Announcing redesigned Small Island States Foundation website

The Small Island States Foundation is pleased to announce their redesigned website and new blog.

Photo: Ross Cooke

Earlier this year Owen Bethel, SISF’s founder, and I met in New York to discuss how we might revitalize this website and, indeed, the work of the Foundation.  We concluded that since a central tenet of the Small Island States Foundation is to promote sustainable solutions for island development, then one of our core functions should be to write about these issues and regularly publish articles, interviews, and profiles on these pages.

We have since transitioned the website to a WordPress platform, with the blog front and center on the home page.

Our editorial philosophy

Because the Foundation supports applied public policy research that investigates the challenges of sustainable development faced by small island nations around the world, many assume that our writing will have an academic orientation.  But that isn’t the case with this blog.

Our intention is to reach a broad audience that, whilst including the academic community, consists primarily of the men and women who live on these islands, or who love islands, and who are seeking practical solutions to the unique economic, environmental, social, and cultural challenges faced by islanders on a daily basis.

We seek to engage in a lively conversation with you, our readers, about what these sustainability issues are and the best practices used on islands around the world that can be translated to your unique circumstances.

We will not write exposés that highlight what is going wrong with any particular island, government, business, organization, or person.  Instead, we will focus on what works – so that you might learn from the experience and positive outcomes of others.

Our publishing schedule

Initially, we will publish each Monday morning, beginning with a series of articles that outline in broad strokes the challenges of sustainability faced by small island states.  Interspersed among these articles will be profiles of leaders in business, government, NGOs, the environment, and culture, as well as the occasional in-depth profile of island nations that are making great strides in dealing with these challenges.

We welcome your feedback.  In fact, we encourage it.  Please take the time to respond to these articles – tell us what you like, what you don’t like, suggestions for how we can improve, and even story ideas you might have.  We promise to be an active participant in this ongoing conversation, and not just casually watch from the back of the room.

The Small Island States Foundation is based in Nassau, The Bahamas.  And whilst our focus extends to small island states and territories everywhere, our reach is still growing.

We encourage your involvement

If you have a story to tell, let us know and we will see if we can arrange for you to post a guest article.  Likewise, if you are a photographer with images to share we will gladly include them in future articles and throughout our website.  In all things we do, we operate under a Creative Commons license – sharing our work for attribution.

Owen and I are very excited about this new beginning for the Small Island States Foundation.  We encourage you to learn more about us within these pages.

Most of all, we are thrilled to start this dialogue.  We don’t think you will find anything quite like it anywhere else.  But we will only be successful with your participation, your feedback, and your help in spreading the word about the Small Island States Foundation and the work we do.

Please sign up here to join our mailing list.  If you are so inclined, we would greatly appreciate your becoming a member of the Foundation or supporting our work in one of the many ways outlined here.

So, tell me, what do you think?  How can we help you reach your sustainability objectives?  What stories do you have to tell?  And, what would you like to see us write about?