The founders of LS share a deep concern over environmental degradation, desertification, water pollution, poverty and their related threat to the livelihood and health of Mongolians. We believe that local communities must be enabled to identify their problems, understand the global importance of their circumstances, and solve the challenges they face with ingenuity and with the resources available to them. We help communities to make such changes via public education. 

Since its foundation in 2007, Local Solutions produced/translated and disseminated four publications for Mongolian public: 1) Jobs and Occupations Directory (with support from the World Bank, Ministry of Education and World Growth Mongolia); 2) A Community Guide to Environmental Health (with support from Hesperian Foundation from CA and Misereor Foundation from Germany); and 3) Nomadic Dialogues (with support from Helen and Peter Bing). 4) Let’s Change Our Toilets (with support of New Venture Fund). In 2018, LS team is working on its fifth publication, Mongolian translation of a Hesperian’s health guide, The Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety.

During its early years, LS was principally engaged in identifying local change-makers to address pressing local poverty and education issues and fund-raising for community-based initiatives. They were projects to help orphan children attend day-care center, winter housing, and building learning center for disabled citizens’ groups and illiterate adults. Our partners and donors for these projects were Amistad International in CA, the Embassy of the Netherlands in Beijing and Dr.Ann Altman. 

However, since 2010, LSF concentrated on developing the capacity of youth for local leadership, and we minimized our humanitarian project fund-raising activities till 2018.  We developed our original model of a scholarship program. Mr.Jonathan Woetzel have supported our model from the beginning and he, along with his colleagues, has provided LS with $20.000 to $28,000 funding each year since 2010 for our youth-outreach projects. Each year 12-15 students do summer projects and earn a 1000 dollar scholarship support in this program. The scholarship program was mainly focused on sanitation and waste management since 2015.

On November 19, 2017, Local Solutions had launched its current project “Let’s change our toilets”. We put together a very engaging one-day training program based on the book “Let’s Change Our Toilets” by Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, and enriched by several other topics such as health, finance and legal environment and local community engagement. We were lucky that amazingly entertaining and powerful speakers joined our team voluntarily. We reached over 3000 citizens in classrooms, over 20,000 people through our trainees’ trainings in local areas and over a million viewers on social media and mainstream media in 2017-2018.

In 2019, we launched two parallel initiatives: Let’s Change Our Toilet’s second stage “Toilet 2.0” and a new series of training against air pollution, “Let’s Remove Smog”.