Newsletter Library
The Center for Sustainable Development’s monthly newsletters give practical information on developing sustainable, impact-oriented development projects that provide solutions to community need. Issues cover leading community workshops, participatory needs assessments, project design & management, funding, logframes, impact evaluation, reporting, and organizational strengthening.
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2016 – 2018
Here is the Newsletter Library Archive: 2009 – 2016
| September 2016: New eBook. 4 First Best Steps in Program Design • Community Needs Assessments • Needs Assessment Based Program Design • Evidence Based Solutions • Fast Logframe for Project Funding & Management |
| August 2016: Jumpstart Project Design • 4 Powerful Steps to Design-Fund • Participatory Needs Assessments • Evidence Based Best Practices • Logframes for Project Funding & Management |
| June 2016: Increase Nonprofit Donations in Mentored Training Programs • Nonprofit Certificate • Work one-on-one • Communication = Donations • Choose from one of two tracks |
| May 2016: Make a Website the Right Way: Step 1 to Increase Donations • Community Needs Assessments • Needs Assessment Based Program Design • Evidence Based Solutions • Fast Logframe for Project Funding & Management |
| April 2016: Online Fundraising: THE 3 Mandatory Tools for Beginners • Sustainable Claremont • Uncommon Good • Action Committee for Women in Prison • Pomona Hope |
| March 2016: Survey Results: 24 Nonprofit Skills Pros Want to Improve • Community Needs Assessments • Needs Assessment Based Program Design • Evidence Based Solutions • Fast Logframe for Project Funding & Management |
| February 2016: 2016 Non Profit Survey Results • Challenges, Solutions & Funding Plans • Organization and Program Management • Funding • Staffing and Volunteers |
| January 2016: 2016 Annual Survey of Nonprofit Pros • 4 Powerful Steps to Design-Fund • Participatory Needs Assessments • Evidence Based Best Practices • Logframes for Project Funding & Management |
| November 2015: Challenges, Solutions & Funding Interviews: Meet the People • Develop skill sets for a better job or for a promotion • mprove donor communications and donations • Learn to develop projects that solve challenges • Time saving techniques for getting everything done |
| October 2015: New eBook. 1st Four Best Steps to Design & Fund Programs • Increase funding for your program services • Design impact into your projects • Use evidence to boost project successes • Engage donors with improved communications |
| September 2015: Part 2. Non Profit Interviews • Sustainable Claremont • Uncommon Good • Action Committee for Women in Prison • Pomona Hope |
| August 2015: New eBook. 4 First Best Steps in Program Design • Community Needs Assessments • Needs Assessment Based Program Design • Evidence Based Solutions • Fast Logframe for Project Funding & Management |
| July 2015: Can you identify? Nonprofit Interviews • Challenges, Solutions & Funding Plans • Organization and Program Management • Funding • Staffing and Volunteers |
| June 2015: Jumpstart Project Design in 2015 • 4 Powerful Steps to Design-Fund • Participatory Needs Assessments • Evidence Based Best Practices • Logframes for Project Funding & Management |
| May 2015: New Video: Mentoring & Coaching Programs • Develop skill sets for a better job or for a promotion • Improve donor communications and donations • Learn to develop projects that solve challenges • Time saving techniques for getting everything done |
| April 2015: New Non Profit Project Video • Increase funding for your program services • Design impact into your projects • Use evidence to boost project successes • Engage donors with improved communications |
| March 2015: Capturing Compelling Photos • Compelling Photos: What are they? • Collecting Photos During Site Visits • Photographic Images • Example Photos |
| February 2015: Capturing Compelling Stories • Examples of Compelling Stories • Meeting Storytellers • Maintain a balanced objectivity • Writing down your story |
