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Making the Rainiest Place in India Wet and Green Again!

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In October 2020 Sadhana Forest started its reforestation effort in Meghalaya, a state in northeast India, which is known for its hilly terrain and extremely high rainfall.

When we first came to Meghalaya we thought that our experience in water conservation and reforestation was not relevant. Then we started traveling the state and witnessed first-hand the massive deforestation, soil degradation, and the great challenges with the water supply. After a few more visits and a deeper understanding of the ground reality, we started working with the Government of Meghalaya on training local communities and demonstrating different water conservation and tree planting techniques. 

Our solar-powered deforestation bus

Two old wooden buses were turned into a mobile reforestation unit. They were fitted with a small kitchen, bathroom, and solar panels on top to meet the electrical needs of the team. With these buses our team of long-term volunteers drove across the state for one and a half years, working in 25 different villages.

Conducting training with local villagers

The focus of the team was on water conservation (swales proved to be very helpful on the sloped terrain), reforestation (using only native species), soil regeneration (using legumes that were chopped and dropped), and training. In every village, local people were trained in the aforementioned techniques. We planted only indigenous, food-bearing tree species, with the aim of improving food security in the area.

Our team lived very simply, staying in the villages, cooking for themselves, and sleeping in the buses and in tents. This made them very accessible to the local villagers, who welcomed them with open arms. The trainings were met with great enthusiasm, and in every village motivated volunteers stood up to continue the ecological restoration work after the departure of our team. The project was a great success and the Government has asked us to establish three permanent immersion centers in the state, one in each of the tribal regions: Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia hills. These centers will enable an immersive experience in nature and sustainable living and will provide training in water conservation and reforestation. A team from Sadhana Forest will live in each one of the centers and will interact with the local people and provide training.

Digging swales as a part of our water conservation work

If you are interested in making a long-term commitment and getting involved, you can email us at india@sadhanaforest.org. 

About the Author

Sadhana Forest is an international reforestation and water conservation volunteering organization. Sadhana Forest welcomes 1,500 volunteers per year that come and stay on sustainable vegan off-grid community campuses. It was founded in 2003 by Yorit and Aviram Rozin in India and later expanded to Haiti and Kenya, working on food security with local people living in drought-prone rural areas planting indigenous food-bearing trees. In 2020 a new project was started in Meghalaya, northeast India. Find out more about them on their website sadhanaforest.org.

MIBNP Ecosystem Restoration Project, Philippines

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This project is about efficiently using permaculture to restore a sustainable bio-cultural landscape in Mts Iglit-Baco National Park, Mindoro, Philippines

In cooperation with D’Abboville Foundation, Philippine Permaculture Association is exploring ways how to apply a permaculture lens while bridging indigenous people’s well-being and a dwindling tamaraw (endemic buffalo) population in the natural park. The focus is on practicing ecosystem restoration approaches on a granted 6 ha grassland and finding ways to feed park rangers without bringing in processed foods from the outside. 

Drone shot of 6 hectares of grassland under conversion

Here, we use permaculture design to connect existing components and enhance their relationship in order to create better responses. It is a gentle, yet quick approach to allow nature to bounce back. In the grassland, we’ve created bio-diverse islands, swales, firebreaks and we surrounded existing pioneer species with other trees to grow together in a strong bond. In succession, we also created small water impounding with overflow water from an existing water tank so no resources will be discarded. Biomass from the nearby ranger station is scattered around the trees to hasten the growth of microbes and mycelium in the soil.

Drone shot of the ranger station

Within the premises of the ranger station, we use a permaculture systems approach to create productive and intensive gardens that will feed the rangers and supplement some of their needs with locally made soap and food processing from crops grown on-site that allow for storage during lean times. Renewable energy components like solar and hydropower are supplying the energy needed to run the ranger station. 

During the initial restoration approach, the Tao-build are observers and critique the processes we undertake as it evolves. The purpose is to share without imposing new ways of doing things. The project is setting into motion a long-term dialogue between people and responses from the natural world.

Bert Peeters. Philippines Permaculture Association, Philippines.

Born in Belgium, Bert has been in the Philippines since 1989. He worked in the education sector and has been hosting groups, individuals, professionals, and volunteers in the Philippines on a regular basis ever since. Later he started designing products to improve living conditions for people in rural areas. He developed and set up development projects with Tribal communities in several places of the Philippines for over more than 15 years. He studied and developed synergy models between nature and design. System thinking is Bert’s motivation in cooperating with people in order to elevate design to a sustainable development level. The Permaculture framework is his favorite design method and approach for combining available natural sources and simple technologies into relevant and sustainable design solutions. At present, he is training people to develop skills and to take (in a positive way) charge of the changes happening in their environment. Bert has been the coordinator for a volunteer network and an international solidarity network. Later he became the program coordinator for a foreign-supported development program.

