Community Partnership Centers

DI collaborates with the  Community Partnership Center Foundation (CPCF) to establish Community Partnership Centers (CPCs) through which local stakeholders empower themselves to initiate and oversee their own development strategies and initiatives via Community Drive Development (CDD). It is the purpose of the CPCF to help communities by facilitating access to financial resources and technical assistance resources for the establishment of programs that they determine are most needed for the enhancement of the general welfare of the population.  

The CPC mission is to address cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors comprehensively to strengthen overall community well being through sustainability and resilience. In addition to customary development activities, the CPC will promote endeavors normally considered apart from economic development assistance, such as disaster risk mitigation and relief preparedness, as well as historical preservation.

Disaster risk mitigation includes such endeavors as putting into place strategies, protocols, and building codes that take into consideration various conceivable and emergency contingencies to which a community is known to be susceptible, such as sudden yet anticipated challenges presented by reoccurring natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, storms, and droughts. Relief preparedness entails planning to facilitate a timely response to the consequences of these events, as well as to sudden challenges that are human caused, such as social upheavals and rapid population displacement.

Historic preservation reaffirms a community’s collective identity by memorializing its unique historical esthetic and cultural traditions, by preserving surviving icons that pay homage to historical achievements, by fostering the integration of current development initiatives in the context of a community’s perspective of that history, and by linking that history to the awareness of the social and cultural continuity that have enabled it to persevere over time.
    
The CPC offers a venue for the coordinated interaction of the four critical local development constituencies—government agencies, civil society organizations, the business community, and academia—whose involvement is essential to all development sustainability to promote capacity building. 

Cultural Enrichment:

The CPC offers programs and a venue for music, dance, theater, and the visual and literary arts, as well as promoting those traditional cultural art forms that are the heritage of the various groups that make up the extended community. These programs include cultural exchange for the purpose of exploring cultural diversity between neighboring communities as well as internationally, involving travel for both inbound and outbound exchanges. All activities promote intercultural and multicultural awareness and respect.

Social Enrichment:

The CPC offers activities that provide family health and wellbeing. These include supplementary after-school activities for sports and hobbies, especially targeting at-risk youth in jeopardy of leaving school, as well as activities focused on post-conflict stress mitigation. Instructional health activities include prenatal health awareness, sanitation and prevention of communicable diseases, safety in the home, and recourses to domestic violence and how to access to professional medical care. 

Economic Empowerment:

The CPC offers activities that introduce various avenues of economic empowerment to the local population. Training workshops are provided on such topics as secondary graduation equivalency programs, small business development, bookkeeping, microfinance, marketing, export opportunities, and establishing successful home-based industries. A particular emphasis is on support for economic opportunities for women, and minority and indigenous communities.