MA in Sustainable Business and Communities Program

Sarah Bobrow-Williams, MA

Faculty Advisor, MA in Sustainable Business and Communities Program

 

“Community is essential to survival. Only community can stabilize patterns of productive cooperation, only community can nourish relationships of clan and family that harness human willfulness for purposes of social capital. It’s not just a Native thing. We are all Native peoples of the community called Earth. To sustain ourselves, we must reorganize economically and socially so as to get along with one another and our environment.” --- First Nations Development Institute

The world is becoming smaller yet more complex everyday evidenced by my own ascension to rural development work from an office in New York City by way of a bumpy road from Managua to Esteli, Nicaragua, to the high mountain communities of northern New Mexico, to the distinctive Gullah Sea Islands of South Carolina, to the rich African American heritage of the black belt south and the Mississippi Delta.

My 20 year journey as a community planner in isolated and self reliant communities has been humbling. It has been principally about shared learning, precipitated by a gradual erosion of my own cultural arrogance in favor of processes that nurture the respectful exchange of information and expertise and through which communities can make informed decisions about their essential assets.

My early work with Ganados del Valle/Tierra Wools (www.handweavers.org) and Penn Center’s (SC) Sea Island Preservation Project (www.penncenter.com) focused on developing enterprises that utilized natural and cultural resources and positioned communities to gain control of their cultural, environmental, economic and social development. Because these communities were faced with mounting assaults on land uses (from second home and resort development to sprawl) we worked with local community leaders and landowners to develop and pursue land preservation strategies. After leaving Penn Center in 1996 I worked for the Southern Rural Development Initiative (www.srdi.rog) and the Association for Enterprise Opportunity (www.microentepriseworks.org) and as an independent consultant designing and conducting organizational development, sectoral development and market and product development training programs for community-based practitioners.

I am currently the Asset and Finance Development Director for the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice, Children’s Defense Fund, Southern Regional Office (www.srbwi.org) where we are working with women in 77 counties in the Alabama and Georgia black belt and Mississippi Delta to develop local assets within a human rights and self empowerment framework. Initiatives include workforce development, value added agriculture, specialty food processing, niche manufacturing, worker owned and cooperative development, cultural heritage tourism and regional planning and networking.

I am grateful for this opportunity from Goddard to share my experience and to further my own knowledge and in turn contribute to the communities I am currently working in.

Recent/Relevant Publications: Co-author of the introduction to the Rural Roots Chapter for the Covenant with Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley and published by Third World Press, 2007; Implementing a Vision: A Community-based Effort to Manage Growth on St. Helena Island, SC, Ford Foundation, 1999; Sustaining Traditional Sea Island Communities, Carolina Planning, UNC Chapel Hill.

Educational Background: MA in Community and Regional Planning with a concentration in Rural Development, University of New Mexico; BA in Politics and English, New York University.