In 2000, he started the permaculture development site of Cabiokid foundation in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija, and he also founded the Philippine Permaculture Association. At present, he is part of a team that works towards a well-rooted permaculture fabric and membership base in the Philippines.

Conscious Food Systems Alliance calls for Local Hubs

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The Conscious Food System Alliance (CoFSA) is currently looking for partners who can help create a global network of local hubs that offer conscious food learning programs and retreats to key actors in the food system, with the aim of facilitating an equitable exchange of knowledge and experience. If you’re interested, please complete the form linked here.

What is CoFSA: 

Conscious Food System Alliance – CoFSA was convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and it’s a movement of food and agriculture practitioners and consciousness experts united around a common goal: to leverage the power of inner transformation to support systemic change in food and agriculture systems. For more information, please visit the CoFSA webpage. 

CoFSA Vision: 

The vision of the Alliance is to pioneer the application of leading approaches such as mindfulness, compassion, somatic transformation, systems leadership, indigenous and feminine wisdom into food and agriculture systems to help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and nature, and to build the inner foundations – mindsets, values, and skills – needed for systemic change.

CoFSA is looking for partners who’s organisation…

  • – Emphasise an interweaving of human and more-than-human communities through food
  • – Take a holistic approach to social, cultural, ecological, economic and individual engagement with food systems
  • – Engage with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – with a particular emphasis on , with an emphasis on addressing global poverty (1), hunger (2), health and wellbeing (3), and partnership building (17)
  • – Engage with the skills and core principles of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs), namely: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating & Acting
  • – Can offer learning programmes or retreats on conscious food systems in local and global contexts
  • – Willing to actively participate and contribute to the development of the network.

If this resonates with you and your organisation’s values, we invite you to join the network, please complete the form linked here as soon as possible (preferably before 10 February 2022). 

cover picture credit: Wild0ne

Foodscape Pages: Soulful Conversations on the Ecology and Culture of Food

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If you care about food and how it is grown, about the soil and people who help to restore it – the path leads you to Foodscape Pages! 

Foodscape Pages is a community-driven platform for publications and gatherings that inspire meaningful conversations and new perspectives around the ecology and culture of food. Through the lens and medium of food, we hold space for personal stories of lived experiences and for direct connections with practitioners on the ground.

As more and more people in Singapore and neighbouring countries are getting interested in gardening, growing their own edibles, and learning more about our food systems, they look for knowledge and a community of experience. However, a lot of information available online is not always applicable to our context; sometimes it’s the climate condition (a lot of information is from places with temperate climate), and sometimes it’s the socio-cultural and political circumstance in which one can begin to grow some of our own edibles. Foodscape Pages came about to bring up the voices of practitioners who have the experience and skills on the ground, but may not always be active in sharing their stories online. The intention is the sharing of local and bioregional knowledge, and to connect people interested to dive deeper into the conversations around food and our food systems.

What seeds we are planting

Foodscape Pages dreams to connect people who are interested in the ecology and culture of food in our bioregion, as well as to nurture more eco-literacy of regular folks, especially urbanites who are not connected with our food sources, to become more aware of our relationships with food, and how that affects the well-being of the individual, the community, the society and the planet. It is our hope to cultivate and nurture a space for increasing both external awareness of what’s going on out there, and relating it back to how we live our individual lives and make our choices through deepening inner awareness.

Foodscape Pages works towards this dream through bringing together different pieces of knowledge and publishing the theme-based journazine “The Sauce – on food, community and inspirations”. The first issue focused on Soil, highlighting initiatives like the Soil Regeneration Project and Community Composting, and inviting perspectives from practitioners to share their personal stories in Singapore and the region. This publication got distributed with over a hundred hard copies, with selected articles available online for the wider public.The second issue of The Sauce was dedicated to Seeds. As Foodscape Pages intends to be a community-driven platform  we held an open call for contributions, invited practitioners to share their views, and organised a 3-part community creative writing workshop to co-create content for this issue. Part of this Sauce included interviews with practitioners from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and The Philippines, creating a space for all to begin thinking about interconnections in our bioregion.

We want to build the capacity of our community and share skills and knowledge freely, so that people can continue to be inspired to learn and grow together, and bring that to more people. 

