Our Team and Partners

Fostering comprehensive growth that facilitates a community to tackle both internal and external challenges, encourages innovation, and cultivates a sense of responsibility towards others.

Precepts for Community Growth

1. Ownership and Management
   The community must take ownership of and manage its affairs with the organization primarily as facilitators. When determining a project or process, both the community and the organization will need to agree through a dialectical reasoning process.
2. Empowerment
   The organization should focus on enabling residents to identify their own challenges and take collective action to address them, rather than perpetuating dependence on external agencies—including the organization itself.
3. Sustainability
   The effects of change must be sustained for a prolonged period as defined by the community. It should generate new resources, and their management will be maintained through the promotion of self-accountability.
4. Interpersonal Networks and Values
   Interpersonal networks, community wisdom, and values are significant yet largely untapped resources. Understanding the priorities of community residents is criticalucial for facilitating collective and collaborative activities.
5. Partnership
   The foundation will act as a “partner” instead of an “employer,” fostering processes that promote shared ownership and mutual accountability.
6. Empirical Understanding
   An empirical, systematic, and ethnographic understanding of the community is essential to help contextualize actions and their consequences.
7. Conflict Mitigation
   Any introduction of resources carries the potential to create marginalization and conflict; therefore, processes and arrangements must be in place to mitigate these issues.
8. Democratic Leadership
   Identifying trusted leaders of these arrangements should be a democratic process that involves obtaining consent from each resident.