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The next fully-online offering of the program will begin in late January; apply now!
What is Community Economic Development?
Community economic development (CED) is an inclusive and participatory process by which communities initiate and generate their own multiple bottom-line solutions to economic problems. Community economic developers focus on creating inclusive local economies, developing nourishing livelihood opportunities, building on local resources and capacities, increasing community control and ownership, enhancing the health of the environment, and encouraging community resilience.
What is the program?
An 8-month, fully remote, part-time certificate program catered to working professionals. Learn where you live! Taught by outstanding instructors who are experts in their field, each course is delivered by video and complemented with in-person, online talks.
About SFU CED:
In 1989 Simon Fraser University became one of the first educational institutions in North America to offer programming in Community Economic Development (CED), and has continued to prepare multiple generations of practitioners for environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economic development at the neighborhood, municipal, and regional scales. Since 2001 SFU has offered the Certificate Program for Community Economic Development (CED Program) to hundreds of students in dozens of cohorts drawn from around the world, with a particularly active concentration of students drawn from BC and Alberta.
SFU’s CED program is a leader in CED across Canada, and our content is both progressive and unique. The CED Program differentiates itself from traditional economic approaches as it is rooted in theoretical and embodied resistance to traditional capitalism and growth machine development. However, we also recognize that many communities rely on existing economic structures and resource extraction, so we teach a spectrum of approaches from incremental to transformational. As practitioners ourselves, we recognize that different students have different needs when they return to their home communities.
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