As we work together, we intentionally hold a space of care through regular check-ins and actively practicing kindness, empathy, trust and gratitude through active listening and authentic sharing. One of our priorities is a relationship with members of Foodscape Pages wider community. We are exploring how to use language with care and cultivate supporting ways of being.

How it grows

The initiative was conceived by Vivian, Sixian and Huiying with the Foodscape Collective as a key partner to form an ecosystem around the vision of a fair and circular food system for all. Now it is growing through partnership and relations! Each of the Sauce editions brought us close with other change-makers in the region –  with Kontinentalist to create a seed map and share our research around the importance of seeds; with independent developers and designers from ThoughtWorks for creating a new website with better features; with a developper and illustrator receiving partial funding from CreativesAtWork and Blue3Asia for making our work even better; and with many more.We have received contributions from close to 30 contributors, either through writing, sharing their stories, illustrating or contributing their design and developer skills. You can read more about the community of Foodscape Pages on this page.

To date, without any funding except through community crowdsourcing, we have published our first journazine in print, in the process of publishing the second issue on our new online platform, organise in-person gatherings that bring people together to be creative and deepen our knowledge and literacy around our relationships with food. Throughout this time we learnt how to be adaptive and agile during these volatile times of a global pandemic, to find different and creative ways to connect on a human scale and trust that by deepening the influence and impact we can have in even a small number of people, it can create a ripple of impact through these engagements.

One of the good practices we discovered is to have regular check-ins for anchoring the connections on a human level, one that is based on trust, respect, understanding, interdependence and interconnection. This provides resilience especially during challenging times.

It has been amazing to see how people come together to co-create and find ways to be together in challenging times. Community support is one of the key enabling factors that has been keeping this vision of creating and maintaining the continuing growth and work of Foodscape Pages. 

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Go to www.foodscapepages.org to discover our materials, meet the community and connect with Foodscape Pages! You can also follow us on Facebook and tell your friends who are curious about growing and eating healthy food and living in connection with nature.  

The Green Unconference 2021

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For thirteen days, as world leaders, community leaders and climate youth activists met at COP26 in Glasgow to make decisions that affect our common future, We at The Green UnConference gathered daily to listen to each other’s stories.

From the mountains and rivers of the Himalayas to the seas and forests of Palawan, Siargao, Dumaguete, Boracay, and Baler. 

From our metropolises in Manila and New Delhi and Bangalore 

From intentional communities in Crystal Waters, Queensland, Bulacan, Japan, Bangalore, Udaipur, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan

We have seen rivers of gold and silver stars. 

Healing ourselves, our relationships, our projects. 

Weaving together our golden threads of light, spun from passion and purpose, a touch of magic — affirming that at this critical time in the history of humanity and our beautiful planet — we are here for one another, and for Mother Earth.

TGU 2021 truly connected rivers of people, projects to the ocean ecosystem. 

The journey was the destination. It taught us that life is about the little things. 

We are so grateful to co-travel with Binhi Supper Club, Daloy, Ecoversities Alliance, FarmLab, Good Food Community, Green Releaf, Re:Source Labs, Healthyndahan, Inner Moon Well-Being, Isla Medisina, Jabez Perma Research PH Tala, Jail University (TBC), Kayumanggi Organic, New Deli by Kashmir, Permayouth, Project Thrive, ReGEN Nations, Ritual (TBC), Soul Kitchen El Nido, Swaraj University, The Living Library, The Social Enterprises, TI Eco-Village, Weekend Wild Child, and Local Futures 

Together we distilled and displayed what works for our collective wellbeing. 

Our goal was to weave and celebrate learning and unlearning and together reimagine the new map and blueprint of the beautiful world we know is possible if we indulge and converge for radical collaboration. Collaboration begins by knowing our stories and what makes us flow and grow as living systems. We showcased what we need to do to come closer for collaborations and co-create larger connected systems. 

We established that we simultaneously need a culture of inner and outer transformation and transitions to birth the new humanity that takes compassionate care of mother earth and all life on it. 

We focussed our themes similar to the COP26: Regeneration, Agriculture, Energy, Youth, Gender,  Women, Adaptation and Indigenous People, Social Enterprise, Transitions in Education, Transitions in Tech, Nature, Biodiversity, Transport, Travel Cities and Built Environments.

Please visit GENOA FB Page to tune into the Transition Journeys and stay tuned for the TGU 2021 short Film to be launched soon!

