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International Work
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Phyllis Davies stands with Carmita and her son in the Ecuadorian Andes. Carmita is an outstanding local agriculturist and women's health trainer. They are in a field of high-protein amaranth that is being re-introduced into the area. |
Travel with a purpose is important to Phyllis Davies. She shares her skills in grief education, as well as in solar cooking, leadership development, sustainable agriculture, reforestation and community health. She helps rural communities address problems with potable water, AIDS projects, orphanages, school farms, as well as working with Hospice and in peace and trauma survival education. She is dedicated to working in remote regions and loves helping people identify and solve their own village problems using resources already available in the local area.
Phyllis is a native Californian. She is a 1966 Cal Poly graduate and has been named theUniversity's Honored Alumnus. She has lectured there in World Food Politics, Psychology as it relates to grief issues, and simple, sustainable techniques to improve lives and stop global warming. Her specific focus is on the roles of women in subsistence agriculture, and helping women learn to facilitate changes in their community.
Her lifetime interest in education, peace, global hunger, and heath issues have taken her into remote areas of many "two-thirds world" (what is often called
"third world") countries across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Her 2007 trip as part of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) Citizen
Diplomacy Delegation to Iran and her 2009 agriculture research trip to Cuba
brought the number of nations in which Phyllis has traveled and worked in to
57 countries.
As a delegate to the United Nations Summit Forum in Rio de Janeiro, she helped negotiate the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security Treaties that were adopted by the United Nations for non-governmental organizations. She has been named World Neighbors Volunteer of the Year.
People often ask her why she is so concerned about solving the world problems. She conceeds part of her motivation on global issues is related to experiencing the grief of two of her three children dying in accidents. "World hunger is largely solvable within our lifetime, if we are willing to address it with even a small portion of the commitment that we have given to war."
Her daughter Dawna, says, "My mother has her ear to the heartbeat of the world."
Phyllis Davies is the author of a top-selling book, Grief: Climb Toward Understanding, now in a 5th edition.
It came out of her experience with the deaths of their two sons.
She and Bill, her husband of over 40 years, have grown much of their food on their small solar-powered organic family farm in the Los Osos Valley since the mid-1970s.
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Davies is available as a speaker, for more information contact:
Phyllis Davies
P.O. Box 945
San Luis Obispo, CA 93406
Questions Davies is often asked:
- Why is agriculture training focused on men, when in many areas of the world, 70% of agricultural work is done by women?
- How can we nurture both men and women as community leaders in developing countries?
- What elements contribute to successful, self-motivated maternal and child health programs, as well as improved local agriculture?
- What can comparison of consumption patterns reveal about world population, and how can this be applied in making our personal decisions? (For example, on an average, one child in the U.S. consumes 37 times the resources compared to a child in some developing countries.)
- Why are all quality-of-life factors higher where women are treated fairly? (Long life-expectancy, low infant mortality, high literacy, and low fertility rates always go together. There are high statistical correlations among these factors.)
- How does solar cooking my food in the US actually impact the world and climate change?
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