The Sustainability Institute and Lynedoch Eco-Village We activate collective imagination to accelerate shifts to just and regenerative futures

Founded in 1999, the Sustainability Institute is an intergenerational learning and living imaginarium that challenges existing paradigms by blending creativity, innovation and imagination to nurture regenerative ecological and social ways of being. The SI is a place where research, practice and community converge. We are located outside the South African university town of Stellenbosch. Surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of the Cape’s towering mountains and rooted in an agricultural community needing to break free from its’ racial past, the Sustainability Institute provides a space for people to explore an approach to creating a more equitable society that lives in a way that sustains rather than destroys the eco-system within which all society is embedded.

The Sustainability Institute forms part of the wider Lynedoch EcoVillage. The Eco-Village is an ecologically designed, socially mixed community built around a learning precinct. It is a mixed community of 30 families from diverse racial and social-economic groups built around a child-centered learning precinct, which is a financially and economically viable community requiring no external funding to sustain itself. It is also a working example of a livable ecologically designed urban system that challenges the notion that sustainable development and ecological building is too expensive. Various ecological design approaches have been integrated into the building of the Eco-Village. https://lynedochecovillage.wordpress.com/

Our history has been written up in this book (https://www.sustainabilityinstitute.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SI-20YRS-Full-Doc-small-spreads.pdf).

For more information on the Sustainability Institute, visit www.sustainabilityinstitute.net