The Green Unconference 2021: Transition Journeys

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The year was 2015. The first TGU 2015 gathering was in Manila, Philippines. A simple and soulful act by friends, with Karla and Amena wishing to weave their world for healing and wellness. The seed was sown for TGU 2017 and TGU 2019. A biennial gathering, a celebration of all things green, nurturing life with compassion, courage, consciousness, and collaborations. 

The Green Unconference 2019

Now in this time of the pandemic, we are being called on to transition to a way of life that supports our collective health & wellbeing.  

In this time of climate crisis, we are being called on to transition to living in a way our planet can thrive.  

The Green Unconference 2021 is a gathering of intergenerational earth carers, wisdom keepers, healers, activists, regenerators, regen-preneurs, creatives, reimagining and making change happen to birth the new healed humanity and transition our earth to a beautiful world we all know in our hearts is possible. 

This year’s theme is Transition Journeys, and we are partnering with groups who are already transitioning and inspiring others to transition. 

Official partners are

GENOA -Global Ecovillage Network Oceania & Asia 

Kai Farms

Kids for Kids 

Lokal Lab Siargao

MAD Travel

Our timing and themes coincide with the COP26 Climate Conference October 31-November 12, 2021

We are collaborating with many people and groups all over the Philippines, India, Australia, and beyond. 

Our line-up includes online as well as face-to-face events where they are possible. We are also curating transition travel journeys next year when possible. These journeys will allow immersion in projects and interaction with people and communities that are supporting regeneration at the grassroots. 

TGU is a call for friendship, to regenerate our relationships and live from a place of unified loving awareness in service to the wellness of all life. 

We welcome you to journey with us for the kind of joyful, radical collaboration these times call for. 
We are supporting and energizing a culture of gifting. Registration is free. We welcome participants to gift what their heart desires. Funds raised will go towards supporting the regenerative community projects of partners.

Celebrating the Partnership with Hans Handmade

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During these times GENOA recognises the immense need for community and radically interconnected solutions for our collective future, helping to heal our planet from the ground up. We are dedicated to actively forging partnerships for building resilient communities and organisations for climate care by scaling collective impact towards a healthy planet and people care. Our focus on partnerships is to create a shared well-being economy based on social and economic justice in service to ecology. 

Through these partnerships, we are able to engage with kindred spirit organizations and stakeholders who are aligned with the ecovillage movement, who aim to achieve the UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and/or apply ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) framework for better reporting and disclosure of their impacts and externalities. 

As we activate pathways for partnerships, with a grateful joyful heart we are celebrating our friendship and partnership with Navjot Kaur, the founder of Hans Handmade. 

Navi and Hans Handmade have pledged to share a part of their profits with GENOA projects, paying it forward to communities on the ground that are healing and helping for regeneration.

Hans Handmade pieces are made from carefully selected, ethically sourced materials to create the highest quality fashion that you can wear for years. 

Navjot Kaur Hans is the creator and designer of Hans Handmade. She is a mother, and entrepreneur with a passion for sustainable fashion that supports communities. 

Having been born and raised in the Philippines with roots in India, it seemed natural for her to start a brand that combined those two together. Each bag is designed by Navi in India, then produced in a small weavers workshop in Manila, Philippines. 

“Since I was a child, I’ve always loved fashion. Back then, I spent on trends and what we would now call ‘fast fashion’”, Navi explains. “I studied in a boarding school in India, and every year I would come home with a suitcase packed with last season’s trends. When no longer on trend, they would be forgotten and I would buy new things to replace them. As I’ve gotten older and become a mother, I’ve become a more conscious buyer. I appreciate the value and tranquility of living minimally. I prefer to purchase ethically made, long-lasting pieces, to know where my fashion is coming from, and who made it. This is the ethos of Hans Handmade.” 

As a mother, Navi’s compassionate heart feels the deep desire to give back to our Mother Earth acknowledging her love and generosity to nurture us with all her abundance and beauty. 

We are inviting all other enlightenment organisations, institutions, and enterprises that would like to nurture a connection to our mother earth to partner with us and create the beautiful healed healthy earth we all know is possible. 

Let’s partner up and make a difference!

