We are a unique group who studied development efforts in our Appalachian Ohio community and compared what we found to efforts to provide effective development in a community in another part of the world. The core of our group is a partnership between secondary public school students in a rural school district and teacher-education students at Ohio University. Parents, teachers, and university professors are also a part of our group. We extended our partnership by collaborating with an ecotourism business, EcoColors, and local townspeople who are directly affected by development in their community.

We chose to study economic development because of its importance to our community, and because our community has no shared vision of what constitutes meaningful development and who development should serve. Consequently, many opportunities are lost, and much time and energy goes into supporting extreme positions rather than in seeking to intelligently weigh costs and benefits, and to reach a consensus based upon the facts. Furthermore, projects are undertaken in the name of develoment which actually harm some groups within our community, or which impact the environment in ways which place the needs of future generations at risk. We chose to work with EcoColors and townspeople in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico because we know from research that the Mexican Caribbean has development issues which are in many ways similar to those in Appalachian Ohio. We also wanted to incorporate an international, multicultural experience into our project.

~Written by the students participating in this expedition

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