News
01.08.12
Crain's New York Business
"Much of Richard Buery's nighttime reading helps him delve deeper into the issues he deals with as chief executive of the Children's Aid Society. He just finished The Power of Positive Deviance, by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, which highlights innovative ways communities around the world are solving their problems without the help of outside experts." Click to read more.
10.05.11
New York Times
Positive Deviance and positive deviant Jasper Palmer were featured on October 5 in the New York Times as part of a lesson plan for the New York Times Learning Network! Check it out...
09.08.11
A September 7-8 PD workshop in Kathmandu, Nepal facilitated by Monique Sternin and Jim Levinson was a great success. Levinson said of the workshop, "We now have a group of PD devotees who have some valuable skills. They are sufficiently committed that they have decided to establish a PD Nepal 'community of practice' which will keep these folks - and others - well connected and will permit them to share the latest PD activities. Some absolutely remarkable people were part of the group!" Read more...
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09.02.11
Pathfinder International
Every now and then we come across great stories of work being done by other organizations and partners which highlight how Positive Deviance works in the field and which demonstrate the dramatic impact that Positive Deviance can have on improving people's lives. Most recently, Pathfinder International featured a two-part "field journal" entry by Sarah Eckhoff in their July newsletter about villages in Burundi where a group of women in the community, termed "maman lumieres" or "illuminating mothers" are helping their peers to overcome maternal and child malnutrition as part of a PD Hearth project (a component of Pathfinder's Maternal and Child Health Project.) Click here to read more...
08.17.11
Due to a glitch with our email system, online contact forms and email to contact@positivedeviance.org submitted between July 21 and August 16 likely did not make it to us! We are sorry for this inconvenience and ask that you please re-sumbit any messages made between these dates. Thank you for your understanding!
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08.01.11
On Monday, August 1, 115 health professionals gathered at the Muskie School of Public Service in Portland, Maine for the 2011 Patient Safety Academy, hosted by the Maine Critical Access Hospital Patient Safety Collaborative and supported by the Maine CDC Office of Rural Health and Primary Care. The day-long event included a presentation about Positive Deviance as well as a variety of workshop sessions offered by innovators and experts within the field. For more information and photos from the event, click here.
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07.29.11
From July 25-29, 2011, Monique Sternin facilitated a Positive Deviance Hearth Orientation Workshop in Ventiane, Laos which was funded by World Vision Canada. The objective of this workshop was to orient participants to the PD/Hearth Model.
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07.14.11
The New York Times
David Bornstein wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times last week which demonstrates the Positive Deviance concept, highlighting low-income families who are able to help each other to achieve their goals rather than relying on outside resources or experts. The families participate in an initiative called the Family Independence Initiative (FII) which was founded by Maurice Lim Miller. Lim Miller says in the article that "When you come into a community that is vulnerable with professionals with power and preset ideas, it is overpowering to families and it can hold them back. Nobody wants to hear that because we're all the good guys. But the focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths - and their ability to see their own strengths."
06.29.11
Over the past two decades Monique Sternin has worked with the positive deviance (PD) approach to address some of the world's most intractable problems, from maternal and infant mortality in Pakistan to female genital mutilation in Egypt. This month, Monique is changing roles and will transition into a PDI consulting and advisory role that will enable her to go back to working in the field and using the PD approach in the communities around the world that she is so passionate about. Monique will focus her time on addressing issues effecting women and children, such as maternal and newborn health, child brides, and disparities among pregnancy outcomes in the US. Monique's new role will first bring her to Nepal this autumn where she will be co-facilitating a PD orientation for organizations who wish to apply the approach in various fields including nutrition, agriculture and public health issues.
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06.01.11
National Public Radio, National Geographic
NPR's Michele Norris and Melissa Block of All Things Considered recently interviewed photographer Stephanie Sinclair and writer Cynthia Gorney about their feature Too Young To Wed in the June issue of National Geographic which profiles young girls from Afghanistan, India, and Yemen who marry at a very early age. The National Geographic article actually uses the term "positive deviants" to label "actors within a community who through some personal combination of circumstance and moxie are able to defy tradition and instead try something new, perhaps radically so." While we were thrilled to see the term "positive deviant" used in National Geographic, it was equally exciting to hear the voice of Stephanie Sinclair during the NPR interview discussing her experience of witnessing the people of a town in Yemen unite through education to stop a child marriage.