For partnerships please contact amena.bal@ecovillage.org, ngothao.kin@ecovillage.org

Building Ethnic and Interreligious Harmony in Sri Lanka

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Story of cpbr; Home for Diversity 

We are an organization that evolves as a community working and existing to spread the vibes of humanity in self, community, and universal levels from an island of South Asia named Sri Lanka. In this land of the earth while we experience nature’s offerings of resources and fertility we experience the wounds, pollution, and polarization which were results of acts of humans such as youth uprisings, 30 years of civil war, ethnoreligious conflicts, and Easter Sunday Attack. There were times such as Tsunami, floods, and droughts in which we tested nature. Amidst this context, we were on the journey of contributing to human and ecological well-being together with our initiatives in the last 19 years. 

We are rooting on the values of power-sharing and interdependency and believing, practicing, and promoting conflict transformation through diverse approaches in order to build co-existence and contribute towards justice and equality and have primarily focused on five target groups- Interfaith religious leaders, community leaders, women, young women, and youth. In the journey of engaging in interfaith coexistence, peacebuilding, reconciliation, healing, and connecting related activities 2019 became a crucial year since as the whole world we too met COVID 19 pandemic.

The thoughts of pessimism created positive energy to face the real-life crisis of pandemic while perceiving it as a natural conflict. As Practionaires and believers of conflict transformation, we as a community tried to transform the situation through diverse experiments and exploration in the process.

It is about how a peacebuilding organization that had worked using traditional approaches transformed to initiate our journey in the digital era……. 

Journey of Healing and Connecting

In the mission of finding lost connections between communities through diverse methodologies and models, Center for peacebuilding and reconciliation, cpbr along with its three wings embarked on an initiative called “Religious Leaders, Community Leaders,Women and Youth as Healers and Community Bridge Makers”.

Heal the Past and Build the Future

JOY OF WITNESSING HUMAN CAPACITY TO SURRENDER

On the morning of 21st of April 2021, 2nd Commemoration Day (of Easter Sunday Attack 2019) no one thought it would be a historical moment in APINĀM life.

But it was….

Islam Religious leaders kneel down in front of Christian religious leaders to ask forgiveness. Tears were falling, sobbing and weeping proved that behind robes Nabi was alive. Strong men proved they are symbols of strong fatherhood being vulnerable when it was needed most.

All humans who were there to witness two years-long deep pain and guiltiness in Islam leaders’ hearts were in heavy hearts, full of tears.

It was a moment of DEEP SILENCE sprouted from SURRENDERING.

JOY OF WITNESSING HUMILITY IN ITS MAXIMUM

 “If I, Therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

Jesus Christ

Following Jesus’ footprints to forgive doing the ritual of foot washing. It was a moment of experiencing humanity in its fullest existence.

THE JOY OF SEEING ONE ANOTHER IN DEEP LOVE

Jesus was alive in the hearts of all Christian clergy when the Islam religious leaders were asking for apology.

Humanhood sprouted …

Holding the other so tightly.

Humanity bloomed who were witnessing the human capacity to surrender and to open the arms to wrap the other with deep compassion and love.

It was just simple LOVE.

Heal Oneself; Heal the Other; Heal the Nature 

Woman as Faith Keepers of Healing and Connecting

There are limitations in accessing resources, knowledge, and skills for Women in developing countries, especially in patriarchal societies.

The pandemic made this situation worse and cornered women to an invisible corner since everything became digital and online …

In this state WOMAN together with cpbr created safer spaces for women to access knowledge, skills and healing spaces through creative and strategic interventions to access internet facilities. Addressing the generational gap brought sons, daughters, young siblings, and neighbors into the training space to support and teach to access cyberspace.  

Homes became workshop locations 

Gardens became healing spaces

Kitchens became starting place of social entrepreneurship 

everything happened connecting in cyberspace…  

They started to learn mute and unmute in zoom spaces are very significant moves since they were heard and listened to by many …

Conflict bloomed another flower 

Women started to learn how to use their smartphone to access knowledge, skills and to connect with the other for a purpose. Some are determined to buy a smartphone. Some started to use their children’s phones or computers. The connection between mothers and children became more meaningful because now their mothers can understand the digital world. 

Moment of giving a meaning to power-sharing and interdependency.

INTERFAITH CAFE: Online space for youth to meet each other

Interfaith café is an online/virtual dialogue space to meet our friends, brothers, and sisters of a fellow community to initiate a conversation about diverse faiths… 

We meet to initiate readings about our own faith and fellow faiths  

We meet our own community to find the meanings and connect with those meanings 

We meet our fellow communities to find the connections and core

We meet to reflect the distance we have between the true meaning and our life. 

We meet a community to find the connection we have lost as humans with nature.

Online Coaching and Mentoring Design was the Innovation

“What is your personal vision for life”

“What is your vision for your community /Sri Lanka? World?”

