OL 101. Sustainable Development Course: Design, Fund & Manage Projects
Earn a Sustainable Development Online Certificate While Running a Real Project in a Real Community.
Learn Sustainable Development from The Center for Sustainable Development: Take this sustainable development course and learn how to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Learn project design & project management. Get field experience: Run a real sustainable development goals project in a real community. Enroll now!
An 8-Week Online Training Course. Courses begin the first Monday of each month. Enroll Now! |
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Video overview the Sustainable Development Course. | Learn Sustainable Development Online. |
Advance your Career, Raise Funds and Solve Challenges
This Sustainable Development Course is for NGO and donor staff—and job-seekers wanting to successfully solve community challenges sustainably. Participants work on projects as diverse as food security, water, health, income generation, adaptation to climate change, gender and education. Learn sustainable development goals project design by:
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Great Project Design + Extra Funding = Increased Services
Design your next project to increase project funding & impact. The course will lead you in developing a winning, impact oriented project while learning to:
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Design Sustainable Development Course Projects & Attract Donors
The course provides cutting-edge information, tools, time-saving templates, training and expert consultancy—and leads you in developing a real project for your NGO. Program highlights include:
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Methodology | Sustainable Development Course: Design, Fund & Manage Projects |
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The course will lead you through the development of a real project, in real time, and leave you with the practical field tools to sustain it. We are committed to achieving results-based sustainable development goals. For long-term sustainability you will learn to incorporate community identified need into the design of your project and research project activities that have shown evidence of having worked at solving challenges.
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Real Projects | Become your NGO’s Sustainable Development Solution |
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For example, student projects have included efforts to help communities in Europe and North America with sustainable development course projects—and communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that face the challenges of drought, hunger and poverty. The course will lead you through the development of similar real projects, in real time, in your own country.
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Step-By-Step | Design Projects to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals |
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Course leaders have gained their development expertise providing face-to-face consulting services to NGOs & nonprofits in the field and will also provide you with personalized consulting to ensure your project has a solid beginning.
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- They will help you conduct a participatory needs assessment in your community,
- develop a preliminary project concept,
- conduct research on your project to identify evidence based activities for fulfilling the UN Sustainable Development Goals,
- refine your community based projects and share it with your community, and
- share your project concept with a potential donor.
Participants | |
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This training program is for members of NGOs solving challenges in developing nations aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It presents an online field experience and lead participants in the process of developing empowered, sustainable communities. Online course participants learn to develop real projects in real villages.
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Facilitation | |
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This sustainable development course aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be led by Tim Magee, CSDi’s Executive Director, who has over 30 years experience in both working with NGOs and nonprofits, and leading international online training workshops. Mr. Magee is the author of A Field Guide to Community Based Adaptation published by Routledge, Oxford, England.
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Don’t have community access? No problem: we partner you with a fellow student in a developing nation who does.
What Other Students Think About the Online Sustainable Training Course.
In the next Sustainable Development Course, OL 102: Sustainable Development project funding, management and impact, you will transform your project concept with the real management tools of a logframe, a budget, and fact sheets (letter of inquiry) into a project ready to formally present to a donor.
Certificate. Course participants who successfully complete the Sustainable Development Course on time will receive a course certificate. Learn more. Your certificate will be e-mailed within 30 days of the end of your course.
Course Fees
The 8-week course is $150.00.
If you have a question don’t hesitate to contact us. Many questions are answered on our Online Learning FAQ.
An 8-Week Online Training Course. Courses begin the first Monday of each month. Enroll Now! |
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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT COURSE SYLLABUS
- Week 1 Learn to navigate the course website, and download the week’s documents.
- Week 2 & 3 Read the document on participatory needs assessments and conduct an informal assessment with a few community members to uncover a real challenge. List the needs identified and organize them into a clearly described challenge—a sustainable development challenge that you are going to solve with your project design. We want this as real as possible.
- Week 4 We will clarify your project’s challenge, develop a theory of how you plan to solve it, and research 3 solution-oriented activities that would fulfill the premise of your theory.
- Week 5 Research one peer-reviewed paper for three of your project’s activities and see if scientists have found evidence that they are effective in solving your project’s challenge. Write a one paragraph summary of the papers’ findings.
- Week 6
- Share your proposed project concept locally with colleagues to gain feedback and constructive criticism.
- Return to the community with your project concept and get their feedback and hopeful buy-in.
- Pick one of your evidence-based activities and write a simple one page guide on how a field staff person could implement it.
- Week 7 Write a workshop lesson plan for introducing this activity into a community, and then make an illustrated, How-to card to give to community members.
- Week 8
- Share your project with someone that you would like to sell it to: a donor, your boss, your professor, someone in the sustainable development world for feedback.
- Lay out your challenge, proposed solutions, and activities in a simple matrix (logistic framework) that I will supply. This will prepare you for the next course: OL 102 where you will transform your project into a set of management documents that can formally be presented for funding.
*From the developing world? Take your $50 scholarship.