Center for Collaborative Conservation seminar: Dave Bartecchi
Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 12:00 PM
Lory Student Center, Room 213-215

Supporting Community-Based Conservation

David Bartecchi Executive Director, Village Earth and 3rd cohort Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellow, will be talking about Village Earth's Global Affiliate model, an approach to supporting grassroots organizations around the world that he developed through his fellowship with the CCC.

The affiliate model is designed to enable autonomy at the grassroots level while creating accountability for donors. This tension, common among NGO's, often creates an "alien hand syndrome" eroding local autonomy and self-determination.

David Bartecchi received his M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Colorado State University and serves as Executive Director of Village Earth, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit community-development organization based in Fort Collins, Colorado.

He has extensive practical experience in community development, working with grassroots groups on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation since 2000 to recover lands for community-based bison restoration. This work is currently funded by a grant from Indian Land Tenure Foundation based in Minnesota. He has also worked with Indigenous groups in Peru and Ecuador and trained and consulted on community-based development projects in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and India, as well as with Native American Tribes in California and Oklahoma.

David has served as a trainer for the International Institute for Sustainable Development at Colorado State University since 1998 and currently teaches courses in Participatory Practices for Sustainable Development, Community Mobilization and online courses in Approaches to Community Development, Community Mobilization and Organization, Community Capacity Building and Community-based Mapping.

Between 2003 and 2005 he taught a 200 level Anthropology course at Colorado State University called "Cultures and the Global System." He has also been an instrumental part of several research projects with CSU's Department of Anthropology including a 6 year longitudinal study of the informal economy on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota funded by the National Science Foundation, a survey of farmers and ranchers participating in the National Conservation Reserve Program conducted by CSU's Natural Resource Ecology Lab and funded by the USDA, and community-based censuses on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations in South Dakota.

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Event Contact: Jill Lackett can be reached at (970) 491-4118

Sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Conservation.