Global Girl

A Global Girl Introduction to a Great NGO, Catalytic Communities, and an Inspiring “Solution” Database, WiserEarth

Global Girl's Creation of the Conceptual Framework: An International Development Tool

Theresa Williamson, the director of Catalytic Communities, when explaining the work that her NGO does,  brought up an extremely important view of how to look at all of the efforts of non-profit and community action groups: We need to look at NGO/Non-profit efforts in terms of their “solutions” and share these solutions in the model of best practices.

Look at non-profit efforts in terms of solutions, this seems obvious does it not?

I know it seems simple, but on the ground the “solutions” often get lost and don’t get recorded. And certainly, if the solutions get lost, you better believe the failures cannot be found -No NGO wants to publish a huge failure. Even so, it is important to share solutions to teach people what to do and failures to teach people what NOT to do. It occurs too often that potentially great solutions get lost in implementation to the point that the efforts no longer reflect the problems, and thus “solutions” become jumbled and often miss crucial pieces.

My professor from last year, and director of the Payson Center, Dr. Eamon Kelly would call this a break down in the “conceptual framework.” You can see a brief description of the conceptual framework in the image above.

Theresa is documenting a huge database of solutions that Catalytic Communities has collected over the years and putting them in the database, WiserEarth. This is a database filled with the various efforts in communities around the world. (And it was recently translated into Portuguese for all you Portuguese speakers.) I invite you to take a look at this interesting community here, plus you can follow them on twitter with the user name   WiserEarth.