David Lempert

Professor Lempert is a California attorney, M.B.A., social anthropologist, educator, author, and consultant who has worked in more than 20 countries on five continents since the early 1980s, pioneering new mechanisms in rights, law, education, development work, and social science.

In 1985, he founded Unseen America Projects, Inc., an NGO that has promoted new forms of clinical education and democratic-experiential learning at the university and graduate school level throughout the world.

In addition to his work on NGO Donor Monitoring, he has elaborated an International Red Book for Endangered Cultures monitoring project; designed a future Diaspora Bridge Center in Eastern Europe; devised a simple Sustainable Development Indicator to measure performance of NGOs and agents in promoting sustainable development; published professional ethics codes for development practitioners; and designed model constitutions and laws to promote effective citizen oversight of modern bureaucracies and to protect community and cultural rights.

Among the more than 20 books he has authored—ethnographies, practical handbooks for reform, and fiction—are his alternative development text, A Model Development Plan, and his work of model clinical curricula, Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education.

Dr. Lempert holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, law and business degrees from Stanford, an undergraduate degree from Yale, and an honorary degree in pedagogy from the Moscow External University of the Humanities.

He is fluent in several languages and currently resides in Lund, Sweden.