Donald E. Voth served as a Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, retiring as an Emeritus Professor in 2003. Voth grew up in Oklahoma, received his B.A. at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana and received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Rural Sociology at Cornell University, where he focused on Rural Sociology, Community Development, Research Methods, and Southeast Asian Studies. Voth taught at Southern Illinois University before coming to the University of Arkansas. At the University of Arkansas, Voth held joint research, teaching and agricultural extension appointments with primary responsibilities in the areas of Community and Rural Development. Voth also made major contributions in the areas of international development, project design, implementation, and evaluation; rural studies; agricultural structure; small farms; and sustainable agriculture. Voth served on the Council for Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program, on the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), and as representative for the University of Arkansas on the Southern Rural Development Center (SRDC) Advisory Committee. In 1995, he received the Rural Sociological Society’s national award for Excellence in Extension and Public Service, first as a member and Chairman of the Ouachita National Forest’s award-winning Ecosystem Management Advisory Committee and as the leader of several major research and action efforts on community-based forest management and planning. Voth’s teaching interests include Community Development; Project Design, Implementation, and Evaluation; International Agricultural and Rural Development; and the Human Dimension of Natural Resource Management.

Voth has participated and led several international projects. He lived in southern Vietnam for three years working with the Mennonite Central Committee and has also lived and worked in the Philippines. He designed, evaluated, and consulted with USAID-funded participatory development projects in Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Kenya, and Egypt. In the summer of 1996 he led a faculty-student consulting team to Haiti in collaboration with the World Christian Relief Fund. In January of 1998 he led a 14-member work camp to complete the construction of an elementary school in a rural village in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. In addition to English, Voth speaks French, an ethnic minority language of Vietnam (Ede), some Vietnamese, and some German.

Voth has published extensively on Southeast Asia, community development, rural conditions, and forestry.