MAPLE MICRODEVELOPMENT
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Mission Statement
MAPLE Microdevelopment works closely with marginalized, impoverished communities across cultures to co-design, implement, and sustain tools for building assets to strengthen financial, cultural, and ecological resilience.
About This Cause
MAPLE Microdevelopment was established in 2008 to design innovative approaches to community-managed, sustainable development together with economically impoverished communities across diverse cultures. If current macro approaches to development fully worked as intended--poverty, food insecurity, and environmental degradation would no longer exist. MAPLE is the only international NGO that embraces the notion that, when it comes to questions of economic empowerment and strengthening cultural/ecological resilience--culture matters greatly. We can all learn together from and with others who live in very different contexts yet share similar challenges. In so many cultures around the world, communities excluded from the benefits of economic growth continue to develop innovative, culturally specific approaches to sustaining life. These approaches often depend upon access to arable land, natural and social resources available within their own cultures and communities, and innovative partnerships with allied, external supporters. MAPLE was founded on the assumption that innovation, at least for marginalized communities, arises from the ground, not from the top down, that it is possible to strengthen what is positive in those innovations, and that impoverished neighborhoods and communities, even in "developed" countries, have much to learn from those who continue to sustain their own livelihoods in "less developed" countries, in accordance with their own values, needs, and aspirations. Our unique approach--rooted in cross-cultural dialogue, design, modeling, implementation, and sustainable asset building--has now produced immensely successful approaches to community-managed microdevelopment across rural villages in Northern and Eastern Uganda (since 2008), indigenous Mapuche communities in Araucania Region of Southern Chile (since 2013), and affordable tiny-house communities serving formerly homeless persons and families in Oregon, US (since 2018.) We strongly believe in transparency, and the materials/toolkits we create are open source and available to others. We hope that the models for economic, cultural, and ecological resilience we design with disenfranchised communities can be used by other like-minded organizations. We invite and appreciate collaboration. Please join us, and feel free to contact us for more information. Thank you.