Community Driven Development
Bringing It Back To Communities
About Us
When faced with a crisis, communities often find themselves lacking a relationship with local resources, organizations and government agencies. Walu has a demonstrated method of building a community bridge between communities and the social programs and resources that are there to serve them.
Community Driven Development: Walu believes that community members have better insight into their needs than outside agencies. Therefore they should be stakeholders in building a government or agency relationship to fulfill the needs of the community.
Walu believes in Bringing It Back To Communities to find better solutions, and invites you to join us. Scroll down to learn more.
How Does CDD Work?
Because Walu works directly with communities versus just providing theoretical training, the training can be designed around the culture and needs of the community, group, organization, nonprofit or agency.
Community Driven Development (CDD) forms steady leadership and communication channels within the heart of each community. Training in CDD empowers communities to run autonomously to bridge the gap between government aid and people’s needs in both times of normalcy and in times of calamity.
Through Community Driven Development, Walu works with a community leadership team and community members to gain a collective voice to:
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Empower community members to address current needs.
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Prepare them for future disasters where government intervention is lacking.
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Equip communities to be stakeholders.
Walu works with a wide range of demographics. This ensures the community, as a whole, is represented.
Walu is currently providing CDD training to fire victims in the Santa Cruz Mountains and El Dorado County. We also offer training to groups, organizations, and communities who want to come together to improve current conditions, as well as be trained and prepared to manage disaster recovery.
Training Provides:
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Insight into how Walu's CDD model differs from other approaches
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identification of issues and the root causes
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Assessments to find solutions/corrective action
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Committee formation
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Community project management
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Communication: establishing partnerships with local resources, organizations & municipalities
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Evaluation & Monitoring.
Why Community Driven Development?
Why is CDD vital for our communities, organizations, and government agencies?
Communities know their people, culture, terrain, resources, politics, history, needs, and obstacles better than an outsider.
Globally, communities deal with crisis & disasters. Through CDD the gap that is often felt by communities during a crisis will be minimized as all entities collaborate together for the good of the people impacted by disaster.
Regardless of disasters, communities face obstacles in their daily lives that need resolving. Typically there is not a structure in place to equip and empower a community voice. CDD provides the structure to create partnerships with agencies to develop and maintain a community voice.
Communities that regularly use CDD to resolve day-to-day issues fair better during a calamity because they were already in the practice of collectively coming together to accomplish a common goal.
Community Member Statement
After the CZU fire, many of us lost our homes, it has become very clear that we need a way for the community to create, in a structured way, communication with our government and local agencies about the needs from this catastrophic disaster. Walu was identified as an experienced resource to help achieve a process to alleviate this burden. Julie W - Fire Victim
Meet The Team
CJ Runyon
President/CEO
Zack Parker
Founder
Christi Grab
Secretary
Brynna McComb
Treasurer