How We Design
As a financial strengthening organization, we co-design and implement, with communities in Uganda, Chile and Oregon, ways for people to strengthen their own economies while preserving the environment.
Processes of Community-Based Design
Perhaps the most unique aspect of our approach to community-based microdevelopment is that we co-design programs with the communities we serve. Our first assumption is that people know more about their lives than we do, so we start by learning about their own practices of resilience. Our second assumption, is that we do have something to offer, including knowledge about how formal finance works and how resilient people across diverse cultures have successfully developed ways to sustain their own lives, livelihoods, and ecologies.
Our challenge is to co-design new and creative processes of microdevelopment that combine diverse kinds of wisdom and, then, to work with community members to build the capacities needed to manage and sustain these processes on their own. Our processes of co-design are illustrated by this diagram.
Scaling Program Designs Across Similar Communities
Program designs are also eminently scalable across communities within each branch of Maple. We know this because communities often share these designs with others in their own regions without needing Maple to redesign programs with each new community.
We support this process of scaling programs by:
Designing culturally specific toolkits that new communities with similar characteristics of our original co-design partners can use on their own.
Assisting other communities to make adjustments based on slightly different needs, if necessary.