| January 2015: January’s 32 Top Resources • Climate Change & Finance • Adaptation • REDD+ • Gender & Livelihood |
| December 2014: 4 Powerful Steps to Designing Projects • Participatory Needs Assessments • Using Assessment Results in Project Design • Evidence Based Best Practices • Fast Logframe Development |
| October 2014: Getting your Project to Work • Evidence based best practices • Scientific research on activities • Peer reviewed documents • Theory of Change |
| September 2014: Solving Your #1 Challenge • Participatory Needs Assessment • Community Feedback • Sharing with Stakeholders • Interactive Graphic |
| August 2014: Non-profit Survey Results • Project Design • Funding Challenges • Project Momentum • Project Evaluation |
| July 2014: July’s 42 Top Resources • Climate Change and Finance • Adaptation & REDD+ • Gender • Livelihood |
| June 2014: 4 New Videos on Community Based Development • Designing & Funding International Development Projects • Discussion on Participatory Needs Assessments • Developing a Project Outline from a Needs Assessment • About Course Facilitator Tim Magee |
| May 2014: May’s 55 Top Resources •Climate Change & Finance • Gender • Food Security • Livelihood |
| April 2014: 100 Projects: 3 Years of Field Projects • Community Based Water Management • Community Based Adaptation • Forests & REDD+ • 400,000 Beneficiaries • 270 Kinds of Activities |
| March 2014: Special Water Field Projects Issue • Mali • Zimbabwe • Peru • Tanzania |
| February 2014: Special CBA Field Projects Issue • Pakistan • Abkhazia • India • Iran |
| February 2014: 35 Top Resources • Climate • Gender • DRR • Nutrition |
| January 2014. Field Projects Special Issue: Adaptation | Islands | Water | Forests • Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change News: CBA • Forests and Climate Change News • Water and Climate Change News • Islands and Climate Change News |
December 2013: 32 Top Resources • Development • Collective Action • Climate Finance • Water |
| November 2013: Report: 7 Day Live Workshop in Guatemala • Union Huista: 7 Day Live Workshop in Guatemala • Identifying and Prioritizing Community Need • Identifying Climate Hazards and Community Vulnerabilities • Mapping, the Annual Calendar, and the Historical Timeline |
| October 2013: 36 Top Resources • REDD + • Markets • Guatemala Fall Training • Water |
| September 2013: 30 Top Resources • Gender & Climate • Youth • Ag. Intensification • Children’s Health |
| August 2013: Sustainable Development Blended Training | International: English | América Latina: Español • 2 Month International Blended Training Program: • Programa de Capacitación Internacional de 2 Meses • Designing & Funding Community Based Adaptation Projects • Designing & Funding Sustainable Development Projects |
| August 2013: 35 Top Resources • Water Security • Women & Water • Disaster Risk Reduction • Sand Dams |
| July 2013. July News • Blended Distance & Live Training • Community Based Adaptation • International Development • Northern Nonprofit |
| Special News: 36 Top Resources • Climate Change • Climate Smart Agriculture • Smallholder Value Chains • Water Management |
| June 2013. June News • International Adaptation Workshop • Northern Nonprofit Project Design • 2 Year Compilation of Gardens for Nutrition • June Resources |
| May 2013. May News • Papua New Guinea • Climate Smart Agriculture • May Field Guides • May Resources |
| April 2013. Climate Smart Agriculture • South Sudan • Conservation Agriculture • Adaptation, Agriculture and Livelihoods • Managing Soil and Water |
| March 2013. CBA Climate Change News • South Sudan • Vietnam • Kilimanjaro • H20 Field Guide |
| January 2013. CSDi Adaptation News • CBA Book Launch • DRR Field Guide • Adopt a Village • Community Based DRR |
| December 2012. Adopt a Village • Designing & Funding Projects • Community Based DRR • Lesotho • Zambia |
| November 2012. CSDi Water News • Ethiopia • Uganda | Nigeria | Fiji • 50 Field Programs • 1,000 H2O Solutions |
| October 2012. Fall Quarter • GEF Grant • Lesotho | Mozambique | Fiji • Tanzania | Grenada | St. Lucia • CBA Resources |
