Who is the IDPSA?

Every graduate student enrolled in the International Development Program in the School of International Service at American Unversity is an automatic member of the IDPSA. Your level of involvement and leadership are the keys to the IDPSAs success.

IDPSA Mission

The mission of the IDPSA is to support, inspire, and foster the growth of innovative and progressive future international development practitioners who seek to advance people-centered development by linking critical inquiry with community action.

ID Program Philosophy

The International Development Program is designed for students and faculty concerned with analyzing and participating in economic, environmental, social, and political change, with particular emphasis on improving the opportunities for the poor and disenfranchised of the Third World. While the primary focus of the program is on Africa, Asia, Latin America and the newly independent states of Eastern Europe, it also recognizes that in our new globalized environment the *Third World* is as much a set of relationships and conditions as it is a place, and may just as easily include parts of Washington, D.C. and rural America as it does the Sahel and Cairo. The Washington locale of the program helps students understand how international development has become a world-wide process, intimately linking North and South, rich and poor, macro and micro activities, international development agencies and grass-roots organizations.

Concern for the poor and vulnerable underscores a distinguishing feature of the International Development Program -- the recognition among students and faculty that development brings important costs as well as benefits, and that these are not equally shared. Given this perspective, development becomes an ethical and political as well as a technical undertaking. The International Development Program is dedicated to ensuring that development is a *community* exercise, including the preferences and interests of all those affected, regardless of class, race, or gender. With this community focus, equity becomes a central objective, in decisionmaking as well as the distribution of benefits.

This sense of community also characterizes the International Development Program itself. Since its founding more than twenty years ago, it has been built upon a sense of mutual commitment and respect. Through both formal and informal activities, the faculty and students work together both academically and socially to create projects and research plans, discuss ideas, and evaluate and improve the program. The students themselves play an important role in the ID Program. In addition to taking part in all SIS policy-making bodies, ID students founded the International Development Program Student Association (IDPSA) which is actively involved in academic and program policy, community and professional programs, and social affairs. With support from the Socity for International Development, the IDPSA sponsors a weekly speaker series, The Friday Forum, bringing academics and practitioners to campus to discuss current issues facing the international development community.