People-Centered Economic Development

My own experience came about by meeting Terry Hallman the founder of the organisation above, while he was working in Russia. Back then, in 1999 I had little comprehension of what he was doing, it dawned on me gradually as I became more closely involved.

As the name suggests, he’d been reading David Korten and set about delivering a practical model for deployment. The opportunity came with an honorary appointment to the Clinton re-election comittee in 1996, to which he submitted a whitepaper for a social business model.

Around this time, large scale top-down economic development in Russia under Yeltsin had floundered, in response he proposed a.targetted development strategy.

By 1999, this offered the opportunity to visit Russia and draft an economic strategy plan which resulted in a USAID pilot project based on his paradigm. It ran 5 years and in that time achieved full cost recovery, 10,000 microloans for new SMEs of which more than 80% were commenced by women without gender targetting.

I joined him in 2003, when we began focussing on childcare reform in Eastern Europe. We’ve recently delivered a new national scale strategy paper to Ukraine’s goverment based on the same principles with the primary target of reforms in insitutional childcare for Ukraine’s orphans and street children with full cost recovery delivered over 5 years.

I has much in common with John Mackays ideals of conscious capitalism albeit in an international development arena.

http://www.p-ced.com

In more recent times I’ve become acquainted with Chris Cook, former City of London regulator and former director of the International Petroleun Exchange. Chris is one of the leading advocates of asset based finance on which he consults on an international basis.

The Open Capital model he promotes, illustrates the concept of shared risk and reward under a non-userous application of finance, which to my mind has much in common with the content of this pod.

http://www.opencapital.net

Re: People-Centered Economic Development

Hi Jeff, while going back to my past emails I found a note from Zaadzster Ramla from Pakistan who seem to have similar ideas on people centered development. See wrote

“I just saw your thread about foundation of capitalism. Interesting that the very notion of capitalism`is being challenged. Thank God! You might like to read a paper I wrote “WHY WE DO BUSINESS?”  which can be

downloaded here:  http://nextbyramla.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-do-we-do-business.html”

Cheers