| August 2012. Fall Quarter • Tanzania Community Takes over Project • Fall Quarter • New Electives • Market Links for Smallholders • Soil & Water Conservation |
| June 2012. Summer Quarter • Student Project Wins Grant • Summer Quarter • Rio+20 • June Project: Kenya |
| April 2012. Special Adaptation Field Guide Newsletter • Livelihoods • Resilience • DRR Planning • Mapping |
| March 2012. 50 Development Program Templates • Climate News • Water News • 50 DRR, Adaptation & Development Program Templates • March Online Resources |
| January 2012. New for 2012 • Garden Recipe Book Contest • Final Winter Course Call • New CSDi Memberships • 2011 Project Summary |
| December 2011. Field Projects Special Issue • Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change News • Forests and Climate Change News • Water and Climate Change News • Islands and Climate Change News • Call for CBA Projects: New Earthscan/Routledge |
| November 2011. CBA Climate Change News • 300 Hands-On Field Activities for CBA Projects • Is CC Affecting Farmers in Your Country? • Participatory Mapping. Will It Help Mauritian Farmers Adapt? • CC Risk & Vulnerability in a Remote Tanzanian Village • Indigenous knowledge incorporated into CBA projects |
| November 2011. Last Call: Fall Academy | Kenya | Uganda • Tragedies: HIV/AIDS & Malaria • Family-Planning • Tropical Food • CBA for Horn of Africa Food Crisis • Survey 60 Student Projects |
| September 2011. Soil Restoration | Food Sovereignty | Tanzania | Mainstreaming Adaptation. Frequently people in developing countries are living in areas with depleted soil. We recommend beginning a restoration project for the soil by adding organic material, thus begin rebuilding a soil structure which guides & holds water, supports microorganisms, retains soil nutrients. |
| August 2011. Special Nutrition and Home Gardening Issue. Tonight, over one billion people will go to bed hungry—up from 800 million in 2009.Home vegetable gardens have shown evidence of significantly reducing the number of malnourished children in impoverished communities; Improved nutrition boosts the body’s immune system protecting children against infection. |
| June-July 2011. CSDi Summer Academy 2011: Join us in July for an intensive series of courses with other students from all over the world. 500 Join Our Development Community in First Year. Be sure to visit CSDi’s Development Community and share resources and collaborate online.New Online Diploma Program off to a good start: Over 100 enrolled in Diploma Courses in May. |
| May 2011: Free Courses | CC Injustice | Diploma. Free ‘Online Lite’ Courses Off to a Good Start: 1,000 People/week get installments. Diploma program of online field courses integrates community-based adaptation to climate change, disaster risk reduction & rural development. Climate Change Study in Injustice-10 Million More African Children Malnourished by 2050. |
| April 2011: The Center Passes 100! Plus: ¡Cursos Nuevos en Español! 100 countries—100,000 beneficiaries. In our online program’s first 15 months, people from 103 countries and 225 organizations enrolled on our online courses and have developed projects impacting 100,000 people. Their projects include over 150 different kinds of interventions. |
| March 2011. Project Sustainability: Put the Community in Charge. Explore the next step of empowering communities: creating a community based project management team where they will learn leadership, decision-making skills, management, & gain a sound understanding of the development project. |
| February 2011: How to Kindle Community Ownership: Lessons from a Nobel Laureate. For the past 10 years community-based development has been the cutting-edge philosophy of modern development work—and it impressed me immensely that Wangari Maathai discovered it in the 70s. |
| January 2011: 300 Hands-On Field Activities for Community Based Adaptation Projects. CSDi presents a compilation of Community Based Adaptation Field Activities—complete with links to source materials and technical information. |
| December 2010: 5 hands-on ways to help us this December.
