Our mission
We build prosperity by strengthening communities from the ground up, creating the pre-conditions for self-sustaining growth.
"Our team's approach to economic development and community resilience is rooted in our observation that a village is best strengthened from the bottom-up, not the top-down."
Will Davis, CEO — A Well Watered Garden
Our Focus Areas
Community Resilience
Before prosperity can take root, certain pre-conditions must exist. These vary widely by geography and historical context, but the common thread is resilience. A community's ability to address and recover from hardship is among the very top predictors of stable growth. We build resilience in a few ways:
Clean Water
WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) initiatives are where our work in West Africa began over a decade ago. We've drilled over 200 wells in Senegal alone, and have seen time and again that the immediate transformation is staggering. Wells don't just provide clean drinking and bathing water, they create crop surpluses in areas that have seen mostly famine. They free up children to attend school and parents to start businesses instead of walking four-plus hours a day to carry water. Village wells create shade trees that neighbors meet beneath to barter and socialize daily.
It's extremely difficult for a village to flourish while its people are consumed with planning where their next drink of water will come from. This observation has driven us to expand our scope, identifying and supporting other key pre-conditions for prosperity.
Community Structures
While much of the US has access to numerous community structures and gathering places, other regions are not as fortunate. The difference a community structure can make in an underserved village is tremendous. From a small clinic or elementary school where none exist, to a religious structure a community requests to gather and launch their own humanitarian outreach from, we rely on community leaders and local research to determine if and when developing a community structure is within our scope and capabilities.
See our current development project here: The Joseph Project Trade School
Re-greening Projects
Most communities around the world, regardless of geography, are experiencing a slowly diminishing shade tree canopy. The mature trees that do remain are often located in more upscale areas, leaving impoverished areas with significantly reduced tree canopy coverage.
Our team’s decades-long re-greening efforts have added over 150,000 individual trees. This equates to more than 2,500 non-contiguous acres of canopy, including native hardwoods, evergreens, and agriculturally significant species. As tree coverage increases, temperatures fall, property becomes more valuable, and more pride is taken in the land. Our strategy is most effective in areas where commerce is conducted, like the open-air markets and village centers we now target.
Blight Reduction
By identifying the most obvious sources of aesthetic blight and tackling them directly with our own force of volunteers, we cause a ripple effect that inspires neighbors to do the same. These efforts are far from our largest projects, but they’re among the most immediately rewarding. In Africa, this might mean tidying up a dump site and installing fencing to reduce windblown trash; in the US, it may be as direct as mowing a neighbor’s vacant lot or repairing vandalism.
Wherever our blight reduction projects take place, grateful neighbors are always easy to find.
Economic Development
While government-linked economic development teams are understandably focused on attracting large businesses to their region, support systems for small businesses, farms, and entrepreneurs often fail to meet even the bare minimum requirements for growth; an effect compounded exponentially in developing nations and historically impoverished regions. It is our assertion that the strongest communities are those with a stable base of small businesses, and that the major gaps in support for small, homegrown enterprise we see worldwide are a primary contributor to high poverty rates and reduced standard of living.
By applying an economic development lens to our humanitarian work, it became clear that our efforts are best spent focused on the chronically unmet needs of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. While most economic development teams do include small and disadvantaged businesses in their programming to some degree, our work is focused entirely on this underserved group.
Workforce Development
From basic staffing support to the development of a purpose-built trade school, supporting a region's workforce needs are among our primary concerns. By working hand in hand with local education institutions and businesses to understand where a workforce is deficient, we directly address workforce shortages by tackling the largest need first.
Some communities may need chemical engineers, which require partnerships with local universities to address. Others may be short of tradesmen, which we seek to remedy through our trade school program. Whatever deficiency may exist, we find that most communities will rise to the occasion as long as the shortfall is presented as the true opportunity it presents for residents.
Business Retention and Expansion (BRE)
By applying the same BRE principles many orgs use to keep a finger on the pulse of their area's largest companies, we develop rapport and credibility with small local businesses by making them the focus of our work. Regular BRE meetings with numerous locally-owned small businesses ensure we have an up-to-date picture of the challenges they're facing, and inform the strategy we use to solve them.
Small Business Consultations
Business plan review, finance strategies, access to free or subsidized resources; these are the primary reasons businesses reach out for our assistance. Our consultations go as deep as needed to arrive at the true reasons a business is failing to thrive, informed by decades of experience in the markets we serve. This context enables us to deliver sound guidance, create critical regional vendor networks and help emerging businesses access global markets.
Disaster Recovery
We have, unfortunately, had many opportunities to respond to disasters since 1999. From an F5 tornado, to a global pandemic, our perspective and processes have proven useful in quickly identifying the most critically impacted segments of a community and mobilizing targeted responses with the help of our volunteers and donor base.
Bouncing Back
During the lockdown following the global coronavirus outbreak, our headquarters in Senegal found itself surrounded by neighbors who couldn't work due to emergency closures and government mandates. For many Senegalese families, a day without work means a day without food. Our team addressed the shortfall by exhausting our African budgets to deliver 50-kilo sacks of rice and other critical necessities to our neighbors.
In the wake of the disaster, we saw clearly how we fit into local and nationwide recovery efforts by identifying the most at-risk groups and leading smaller-scale, targeted recovery efforts. In 2020, we officially added disaster recovery to our core mission, as it directly impacts the stability we work hard to create. When recovery is measured in months and years instead of days, our wide-ranging experience and work history allow us to walk alongside communities as they navigate back toward stability and growth.