“What is your vision for Earth”

This is how we started the process of personal coaching and mentoring. It was not an easy task from the facilitator’s end. Instead of group coaching, spending time with close to 100 individuals for 2 to 3 hours with one person was not easy when it happened in cyberspace.

When I was moving with the quest of aligning myself from different social structured roles to a self-healed soul filled with compassion and love, I witnessed that the mentoring and coaching session supported myself for a self-discovered, self-aligned and self-healed individual. The journey which I am now started from that day. Now I choose to live in love, where I feel so light.

Amhar Ahamed, Kattankudy, SANGYOG Core Member

I always want to support and help my community overcome their issues and problems. Until I have been in a conversation with the facilitator in this session, I was only looking at problems, not analyzing and understanding them deeply. I realized that that’s where I stagnated and this realization brings much hope and light in my heart.  

Thevika, WOMAN Core Member Perivaneelavani. 

I have been with cpbr for the last 10 years but online mentoring and Coaching sessions are the spaces which created space to have one on one conversation with facilitator and resource people which give specific deep concern for each participant. During these sessions supported me to release the blockages I had in my personal, social, political, cultural and spiritual spheres

As Sheik. M.B.M. Firthous Naleemi, APINĀM Co-Leader – Batticaloa, Chairman Bismi Institute, Consultant Peace and Harmony Unit Jamiul afreen Grand Jumma Mosque, and Member Co-existence Unit Jammiyathulama Kattankudy.

Physical Field Meetings Turned to Online One-on-One Coaching Sessions

For years and years, we used to visit our focus groups to support them to grow in psychological and spiritual levels in order to initiate community, regional, and national level transformative actions. Sitting in a circle keeping an artistic expression as a centerpiece in the middle passing a talking piece, we build bonds in personal as well as group levels. Visiting participant’s homes, religious places, and special places they want to take us having diverse reasons to cultivate deeper love and care on a personal as well as community level. We BECAME ONE OF THEM. Experiencing the life of the other enriched our lives keeping LOVE as the center of our relationships.

Peacebuilding is about the quality of the relationship you maintain with oneself, others, and one’s environment /nature. As a team who strongly practiced physical interactions in order to build authentic and truthful relationships, we were in a shock and denial phase when COVID hit Sri Lanka.

During the pandemic time, the cpbr team has also adapted to a new working system and culture of home-based office. Building a remote working system that fosters transparency and accountability, and implementing it was swift due to the small size of the team.

CORONA & US online workshop series

Conversation with ONESELF:

How am I doing in this pandemic period?

Conversation with the OTHER

Let’s wear CORONA’s shoes now… Imagine you are the virus… What do you have to say to HUMANS?

How your faith is interpreting this situation, what are the skills it promoting to face pandemics and transform the crisis to experience something positive

In these spaces, diverse dialogues have bloomed to initiate a transformative journey

COVID and SELF-SUFFICIENT ECONOMY

“If the whole world comes to a level of lock down. Are we going to starve and die? What would we do if that is the situation?

What are our key needs?

What is the difference between needs, wants and desires? Shall we make the lists and budgets?

Can we grow our food?

Can we make our soap?

Can we save our clothes focusing only on what we need, not what we desire?

Can we make our own sanitary needs?

Our own milk, eggs and other proteins.

Our own fish. small lake or pond for lake fish.

We call it a self-sufficient economy.

FAITH and PANDEMICS

What does your faith say about pandemics? How do you interpret this pandemic according to your faith?

How did your spiritual leader face this kind of situation?

What is the knowledge, skills, and tools you can find in your faith?

Do we have the resources to face the situation and transform it to bring humanity?

Can we face this situation?

Developing our minds through knowledge, creativity, and innovation

Utilizing all resources, we have to address our basic needs

Following faith-based and traditional practices, rituals, food habits along with modern medical support and guidelines.

Strengthening our spiritual and moral capacities to face hard situations wisely and lightly.

Can we take COVID as a messenger of nature or God (for Abraham traditions) to REFLECT on what went wrong in HUMAN CIVILISATION?

Can we take this as an opportunity to redesign our life in order to contribute to ecological and human wellbeing?

Can we take this as an opportunity to surrender to nature keeping aside collective and individual human egos?

Can we take this as a moment to reverse the wheel or start a new cycle keeping INTERDEPENDENCE and DIVERSITY at the core of the cycle?

With women, community leaders, youth and religious leaders, and their family members we were able to complete 64 number of facilitated workshops in order to open a new path to be conflict transformation practitioners in real-life situations.

