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Web
Smith, Publisher, Educator, Trainer, Author, Editor
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| Web Smith for this site, Community
Empowerment, is Phil Bartle. Now retired, available by email for
discussion of points raised about the material.
Sociology
Professor. Was Chief Technical Adviser (CTA) for the Uganda Community
Management Programme (CMP), 1994-1998, during which this web site was begun. |
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| Here
is Julianna Kuruhiira's depiction (artist's
line drawing) of Dr Phil in a training session for senior community mobilizers,
managers and co-ordinators, at a post graduate seminar, Makarere University,
Kampala. |
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| The sixties had all sorts of youth
revolution, the more notorious being hippies and yippies. The era
also gave birth to quiet movements; many Canadian young people went to
poor countries to offer their services to independence and freedom. |
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| Cuso was founded in 1961 (we boast
it is six weeks older than the Peace Corps). I was one of those idealists,
modest enough to know we could not make major changes, but we could contribute
and learn. |
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| I wanted to find practical uses for
my training in economics, sociology and anthropology. After two years
in Ghana, I spent a year living with poor people in dozens of countries
in Africa and Asia. Hooked, I dedicated my life to development, although
maintaining my connections to academia, and my love for learners and teaching.
Although the training material avoids theory and ideology, I recognise
that my approach has been informed by the writings of Paulo Freire, Ivan
Illich and Franz Fanon. |
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| I did my PhD in Ghana, with African
teachers and an African concentration, focusing on Obo,
a stool town on the Kwawu Escarpment in the rain forest. |
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| I learned that much of our aid contributed
to poverty, making recipients dependent upon handouts, and encouraging
government officials to become corrupt. With others of a like mind,
I helped develop an "Empowerment Methodology" as an alternative to charity,
based on the idea that struggle produces strength. (An athlete does
not become strong when the coach does the push ups). |
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| Now that I am in my sixties, and
health prohibits overseas work, I turned my experience into writing for
community workers. I put it on this free web site, so they could
print the material for training and upgrading. It has grown to over four
thousand documents, on many related topics. We get about 20,000 page views
per day, or half a million per month. |
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| Some pages are translated into over
five dozen languages, by unpaid volunteers.
With all these volunteers (over a hundred persons have contributed
to the web site), we have organized into a non profit society,
registered with the Government of British Columbia on an island in the
Pacific off the west coast of Canada. Several guest contributors have added
training material. A literacy module
is dedicated to the memory of Peter Gzoski, a participatory
management module dedicated to Dr. Gert Lüdeking of UN-Habitat, while
an AIDS document is dedicated to Stephen
Lewis. My rewards are the hundreds of email messages from all over
the world, and the dialogues that result. More recently, it has also been
rewarding to see the many people who donate their time, energy and skills
to the site; it is heartening to see that altruism is not dead.
Phil Bartle
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