"Even more difficult for me to understand is the burgeoning feeling of something spiritual and sacred in the ordinary act of walking. I start to feel that each step taken is part of an invisible journey, for which there is no map and few road signs. I am not sure I am prepared, and the discomfort both frightens and excites me."

In 1971, after witnessing an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, John Francis gives up motorized transportation and starts walking. A few months later, he takes a vow of silence that last 17 years. Through his silence and walking, he learns how to listen and his pilgrimage begins.

Planetwalker is the inspirational and engaging story of one man's silent walk across America to raise environmental consciousness and promote world peace. Born the son of a West Indian immigrant in north Philadelphia, John overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles on his walk from the California coast to the New Jersey shore. In silence, he earns a college degree and begins walking through the West to America's heartland where he earns a Ph.D. in land resources. When he reaches the East Coast, the United Nations Environment Programme names him a Goodwill Ambassador and the US government recruits him to write oil spill regulations following the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Chronicling a young man's call to public service, Planetwalker addresses complex issues of environmental and social justice in America. It encompasses both John's interior journey as he confronts questions of life and death as well as his experiences of life on the road. John encounters people of all walks of life who illuminate the social and physical geography of his journey from the kindness of an Idaho rancher who leaves jugs of water for him on desert roads to the racist violence of an off duty deputy sheriff, who puts a gun to his head. We grow with John as he develops the qualities of character that give him the will and courage of his conviction to act on the deepest voice within him and allow his destiny to unfold.

Along with John's haikus, watercolors and drawings, Planetwalker is filled with practical ways in which we too can become earth stewards and take our own pilgrimages both great and small. And as we discover with John on his extraordinary walk, pilgrimage can lead to knowing our kinship with all of life and the all embracing goodwill that unfolds from that realization.

John Francis lives in Point Reyes Station, California with his wife and son. He is the founder and director of Planetwalk, a non-profit environmental education program. He travels around the world speaking on pilgrimage and change and is developing Planetlines, an environmental studies curriculum based on the walking pilgrimage for high schools and universities. This is his first book.

For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry." He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help.

To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories.

Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground.

In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies and experts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.

"A towering achievement. It outdoes Sen and Hirshman in its reach across economics, management theory, psychology, sociology, mathematics and philosophy. The result is a coherent alternative 'way of seeing' the relationship between aid organizations based in rich countries and aid recipients based in poorer ones, and some practical suggestions
on how to re-engage the aid agencies more as 'helpers' than as 'doers'. Along the way it fairly sizzles with insider insights into the workings of the World Bank."
---Robert Hunter Wade, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics

"Ellerman provides a compelling humanist understanding of how economic development aid can succeed, if only people and nations are enabled to help themselves."
--- William Greider author,The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy

David Ellerman relates a deep theoretical groundwork for a philosophy of development, while offering a descriptive, practical suggestion of how goals of development can be better set and met. Beginning with the assertion that development assistance agencies are inherently structured to provide help that is ultimately unhelpful by overriding or undercutting the capacity of people to help themselves, David Ellerman argues that the best strategy for development is a drastic reduction in development assistance. The locus of initiative can then shift from the would-be helpers to the doers (recipients) of development. Ellerman presents various methods for shifting initiative that are indirect, enabling and autonomy-respecting. Eight representative figures in the fields of education, community organization, economic development, psychotherapy and management theory including: Albert Hirschman, Paulo Freire, John Dewey, and Søren Kierkegaard demonstrate how the major themes of assisting autonomy among people are essentially the same.

David Ellerman is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Economics Department at the University of California at Riverside.

Dan Gillmor, author of We the People, writes on Bayosphere... Starting in 2006, I'll be putting together a nonprofit Center for Citizen Media. The goals are to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.

I'm thrilled and honored that the center will be affiliated with two superb universities in a bi-coastal partnership.

• Here on the Pacific Rim, where I live, the center will collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. As an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow, I'll do a class next fall, and my principal physical office will be at Berkeley as well.
• Our Atlantic-facing partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School, where I'll be a Research Fellow. I'll visit there regularly -- at least once a month -- to work with other fellows, faculty and students. [more...]

[via Scripting News]

Partnerships and collaborations are becoming increasingly important as prerequisites for grant funding. This is particularly true for international grants, for which partnering with organizations in the host country may be the only way to make substantive changes.

Angolan Charity Association In Canada at the weekend handed over goods to the paediatrics section of main hospital of Cunene province, the leprosy hospital and handicapped people, Angop has learnt. The donation comprises wheel-chairs, clothes, shoes and toys and have benefited people from the municiplities of Kuroca, Kahama and Kuvelai. According to organisation chairperson, Victor Rafael, the move is part of a programme of solidarity project and support to people in needy. Editor's note: This is the entire article -- no need to provide a link.

Haiti -- Mark Bourque, a retired RCMP officer who was part of a Canadian police contingent helping provide security for the upcoming elections in Haiti, has been killed by gunmen in Port-au-Prince.

The national stadium of Cidadela, in Luanda, will host this Wednesday as from 08h00 pm the annual show of the "Criança Futuro" (Children`s Future) project, whose incomes will be used in favour of the children under the responsibility and care of the Friends Club of Kuito Children`s Home (central Bie Province).

Republic of Botswana, Botswana -- GABORONE - Y Charity Trust has praised Stanbic Bank for sponsoring its activities over the years.

Bahrain's first-ever Businessmen's Charity Association (BCA) was launched yesterday after the BCA's founders committee members meeting held at the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI). The meeting was attended by over 40 leading businessmen and traders.

The US non-profit organization VNHelp granted Tuesday 30 scholarships of US$70 each to tertiary students in central Danang city.

Maverick MP George Galloway was today facing a fresh probe into the charity appeal he set up to help an Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia. The Charity Commission confirmed last night that a new investigation had been launched into the Mariam Appeal, the £1 million political fund run by the 51-year-old politician. The move comes on back of inquiries by the US Senate and the UN into the fund, which alleged that Mr Galloway's friend and associate Fawaz Zureikat had siphoned £252,000 from the UN's oil-for-food programme into the appeal.

Singapore's biggest charity yesterday attempted to draw a line under a debilitating scandal by releasing an independent report that catalogued the sustained failure of its former senior management. The scandal at the National Kidney Foundation has triggered unprecedented public anger.

NGAPORE: The Singapore government is tightening coordination among its agencies, as well as checks and balances on charities to make sure the NKF (National Kidney Foundation) saga will not be repeated.

The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were named Time magazine's "Persons of the Year" along with Irish rocker Bono for being "Good Samaritans" who made a difference in different ways. "For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time's Persons of the Year," the magazine said in its Dec. 19 issue, made public on Sunday.

Petra Nemcova said Thursday she recently made a tearful return to her work as a supermodel but still devotes most of her time to the children's charity she established after recovering from injuries sustained in last year's tsunami.

LONDON - Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has been honored by Queen Elizabeth II — but the award was for his work with poor Brazilian children rather than his music.

When a squeezable - and bankable - star named Elmo made a belated appearance in France this year, long after his Muppet birth in the United States, doubts emerged immediately about the puppet's proper French esprit.

When Tom Hunter says he plans to get serious about something, he seems to mean it. Earlier this year, after touring Africa with former President Bill Clinton, Mr. Hunter - now Sir Tom - resolved to get serious about philanthropy for a continent in turmoil. The result? A promise of $100 million, ponied up for projects to wrest Africans from poverty - not bad for a man of 44 who started off his business career with borrowed money, selling sneakers.

The quest for a neutral symbol transcending religious, political and national differences was close to resolution yesterday as 192 countries met to adopt a new emblem as an alternative to the Red Cross and Red Crescent.