Honoring Jerry Sternin, Co-Founder of the Positive Deviance Initiative

Dedicated to Jerry and Monique Sternin for all the good work and great love they have shared with the world. In the early 1990’s in Vietnam, Jerry Sternin and his wife, Monique Sternin, working for the US NGO Save the Children experimented with Marian Zeitlin’s Positive Deviance concept and operationalized it to eradicate childhood malnutrition in a sustainable way as mandated by the Vietnamese government. Their community based and owned pilot project was successful in rehabilitating 93% of children and was subsequently scaled up to reach 5 million families in Vietnam.  Since then, the successful application of the PD approach has been documented in more than 41 countries in nutrition and a variety of other sectors from public health to education to business. For more information, please visit our website at www.positivedeviance.org