Donna Sillan, MPH, is an international public health consultant, with 36 years of experience in international health development work, focusing on Child Survival programming. She is a master trainer and facilitator in the areas of program design, monitoring and evaluation, planning, management and community-based health information systems and nutrition. As a health educator, her focus is on behavior change approaches. Her interest in nutrition has led her to become an advocate and trainer of the Positive Deviance/Hearth methodology and she recently wrote a field handbook on this intervention, published by CORE for the PVO community.

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Donna has been the team leader on numerous primary health care and child survival evaluations. Since 1987 she has facilitated training workshops in Asia, Africa and Latin America for community health care workers and trainers working in child survival initiatives. Her philosophy is proven by the strong commitment to results, generated by participants in her workshops and training programs.

Living for 11 years in Asia, in a professional capacity, she worked both at the country and regional level. She has worked extensively in Indonesia and has done short-term work in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Vietnam, East Timor, Maldives, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Her assignments in Africa have taken her to Somalia, Ethiopia, Mali, Malawi, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Tanzania. In Central and South America she has worked in Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, and Haiti.  In the US, she has worked on Montana’s Indian reservations, in border towns with Mexico and in the deep South.

In 2007, she started a grass roots NGO which resonates with her core values and applies the lessons she learned to ONE community, following the principles of development. Her organization called, Common River is in the coffee growing region of Sidama, Ethiopia in a village called Aleta Wondo. It is where Common River is creating a Positive Deviance Development model for replication in other parts of Ethiopia and the developing world.  The program works towards creating a sustainable community through health, education and livelihood development.

After 4 years of documenting the Sidama tribe’s food ways, Donna has completed the first “Sidama Cookbook” ever written to capture the traditional art of this unique cuisine. It is an anthropological document which preserves the dying art of planting, processing, and preparing enset — a tradition that, prior to now, had ony been transmitted orally. Order it today on Blurb!

Her services are available for short term assignments. Attached find her resume:  CVDonna2016.

Donna has travelled to 77 countries.  See where she has been on the map.  matador2016