Education

Resources and Skills for Ecovillage Living and Community Action

Welcome to GEN Education!

What makes ecovillages thrive – and what doesn’t? What are grassroots initiatives around the world already doing to create cultural, ecological, economic and social regeneration? How can you live an ecovillage lifestyle, right now and regardless of where you are?

Around the world, ecovillages are experimenting with regenerative living. From compassionate communication and self-governance to natural building, appropriate technology, social entrepreneurship, traditional crafts and participatory design – ecovillages are full of innovators, teachers and facilitators dedicating their lives to the creation of regenerative cultures. Our aim is to be a link between them and you, making it easy for you to:

Explore Ecovillages and learn more about where they are, how they work, and what it’s like to live in one
Get Resourced to work with the 32 Ecovillage Principles for cultural, ecological, economic and social regeneration
Take Action and start a community project, found an ecovillage or use ecovillage solutions in your life

Our Approach

Our passion is to facilitate hands-on, participatory and positive transformation. Our vision, a world where empowered citizens and communities design and implement their own pathways to a regenerative future.

We work with three core ingredients

Regenerative & Holistic Design – working with the Ecovillage Map of Regeneration and the 32 ecovillage principles. A whole-systems approach where attention is given to cultural, economic, ecological and social regeneration, the way they are linked, as well as to how we can design and act knowing that we are in the system not apart from it, and that how we do is equally important as what.

Community Building – learning, experiencing and using creative and diverse ways of building trust, inclusion, friendship and a sense of belonging. We can create community wherever we are, whether in a short workshop or our homes, in small villages or large cities.

Ecovillage Solutions – the practical, hands-on things people in ecovillages are doing to create and maintain their communities. From membership policies and decision-making to biogas digesters and agroforestry. From traditional crafts and inner transformation, to new social enterprises and community currencies. These are the grassroots solutions that enable people to make real shifts in their day-to-day lives.

We aim to always be

• Participatory – inviting active engagement and encouraging you to draw on and include your personal life and experiences
• Transformative – encouraging inner and outer change, in your own worldview as well as our communities and the world
• Integrative – welcoming bodies, thoughts, feelings, senses and intuition in sharing and creating holistic approaches to inner and outer transformation
• Collaborative – reflecting an interdependent world and the power of collective intelligence
• Cocreative – embracing peer-to-peer learning, co-teaching and active inclusion as tools for personal and collective learning
• Experiential – enabling deeper understanding through lived experience

GEN Supports the Sustainable Development Goals