Finance

Difference, respect and money

by David Week on 06 May 2011

Don’t be tolerated Tales from the Hood recently wrote a post about tolerance. It begins: I remember several months ago sitting in the Karachi airport McDonald’s chatting with @ayeshahasan about the foreigners who go to Pakistan and try to blend in by wearing a salwar kameez… and asks, mid-stream: How do you know that your [...]

‘People to People’: an alternative way of delivering humanitarian aid

by David Week on 21 December 2010

Azwar Hasan is the founder of Forum Bangun Aceh (FBA), a good friend, and a great colleague. He and I worked for three years on LOGICA: Local Governance and Infrastructure for Communities in Aceh. Az was Deputy Team Leader; I was the infrastructure Adviser. LOGICA took a community-driven development approach to assist 200 of the hardest [...]

How to finance your civil society organisation

by David Week 7 October 2010

How Matters has published an important list of resources, that answer this question: Waiting for Pennies from Heaven A few select quotes: The web of local civil society organizations and grassroots initiatives around the world is still largely undocumented and unrecognized. WiserEarth.org has registered over 110,000 local organizations and movements working on a wide variety [...]

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What development teaches you about architecture

by David Week 20 September 2010

I recently registered for a new initiative of The Guardian newspaper concerning global development. (Thanks to Craig Zeliger of the Peace and Collaborative Development Network for alerting me to this.) In introducing myself on this site, I felt like saying something about how development has changed the way I understand my profession. I think this is [...]

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The power of co-investment

by David Week 18 September 2010

Sharing the load Recently, I was advising a client who had the following problem: Four years ago, they had agreed to fund a project to the amount of USD1.0m. Now, for a variety of reasons, the cost at the commencement of implementation had increased to $1.6m. The question they asked me was: should they provide [...]

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Business models for NGOs

by David Week 23 July 2010

NGOs are businesses Many people starting NGOs think that NGOs are not businesses, and therefore they don’t have to be run like a business. But every organisation has the same basic challenge: in order to do things, it needs resources. Those resources can take different forms. In NGOs, they are commonly: volunteer time; in-kind contributions; cash [...]

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About “Architecture for Development”

by David Week 27 April 2010

Why this blog Below, I’ve pasted my professional “about” blurb from my CV, written in some version of bureaucratese. It serves as a potted history of my professional life, and provides some insight, I guess, into my professional persona. But I’m not blogging to further my professional career, which is doing just fine. Here are [...]

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