Tim Magee

I have been living and working in Guatemala for the past nine 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 created intense curiosity on my part in better understanding “What works in development?” This led to the formation of the Center for Sustainable Development where I am it's Executive Director.

Through teaching online courses at the Center, over the past three years I've had the honor of working with students from over 143 different countries and 450 organizations who have developed projects impacting over 275,000 people addressing 215 different kinds of projects. 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, 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 an online development community.

Two years ago I was asked by Earthscan, an imprint of Routledge, to write a field guide on community-based adaptation to climate change. I had the idea of having a live website where a page could be devoted to specialize links and downloadable documents, manuals and handbooks for readers of the book. Each chapter of the book is organized as if it were a practical field assignment that readers can do to begin holding a project of your own with the community that they work with.

Consequently there is a page in this website devoted to the field guide where I house links and downloadable documents that are organized by chapter in the book. So a reader can come to the webpage, download the documents that they need to complete that chapters field assignment, and find additional resources if they would like to expand their knowledge of that chapters subject. You can learn more about the book and the publisher here.

Joined 2010

Organisation

CSDi