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Partners International Foundation
41 Cedar Hill Road
Newtown, Connecticut 06470
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Welcome
Welcome to Partners International Foundation, a public charity whose purpose is to enable the people of the world to achieve and maintain sustainable livelihoods. The Foundation executes its purpose across the spectrum of humanitarian projects and interventions including development and crisis response.
Sustainable Livelihoods
The goal of any viable intervention or humanitarian program must be to move the affected population to a state of sustainable livelihoods.
The term 'sustainable livelihood' was first used as a development
concept in the early 1990s. Chambers and Conway (1991)
defined a sustainable livelihood as follows:
"A livelihood comprises people, their capabilities
and their means of living, including food, income and assets. Tangible assets
are resources and stores, and intangible assets are
claims and access.
A livelihood is environmentally sustainable when it maintains
or enhances the local and global assets in which livelihoods depend, and has net
beneficial effects on other livelihoods. A livelihood is socially sustainable
which can cope with and recover from stress and shocks, and provide for future
generations."
Our Model for
Achieving Sustainable Livelihoods
Partners International Foundation uses the approach of ensuring partners and people have the right knowledge, understanding, skills, abilities, and tangible resources to achieve, maintain, or re-establish sustainable livelihoods for the people.
Knowledge and Understanding
To attain and maintain sustainable livelihood first requires
acquiring the appropriate knowledge of the population and other influencing
factors. Since knowledge, by definition, is merely “information in the mind”,
the ultimate goal at the knowledge and understanding stage of the developmental
model is to achieve understanding of that knowledge, the needs and requirements,
and the interrelationships of the factors within the domain. Only through
understanding can issues be comprehended and solutions formed.
Skills and Abilities
The next step in the model is to assess the skills
resident in the population and intervention partners as well as the ability of
each group to exercise those skills using the understanding to quantify the
challenges, develop, then implement solutions. These can be
technical and non technical. Training and education at all levels coupled with a
life-long learning approach are key enablers for this element.
Tangible Resources
Finally, it is important to identify and provide the tangible
resources in terms of 7 capital
forms
(Political,
Natural, Economic, Infrastructure, Cultural, Social, and Human) required to support attaining the required knowledge,
Understanding, skills, and abilities to achieve and maintain sustainable
livelihood. Technology research, development, and effective
deployment are key enablers of this element. Throughout this process a
continual “gap analysis” is conducted to identify the gaps in each area then
develop strategies to fill them in an environment of continual improvement.
How we help achieve Sustainable
Livelihoods
Partner's International Foundation executes independently and with program partners from all areas to develop the knowledge and understanding, identify the Skills, Abilities and Tangible Resources available among the potential partners, host nations and peoples both available and required to achieve, maintain, or re-establish sustainable livelihoods. Solutions are then rapidly implemented and objectively evaluated using a customer focused approach.