Not Sure You Want to Commit or Want to Focus on an Area?……..
Start with a Certificate(s) ….. It’s Possible to Turn These into Master’s Credits Later
Start with your particular interest. Increase your skills there. Experience the Future Generations blended learning approach. Take one of the Master’s courses as a certificate. Later, if you decide you want graduate credit, this certificate can be added onto for credit.
Graduate certificates are short, focused programs designed to give you advanced skills in the subject area. Contact Registrar at registrar@future.edu to find out how to turn your certificate into an accredited Master’s course.
Then if you want to commit more – apply to our Master’s Degree program and earn your Masters of Arts in Applied Community Development.
A certificate represents one course. A diploma is awarded upon completion of four courses. If you want to start with certificates and earn a four-course diploma, each certificate will need the additional work done, with formal registration as a student and completion of academic work, in order to make it into a course.
Increase your Knowledge & Skills
Take One Or More Certificates In
Specifically for teachers affiliated with our Bending Bamboo project in Vietnam, these four certificate courses build teacher confidence for excellence in language instruction that supports bilingualism, climate resilience, and sustainable development.
- Theory & Practice Of Language Acquisition
- Lifelong Development Education
- Bridging & Negotiating Differences
- Action Research For Learning Enhancement
Interested in sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship? Then this opportunity is for you! This program will guide you to join the rapidly growing sap and syrup industry.
The Maple Sap and Syrup Collection training combines lecture and field work with internship experience and mentoring to get you in business. The training options include:
- 4 weeks of online training program
- 2-day workshop on Sap Collection
- 2-day workshop on Syrup Processing
- Choose one or both of the workshops to participate in
- Mentorship sessions in the spring with a Maple Producer
The course includes four optional internship sessions where you work with local producers as the tap their trees, process their sap, and close out their season. In addition, all who complete the course are eligible for two free consultations, where an area producer will spend time with you establishing your sugaring operation.
Learn how to foster:
Collaborative leadership: How to build a community-based team to realize change without waiting for inspirational leaders to take charge;
- Community-led development: How to identify, and ground your efforts in existing successes, strengths, and resources;
- Effective action: How to develop a realistic action plan and monitor your community’s progress towards its goals;
- Behavioral change: How to harness human energy for observable community change;
- Positive growth: How to evaluate your progress for continual refinement
Your words and actions are change-making tools waiting to be used! Learn by experiencing Gandhi’s life (live in his ashram, eat as he did, and study on the mud floors where he taught). Gandhi’s approach for motivating others to come together in action is available today.
Equip yourself to make the change you wish to see, creating more just and lasting futures for all. As the Mahatma has said,“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”
Reasons to Pursue a Certificate/Diploma
- Enhance your skills to further your career
- Get new skills to earn a promotion or change careers
- Update & broaden your knowledge base with best practices
Certificate / Diploma Admissions Requirements & Process
- Interest in the Subject Matter
- A Desire to Make a Difference
- No bachelor’s degree required
- Submit a Certificate Student Application
Earn Your Diploma In One of Two Areas
Offered at both the undergraduate and graduate level, diplomas are a great option for those desiring more flexibility in their education and are equivalent to one year of graduate study. You can select the courses most relevant to your life and work and combine them into a custom-built diploma program! Certificates and Independent Study credit may also be applied towards the receipt of a diploma.
Earn a Graduate Level Certificate in Non-Profit & Community Management by taking four courses.
ACC 601 – Introduction to Community Change introduces students to SEED-SCALE as the underlying theory and method of this Master’s degree. This process allows communities to evolve site-specific designs that grow change, use resources possessed by the community, and initiate action that emerges from the community’s current socio-economic reality.
ACC 603 – Going to Scale advances knowledge to improve participatory processes of research and action with communities and agencies that support them. Traditional and alternative approaches to scaling up are introduced for critical comparison. Students develop a grant proposal or case study for expanding impact through SEED-SCALE.
PRC 603 – Monitoring and Evaluation presents a conceptual framework and practical skills for conducting iterative critical examination of programs and projects in community development work. Students learn to use suitable metrics for specific programs and projects, and focus on key performance indicators as a scientific method to simplify complex data collection and analyses.
Pick One of the Following Two Courses
PSK 605 – Volunteer Management focuses on effective facilitation and leadership approaches to organizing and working with volunteers. Students examine the importance of the underlying motivators of why people volunteer. This course presents specific strategies for motivating, recruiting, tracking, and retaining volunteer engagement.
OR
PSK 616 – Entrepreneurship & Innovation is a pragmatic course that addresses the most frequently mentioned needs to grow a small enterprise – whether nonprofit or for-profit. Students learn plan design, market analysis and projections, securing seed money, branding, financial planning, and networking opportunities. They apply concepts to their own context.
Combine the four certificates or courses to earn either an Undergradute Level or Graduate Level Degree
PSK 607 – Theory & Practice of Language Acquisition draws on psychology and linguistic theory to create innovative, motivating, and effective methods, techniques, and strategies for combining language and development learning. Students engage concrete steps of curriculum design and delivery for diverse age groups – elementary, secondary, tertiary, and adult learning.
PSK 608 – Lifelong Development Education presents the challenge of inter-generational and integrated modes of education that inform the quest for well-being. Students learn how a country’s pursuit of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals strategizes the balance of local contextual experience with global knowledge and collaboration.
PSK 610 – Bridging & Negotiating Differences situates students in broader development literature, theories of change, cross-cultural wonder, power differentials, and inter-disciplinary work. Students move back-and-forth between very different realities, beginning with rural and urban, and then rich and poor, and ask of their own context and work, “Whose reality counts?”
PSK 611 – Action Research for Learning Enhancement introduces students to an iterative process of continual monitoring, evaluation, and participatory research for improved curricular design and delivery. Students learn to refine principles, strategies, and techniques for teaching and learning excellence. They identify indicators of change for self- and collective-evaluation.
