Yes, this effort is based in the United States, and most of my work since 1990, supported by World Hunger Year (WHY), a non-profit organization based in New York City, has focused on identifying the most innovative and organizations fighting the real and serious community problems we have at home.

But in the course of that work, and in the course of my business and pleasure travels to Europe, Central and South America and Japan, it has become painfully obvious that similar problems occur everywhere -- and some of them, in some parts of the world, are of such a serious nature that they make much of what Americans call poverty seem almost (but not quite) trivial in contrast.

However, it has also become happily clear that humans of all nationalities respond in similar fashion when the going gets tough. It was my privilege to attend a major conference, "The Globalization of Solidarity," in Lima, Peru, in 1997 that brought together inspiring grassroots activists from many parts of the world. Some of those activists, and their good ideas, have already been influential on U.S. programs.

Just to name a random few, the Grameen microdevelopment banks of Bangladesh, the Mondragon worker cooperatives of Spain, the somewhat similar flexible manufacturing systems of Northern Italy, the apprenticeship programs of Germany, and family-support organizations in Colombia and agricultural cooperatives in Peru are accomplishing much good in their own countries and serving as models for community action in the U.S.

So the short answer to the question, "Are you interested in the rest of the world?" is an enthusiastic "Yes!"

And you can help. If you're viewing these pages from outside the U.S., or if you know about exceptional models of community building and self-reliance anywhere on Earth, I would urge you to use the mail link below to tell us about them. With good fortune and a little cooperation, we can take advantage of the truly World Wide Web to build a library of stories about community enterprise that span not just the nation but the globe.

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