“We were looking at CORONA as an enemy. We never saw it as a messenger of nature or God. Because we never take a moment to reflect how our religions interpret pandemics. We never reflected how our Spiritual leader reacted to such situations. We are also trapped into the interpretations given by popular culture dominated by the media. The Quran says pandemics are on earth to say that we humans behave wrongly. It is a message to STOP and REFLECT. Listen to God. Fix or transform what is wrong in our behavior. This is an eye-opening moment for us to redesign our lives to innovate new lifestyles which contribute for human and ecological well-being”

Al Alim. Zahair Moulavi
Islam Ulama & Teacher
APINĀM Core Member – Sammanthurai

“We felt stagnated and lost. The pandemic has brought us to a difficult situation in which the country’s context as well as what is happening around us is also becoming so difficult.  This workshop of Covid and Us brought a novel way of looking at COVID 19 pandemic and the context which brings much hope in hearts.”

Barathy
SANYOG Peer Group Member Mullaitivu

“After COVID emerged our lifestyles changed a lot and we were panicking about the financial instability we are going to face. We had a lot of time to only blame the government, system and officials thinking that they are the reason for the emergence of this disease. But after this workshop i feel ashamed of myself since i and my family are also a reason for COVID and we have also got a good opportunity to use our free time fruitfully”

Chandra Ratnayake
WOMAN Core Member – Nochchiyagama

ONLINE SYMPOSIUM Series

As human civilization, we have reached an era of complexity; we made everything complicated; we collapsed our natural way of existing. In this collapsing process, we have made huge destruction to Nature … Finally, we lost our happiness and life.

What is the result we all have and face in psychological, spiritual, communal, and human crises? All species of Sapiens are in crisis!

In order to understand this crisis and the bio. psycho, social and spiritual interpretation behind this crisis.

cpbr together with its wings initiated Online Symposiums Series as pinnacle moments of the initiative;

 

APINĀM initiated a discourse with its peer 150 religious leaders’ community from diverse faith groups on the theme of “Heal the Soul, Soil, Mind & Body“
WOMAN initiated a discourse with its peer 130 women from diverse faith, ethnic, social, and cultural backgrounds on the theme of
“RISING WOMAN“
SANGYOG initiated a journey named YATRA with its 120 peers from diverse faith, ethnic, social and cultural background on the theme of “Life & Happiness“

 It’s a very good analysis of the needful movement of micro to holistic understanding of man, social and environmental to find healing in the world. If there should be a holistic healing, it should begin with religion. Therefore, religions should Centre their religious values on the original teachings of their founders. Love heals man, society and environment. Let’s be messengers of love!!!!

Rev. Fr. Pius Kennedy Fernando
APINAM Community Member

Love is my foundation & Knowledge is my capital – Prophet Mohammed
It is a moment to rconnect with this saying …

Akram Junaid Moulavi
APINAM Community Member

Thank You Yatra Team for such a wonderful session. Let me Say this is one of the most terrific training I have attended. To keep the motivation on the notes which you have shared is on my desk so daily I have a glance of the same and hope it helps me to keep the momentum.

Faahim Ismail
SANYOG Youth Community Member

It has been a month since one of our closest relatives died due to Covid. At this moment I am in bed since I have been infected by covid and have been struggling a lot. I was in the session continuously for the last four hours. It is healing and it brought much healing to me. Thank you so much. I believe that only medicines cannot bring healing for us in this context.

Fathima Massiya
WOMAN Community Member

We are trapped and stagnated. I am not a person who resides inside home. I walk on the roads to support people, people who suffer from diseases and prisons to serve them. Now I am inside, I cannot see any humans. We are in a context in which we do not know where we are and where we go… in this lost situation this symposium brought an eye-opening session on happiness … hope and light that we can find happiness whatever the context if we seek ……….

Sister Alexia
WOMAN Community Member

While we were focusing our experimental and explorative online-based activities whenever we got opportunities to meet in the pandemic context, we never missed meeting each other to do our workshops and activities. The image gallery contains the moments of love and humanity we experienced.

In the most complicated era of the world

we believed in mother nature,

We surrendered to her

We listen to her

Therefore we could move the pebbles of transformative, healing, and connecting pathway while bringing creative approaches in the online spaces

We are: 

Religious Leaders who Believe that Religions for Humanity 

Youth who believes in a future nourished by happiness and humanity 

Women who believe in healed and connected future 

Young Women who envision a harmonized community

Our family members, friends, communities are walking along with cpbr team and facilitators pool    

We are a Web of Humans journeying together to; 

Heal Oneself…….. 

