Susan Smith

Consultant and Independent Practitioner

luzdelunaint@yahoo.ca

Susan Smith has a wide range of professional and interpersonal skills that were honed over more than thirty years of work in the global development sector. Her responsibilities have ranged from directorship of disaster relief and emergency services; coordination of university education programs; the design of community development programs; to the evaluation of large scale MNCH projects. She has lived and worked in numerous settings internationally, often under difficult circumstance.

Susan has been engaged in development and research work in an impoverished area of rural Mexico as well as undertaking short-term consultancies internationally. As a senior health specialist, she has completed consultations in Mozambique, Bolivia, Columbia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, Indonesia, Malawi, Bangladesh and China.

Susan is the founder and Executive Director of Atzin, a non-profit humanitarian organization based in Cuernavaca, Mexico, with a sister association in Canada. Since 1997, Atzin’s integrated programs focus on four sectors: Health and Healing; Income Generation for Women; Community Education and Literacy; and Environment, Water and Sanitation. Each program is based on the principles of social participation; continuous learning; investigation with action; and environmental and economic sustainability.

Susan holds a PhD in education, specializing in community health and development and participatory-action research. Her primary focus has been on the complex determinants of health and well-being for groups and communities and on the design of transformative processes necessary for human development. She speaks, reads and writes English and Spanish.

Areas of Expertise: maternal newborn child health; community health; community development; NGO operations; training of trainers.