About

P-CED began in Chapel Hill,  North Carolina in early 1997.

P-CED places people at the center of economic development. P-CED takes the bottom line one step further: to people, past numbers. Enterprise profitability and economic success cannot be fairly measured in terms of gains of money capital alone. Profit is redefined in human terms rather than pure quantitative analyses that remove human and social concerns in the name of profit.

P-CED advocates for the development of localized people-centered economics on a global basis. Toward this end, each local community needs access to:

• a comprehensive, easily accessible information source about all of its currently available local resources

• an extended national and global information resource base to facilitate locating and sharing of resources

• resources for creation of community funding enterprises for profit, with profits to be applied to social needs in addition to private wealth creation

P-CED began as a ‘poverty-relief via targeted community enterprise development’ advocacy in the US in 1997.  P-CED now operates as a UK-registered profit-for-purpose in the former Soviet Union, and a social relief enterprise in Ukraine.

We conduct small business for profit in UK, and invest profits for social purpose under profit-for-purpose rules in UK.  This is somewhat similar to non-profit in the US, except we can conduct any business we see fit according to normal business rules without restrictions that bind non-profits or charities.  We pay company and personal taxes according to usual business rules.  Profits are not shielded in any way from normal taxation that any for-profit business has to pay.  Whatever is left over is invested in the social purpose or purposes of our own choosing.  That way we can do business in the normal, traditional way, changing only one thing: the output, what happens with profit.

P-CED has advocated and pursued that model since inception in 1996-97 in the US.  The design is very straightforward: do business as usual, and invest profits for social benefit.  The US has been slow on the uptake with the profit-for-purpose thinking, UK much faster, so we instituted in the UK in 2004.  More on the inception of P-CED is in the “History” page.  Bill Gates, for one, came around to this way of thinking in 2001.

Our social purpose is poverty relief and childcare reform in the former Soviet Union.  Core framework is straightforward: to build bridges of friendship based on common ground for the common good in the former Soviet bloc.  We firmly believe that this “soft power” approach to international relations is inevitably the only solid ground for establishing and building understanding, good will and peace.  We have therefore pursued that strategy from the beginning of P-CED.  (Sounds like “Peace Ed, short for Peace Education.)

We research and design regional and national programs.  More about these programs are in the “Projects” section.  We continue throughout with advocacy and activism in raising awareness of stakeholders we aim to help: vulnerable children, and people in poverty, first.

These problems almost always stem from government corruption that was a way of life in the USSR, and remains so to varying degrees.  Hence the overall process of what we do in promoting change inevitably runs into varying degrees of conflict along the way.  Dealing with such things as threats and smears is as much a part of projects as the hope and good will built within communities for standing up to it.  Hope, good will, and improved lives far outweigh the stresses and strains mounted by corrupt government officials, so strife and institutional resistance to change are taken in stride as part of the change process.

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