We have seen rapid growth in 2010. And we could not have done it without your continued support. Here are 5 ways that you can help us expand the reach of sustainable development. |
| November 2010 Survey: CSDi Partner Projects. Development professionals from 81 countries and 150 organizations have developed projects in our online courses in 2010. We selected 88 of the best projects from 42 different countries—and that impact 70,000 community members. |
| September 2010. Introduction to Community-based Adaptation to Climate Change. What exactly is community-based adaptation to climate change, and what are communities adapting to? What are some simple examples of adaptation activities that we could incorporate into projects? |
| August 2010. Hunger: Not enough food, the wrong food, or climate change? Two thirds of student projects relate to water, or food—however, many of these seem to be suspiciously linked to climate change. |
| July 2010: How Serious are We About Long-Term Impact? Yesterday a friend who works for a US nonprofit wrote me and asked me to recommend a few exceptional “highly impactful international nonprofit organizations” that are community-centered and focus on sustainability. |
| June 2010: New Online CSDi Development Community. The CSDi Development Community invites people active in development or interested in learning, to share resources & collaborate with each other online in developing sustainable, impact-oriented tools and solutions for development challenges. |
| May 2010 Vision, Expertise, Performance & Impact. Executive Directors are dealing with projects, boards & employees, run like crazy to keep up & don’t have time. They need solutions that don’t take much time to implement, are inexpensive, and will work the first time. They need silver bullets. |
| April 2010. Nutrition, Food Security, & Home Gardens. For many people living in the cycle of poverty the idea of starting a kitchen garden might seem overwhelming. This month investigate best practices in Home Gardens, and show how to lead a community workshop in home gardens for nutrition. |
| March 2010. Theories of Change. What’s your theory of a solution to community identified need? Developing a theory of how we plan to address the community problems discovered last month with the Ten Seed Technique. |
| February 2010. Giving Communities Voice. It’s important to make sure communities have ownership of projects. One of the best ways to do this is to ask the community what they need. There are several techniques for facilitating a participatory needs assessments, but my favorite is the Ten Seed Technique |
| November 2009. Online Classes Capture True Field Experience. Create your own personal field course by interweaving online assignments with your fieldwork and develop community centered projects, in real time, from the ground up. Have fun collaborating with colleagues around the globe. |
| October 2009. Capturing Compelling Photos. Almost any field shot will be interesting for the non-travelling reader, but children and adults performing intriguing tasks rank at the top. Quality graphic images of active enthusiastic people will resonate with your audience and connect them to project potential. |
| September 2009. Capturing Compelling Stories from the Field. For our development purposes, a compelling story is an anecdote that paints a picture and makes the reader feel ‘I was there’. They can capture the essence of donor mission in your reports and help maintain your partnership. |
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August 2009. Project Start-up—A Checklist: Getting organized.It has been a year since you designed the project and now is the time to review it and refresh your memory about the details. The narrative proposal, the logframe, the schedule, and the budget each provide their own unique level of information. |
| July 2009. Project Architecture: Logframes Budgets & Schedules. Logframes are a powerful tool for project planning, budgeting, scheduling, management, & M&E planning for assessing impact. Logframes will communicate to donors and stakeholders exactly what you are trying to accomplish. |
| June 2009. Engage with Donors and Forge Partnerships. Engage donors early in developing projects and create project ownership, sustainability, impact, and compelling proposals. Learn how donor/NGO partnerships can lever their programs into achieving greater impact. |
| April 2009. Increasing Project Impact: What Works in Development? Development urgently needs to shift from output-based to outcome and impact-based development. Impact: the sustainable change in the conditions of people that structurally reduce poverty and improve human well-being. |
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The 211 countries and territories:
Abu Dhabi, Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria , Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Columbia, Comoro Islands, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Curacao, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Darfur, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Dubai, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia , Falkland Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France, French Polynesia, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinée, Guinée Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands , Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinian occupied territories, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Perú, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Republic of Abkhazia, Reunion, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Somaliland, South Africa, South Sudan, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, The Gambia, Timor Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Tristan da Cunha, Tunisia, Turkey, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.