What We Do
The Center for Sustainable Development was developed to provide sound, evidence-based information, tools and training for humanitarian development professionals worldwide.

We Focus in Four Areas:
1. Development Projects Designed to End Human Suffering Sustainably
The Center works with project partners in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East to design, fund, launch and manage projects that help people lead the healthy, productive, meaningful lives they need for leaving the cycle of poverty. Projects have been developed and are being developed with partners to impact the lives of over 170,000 people.

Project themes have included safe water, sanitation, children's health, family planning, nutrition and home gardens, soil and water conservation, connecting farmers to markets, education and literacy, forest restoration, micro-enterprise development, and adapting to climate change.

CSDi’s role is in helping our partners design sustainable, impact-oriented projects that will solve community challenges. We also connect donors to the projects of their choice and provide follow-up support for Project Partners during implementation.

2. Training and Capacity Building
The Center provides training workshops in designing, launching and managing sustainable development projects, and organizational strengthening, among others.

Field staff in developing nations often don't have access to training so we developed Online Courses that are exactly parallel to the workshops -- even including field components that online students to complete in their communities as part of assignments. These online courses are accessible to staff from all over the world.

Professionals from over 113 countries have used our online courses to develop projects.

3. Information Knowledge Center
In order to make progress in solving the complex problems humanity faces, development workers need to use activities in the field which have shown evidence of working. At the Center, we analyze scientific studies to see which field activities show evidence of solving challenges in the developing world.

We then share this information through simple tools on our website. People from over 218 countries have visited our website (see map below right) to find field guides, community workshop lesson plans, posters and handouts which they can download from the site to use in their community projects. There are dozens of activities which we've documented in this manner on our Field Tools page.

4. Development Community
We began to realize that since such a large number of knowledgeable, talented people were working all over the world on common problems – that we should provide a platform where they could pool resources and begin collaborating with each other online to develop tools and solutions to the challenges we find in development.

We therefore launched the CSDi professional Development Community where our colleagues can interact, share information, and collaborate on project ideas. So far, people from over 100 countries have joined.