Mission/Vision
We envision a world in which empowered practitioners produce better development results. By “better results” we mean quicker spread of practices that foster long-term sustainability and faster scaling up of successful interventions. These improved outcomes depend on how well practitioners communicate and learn from each other, globally and locally. The Forum empowers practitioners through its mission of building and strengthening online and offline knowledge networks in ways that tap their knowledge, preserve it, and put it to practical use.
To learn more please download our Problem Statement.
Our Target Audience
The population we serve is large and diverse, comprising several million individuals in over 150 countries, spanning many different cultures, languages, disciplines, regions, and organizations. Increasing numbers of them come from the global South. Their collective experience contains an immense store of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. All too often, however, “what happens in the field stays in the field.” The costs of this inefficiency are likely to grow as the Development 2.0 ecosystem is transformed by the entry of new actors such as venture philanthropists, multinational corporations, foundations, and donor countries from the South. But there are exciting new ways to attack and solve this problem, and that is why we exist.
History
The Forum, a 501 (c) (3) organization, was started in January 2009 by Tony Barclay, with generous financial support from DAI, the firm where he previously served as CEO. Building on 40 years of practical field experience and learning, the Forum aims to transform development practice and help all actors in the ecosystem achieve their full potential. 2009 was our Year of Discovery. We reached out to the practitioner community, social entrepreneurs, and innovators in the Web 2.0 world, to identify areas where we could make a difference. This interactive process shaped the Forum’s mission and operating plan, and resulted in the design of our online Q&A platform, InfoSpring, and the conceptualization of decentralized practitioner networks in the Liberia and Kenya Country Chapters.
Funding/Donors
The Forum was established with generous seed funding from DAI, which continues to provide support in our second year. We are currently in discussions with several prospective investors who can help us expand. We’re also able to receive tax-deductible contributions. Click on Support Us to make a donation.
Partnerships
A central philosophy of the Forum is to complement, not replicate, the innovative efforts of other actors in the development space. With this in mind, we have been developing partnerships with organizations that are committed to increase knowledge sharing and advance best practices across the development field. Our current partner organizations and projects include:
