After 20 years of supporting her family by training and racing horses, Pat Smith was stricken with spinal meningitis. She lay in a coma for ten days, and when she was well enough to go home, she found that her business had been liquidated by her husband. They divorced and Pat started working to rebuild her life.

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In 2000, CFED embarked on a two-year project to strengthen the capacity of local officials to govern in a global economy and to better balance the goals of sustainable development and trade. A joint venture with the Harrison Institute for Public Law at the Georgetown Law Center, this project was led by Bill Schweke.

The Harrison Institute, one of eleven institutes or clinical programs at the Georgetown University Law Center, provides legal services that strengthen political and economic democracy. Since 1972, the Institute has represented citizen coalitions, housing cooperatives, community development corporations, government agencies, state and local legislatures and nonprofit organizations.

The project promoted better international rules that affect state and local public officials and economic development professionals. The project pushed for rules designed to:

1. Aid and not hinder "best practices" in domestic economic development;
2. Support the emerging global field of sustainable development;
3. Better balance the respective goals of promoting global commerce, while still maintaining cost-effective and publicly accountable development policies
4. Strengthen local "laboratories of democracy" within nations that have federal systems, particularly for delivering economic development; and
5. Create new transnational networks, partnerships and alliances.

The project tracked changes in multilateral trade agreements and helped public officials and economic developers understand both the positive and negative aspects of globalization. The project helped officials and developers stay current on provisions that had the potential to either hinder or enhance the economic development profession.

The goals of the project were to provide research, networking and educational products create and strengthen transnational alliances, clarify and focus the trade and investor rights debate, continue and bolster the ability of local officials to practice economic and community development, advance multilateral policy to promote sustainable development, and promote American subsidy reform.

The major deliverables of the project included papers that examined such topics as curbing subsidy abuse in the United States by examining reform efforts in Europe, the future of government procurement programs in economic development, and the best practices in placed-based economic development fiven major trade and investment agreements. In addition, CFED created and maintained an electronic newsletter and clearinghouse. CFED also coordinated a working group of development organizations to track trade and investment policy and to communicate their concerns to the United States Trade Representative and Congressional committees.