Visiting with students and faculty of the Porto Business School was a great pleasure. The Porto Business School is dedicated to sustainability as a key element across all of their program concentrations. 

Its dedicated faculty and administrators describe this central feature of the school as a vital consideration as its graduate and executive level student body builds their capacities as leaders in the business world.

I felt the students’ sincere commitment to the issues of sustainable development. During our talk together they asked poignant questions related to, for example, the methodological design and how that is developed over time. 

Methodologies of people’s participation in project planning and empowerment are of course either to emerge from the context where they are applied or, introduced externally based on their proven quality, are to be fully adapted to the area of operation. Methods are not to be considered as blueprints but rather as flexible and encouraging of people’s own analysis and expression of the needs they most feel in their lives.

A student asked about our view of success, which for us, is not only the communities’ support in the endurance of projects that meet their self-described needs, but that they are able to generate new resources that enable the people to reinvest in new initiatives to achieve their development goals. Success involves expansion and scale, the training of new facilitators of community planning and empowerment experiences. They help enable the people to not only define their most important projects they would like to achieve but also implement them and be trained themselves in catalyzing new development with communities in their regions.

I was asked about what accounts for the motivation to continue this development work in Morocco, spanning my adult life. Morocco is the reason. Morocco’s vision for its own sustainability is the inspiration. At the same time, as we in our lives speak with people who have dedicated themselves to all kinds of work and purposes, it is also incredibly difficult to precisely answer what keeps our energy, interest, and dedication across time. I ask the same of others, of teachers, artists, and people in business and public service who find the will every day to continue their lives’ missions. There is an element I believe we cannot fully explain as to what propels us with lifetime missions. 

The students and faculty at Porto Business School are a delight to spend time with and all of us at the High Atlas Foundation are grateful for our new relationship. There is obviously an intrinsic connection between Morocco and Portugal, and we at HAF are honored to be part in some way with this exceptional bond between societies.