Heal the Other ………

Heal the Nature………..

Be connected with us in the journey of healing:

Sangyog: Facebook, Youtube

APINĀM: Facebook, Youtube

WOMAN: Facebook, Youtube

Picture credits: All images from this article is from the Center for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation, Sri Lanka

About the Author

Dishani Jayaweera. Center for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation, Sri Lanka

Dishani believes peacebuilding is a mission based on interdependence and understanding of the power dynamics of relationships. Learning, Un-learning, Evolving, and Growing is the formula of her life. Reflecting, Re-Interpreting, Re-designing, Re-Creating, Re-producing and Re-cycling is the way to heal the world and build a new future that works for all. Dishani and her life partner, Prof. Jayantha Seneviratne, founded the Center for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation in 2002. Today she serves as Program Designer / Strategist and Trainer /Facilitator of the Center for Peace Building and Reconciliation, (CPBR), Sri Lanka. They collaboratively explore the role faith leaders, women, and youth can play in social change processes, healing, and connecting communities.

Through her work with CPBR, Dishani saw that with an organization with almost 300 male religious leaders and with the dominance normally afforded to men in a patriarchal society, it was necessary to create a safer space for women to come together to interpret the world as they see and experience it. In 2013, Dishani co-founded “WOMAN” to create spaces and places to harness the spiritual and material capacity and will of woman from a multitude of faiths and backgrounds to foster peace in a spirit of interconnectedness and earth-connectedness.

Dishani received the Peacemaker in Action award by Tanenbaum (USA) in 2012 and became the 2nd runner-up of the Annual ‘Coexist Prize’ by Coexist Foundation (UK) in the same year. Together with the co-founder of CPBR, Professor Jayantha Senevirathne, she also received the Niwano Peace Award for 2015 for the outstanding contribution CPBR has made to peacebuilding work in Sri Lanka. But for Dishani, her biggest award is the trust and friendships she has built with diverse communities around Sri Lanka and beyond.

Center for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation. Sri Lanka

Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation is a home-grown organization located in Sri Lanka and based in the city Colombo which was founded in 2002 by Dishani Jayaweera Peacebuilder and conflict transformation Practitioner who has over 20 years of experience locally and internationally and Professor Jayantha Seneviratne who introduced peace and conflict resolution as a subject to the tertiary education system in Sri Lanka. For nearly 19 years cpbr has been engaging in interfaith coexistence, peacebuilding, reconciliation, healing, and connecting related activities such as learning & learning designed processes, capacity & knowledge building workshops and trainings, interfaith & intra-faith dialogues, exhibitions, and creative spaces for dialogues, interfaith & intra-faith community, regional & national activities, forums, symposiums, and skill development programs). While rooting on the values of Power-sharing and interdependency CPBR has been promoting conflict transformation through diverse approaches in order to build co-existence and contribute towards justice and equality while focusing on five target groups- Interfaith religious leaders, community leaders, women, young women, and youth.

NextGENOA Released their Introduction Video!

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NextGENOA is the youth body of GENOA and is a member of NextGEN. We are a network of young people from Asia & Oceania countries who are committed to caring for the earth by practicing and promoting sustainable living and ecovillage values within and beyond the region.
We invite you to watch this 5-minute video to understand more about why young people are coming together, see what we are doing in different corners of the region, and feel the green youth spirit. This is a product that has been brewing for a long time, some footage and interviews dated back to the EDE Course in Gaia Ashram in 2016. We are happy to introduce our youth ecovillage network in Oceania and Asia to you in this uplifting and colorful way! 

Deep gratitude to Eugenie Dumont who created the video; and also to all our dear friends who provided us with the footage and interviews. Find out more about NextGENOA on their Facebook and Instagram pages.

Re-imagining Education Conference by Ecoversities Alliance

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The Ecoversities Alliance is a community of over 100 transformative learning spaces around the world. They were present in our last year’s Restore and Re-story gathering, holding a very insightful panel session titled “The Great REset- What do we have to RElease, REstore, REclaim and REimagine?”  that featured four Ecoversities’ members around Asia who have taken up the challenge to re-imagine education, healing from collective trauma and nurturing the shift to planetary consciousness. This year they have just hosted a four-day online conference on these topics. Read more about the outcomes of the conference and their reflection by downloading the file below:

Ecoversities Re-imagining Higher Education ConferenceDownload