Are you passionate about understanding and improving the practices and impact of your ecovillage? Do you want to know more about how the climate crisis might affect your community and what you can do to keep being a force for regeneneration? Do you want to share your story, practices and ideas with other ecovillagers from around the world?
As an ecovillage case study in the Ecovillage Resilience project, you are an integral part of the mission to find out what ecovillages can nurture today to be more resilient and impactful tomorrow. We work together with 20 ecovillages spread across all GEN Regions and including many types of ecovillages. There is more information about the project and the role of ecovillages in the presentatio below as well as on this page.
What are the Ecovillage Case Study Partners doing?
The stories, practices, situation and dreams of ecovillages are the base of all our work, and the learning, sensing and reflection of ecovillages and their representatives a part of how we weave our collective understanding and create visions and pathways for GEN and ecovillages for the coming 20 years.
The project is made up of two main types of action – online sessions and local workshops.
One or a few members of each participating community are part of the online community of practice. We meet for two hours every three weeks to learn, reflect, sense, cocreate and vision together. Ecovillage partner has people willing and able to commit to being active members of this online space for the duration of the project.
Community of practice members, who all represent a case study ecovillage, also host and facilitate local workshops, and do some local data gathering. They recieve training, materials and support for all local work, as well as resources to carry it out.
Some of the things representatives do:
- join a global Community of Practice (CoP) and safe container of of peers all exploring similar topics
- learn and exchange about resilience, adaptation, collective sensing, processing climate grief and more
- lead your community in a local exploration of resilience, adaptation and impact
- host and facilitate workshops and data gathering in their communities;
- reflect on what we learn and how it makes sense in the larger context of GEN and the world;
- give input into creative storytelling and sharing with the wider world
- cocreate diverse new visions and pathways for ecovillages in the next 20 years
- contribute to research on resilience, social transformation, and ecovillages
What each ecovillage and representative recieves:
- Support from leading international researchers, facilitators and experts to create well grounded pathways to resilience and impact
- Channels to tell your story to the wider world in diverse and creative ways
- Resources to look deeply at current practices and future scenarios for your place
- Training to become leaders in ecovillage design, resilience and adaptation locally and in our global network
- Peers and friends from around the world
Time Commitment and Financial Exchange
We antitipate that active ecovillage representatives of the project spend approximately 8 hours per month from September 2022 to January 2024. This will include online CoP sessions of approximately 2 hours every 3 weeks. Some periods might be a bit more intense, some less.
We try to find times for online work that suit as many timezones as possible, with different options available.
Thanks to our generous donor, we are able to contribute to the costs of the ecovillage representatives’ time spent online, budgeted at £3,200 per ecovillage for the duration of the project, and an additional £4,000 for data gathering and local workshops in each place.
Selection Criteria
- Alignment with GEN’s understanding of ecovillages: Working towards the areas of regeneration (social, ecology, economy, culture, integrating into whole systems design), and involved in participatory projects;
- Relationship with GEN: an up to date profile on GEN database; known to regional liaison and/or participated in collaborative project or course;
- Size: at least 20 members currently living on the land and engaged in the ecovillage’s work;
- Established and Active: existed as engaged community on the land/property for at least 6 years;
- Competent in online collaboration: previous experience working online
- Real interest in the project: a desire to journey through the overarching, collective and individual inquiry, its diverse elements, curiosity to deepen and co-learn.
- Committed to the project process and outcomes: Two people from each ecovillage who have the capacity to engage and take responsibility to engage for 20 months, following the process closely, take part in sessions, share information with the network and their community, hold and facilitate local sessions to contribute to the Resilience Assessment. And signed co-created agreement.
Curious to explore more?
Here is an article (with contributions from one of the core team members) “Measuring social-ecological resilience reveals opportunities for transforming environmental governance“
For any questions, please reach out to [email protected]
