the formation of this online development community http://developmentcommunity.csd-i.org/.

We encourage people to visit our community seeking these types of solutions to development challenges. My hope is that they will be able to access information not only on their own, but also through the generosity of community members who reach out to help them.

Another goal of this development community is to share and collaborate with other members that have similar interests. Please join groups, connect us to your friends and colleagues, participate in discussions, post blogs, and upload documents, photographs, and videos. But most of all let's work together to fine tune the answers to “What works in development?”

Thank you for joining.

Tim Magee