CCARC executes projects with approval of the Board of Directors. Our Board seeks to be representative of the areas in which CCARC works, and includes Central Americans and Afrodescendent and Indigenous men and women. Decisions are made primarily through consensus.
We compete for research contracts, consultancies and also initiate project proposals for funding agencies. Moreover, we respond to project proposals generated by institutions and individuals based on the Caribbean coast of Central America, the Caribbean, and the US. CCARC either executes such projects, or helps our partners refine their proposals and secure funding to execute the project themselves.
CCARC seeks to apply norms of economic justice in its financial operations as well. The organization accumulates a small reserve fund to both support special projects and seed future initiatives. We encourage project staff to turn back 10% of her or his honoraria to an organization building fund. This, in addition to a standard overhead fee, allows the organization to widen our scope of action, while decreasing our dependence on outside funders.
Where feasible, CCARC works with and through local institutions to execute its projects. In particular, CCARC is committed to capacity building through knowledge, skills, and technology transfer to our partners. We seek to transfer these various forms of social capital to both individuals and institutions. The objective is to reverse the inequalities that exist in the development world, so that our partners engage issues of concern to their communities on a more equal footing with their counterparts from diverse social and institutional positions.