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At the second Global Environments Network (GEN) event this year, we headed to the beautiful landscapes of the Moroccan High Atlas. Named “Community-based management in the Mediterranean: Innovations in socio-environmental research and action”, this was the Network’s third Regional Academy—the first two were held in Latin America—and the first of its kind in the Mediterranean.

Fourteen participants from different Mediterranean countries gathered for this 10-day Academy (2–11 November 2018): the Mediterranean Environments Regional Academy (MERA). Through a range of holistic and cross-disciplinary learning approaches, including inspiring plenaries and roundtable dialogues, practical workshops, field trips, participant presentations, skills training and one-on-one mentoring sessions, participants were immersed in intense and in-depth learning. With a focus on cultural landscapes and seascapes, regional and international experts, known as resource people, were brought in to play the role of educators, facilitators and mentors for the participants. MERA was centered around four primary themes: local product commercialisation, rural livelihoods and the private sector; communal governance and management systems in the context of local and national government; policy, advocacy and the role of communities in promoting biodiversity-friendly cultural practices; and gender approaches to agroecology and food systems.

“The level of interaction at MERA was inspiring”, Nessie, GEN Director, said. “Participants were very forthcoming with sharing their personal stories and knowledge, and the challenges they face in their efforts to maintain the beautiful Mediterranean cultural landscapes and seascapes they live and work in”, she added. “For example, the peer-to-peer sharing during the community workshop on commercialisation—designed to analyse the existing situation of different plant and animal products within local areas—really allowed us to gain an understanding of the issues and opportunities surrounding potential commercial products. Together, we created a shortlist of a range of products to explore further”, Nessie explained.

Learn more about MERA in the photo story "First Mediterranean regional academy focuses on community-based resource management". Below are a couple of photos as a sneak preview.

Group discussion

As part of the policy, lobbying, advocacy and communication workshop, participants worked through two case studies of communal systems in small groups to strengthen their advocacy skills. Through this exercise, we provided the group with a framework that will support them to conceptualise and carry out advocacy campaigns at different levels to obtain political influence and build solid argumentation through communication and evaluation. [Photo by Pommelien/GDF]

Demonstration of plants

Thanks to a guided tour and demonstration at our host site, Espace Tamount, we discussed local plant products opportunities and their different uses and health benefits. Moroccan wild thyme for example is traditionally used to treat stomach pains, aching muscles and colds. [Photo by Inanc/GDF]

For more on MERA and our other GEN events, please visit the Global Environments Network website.

Thank you for your support!

Links:

• More details on MERA
• Global Diversity Foundation's Mediterranean programme

Thanks in part to your generous support*, this summer the Global Environments Network (GEN) hosted its sixth Global Environments Summer Academy (GESA) at the University of Oxford and beautiful locales in the surrounding countryside. We delivered this year's GESA in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science (ICCS).

GESA 2018 took place between 25 July and 12 August, bringing together twenty inspiring environmental changemakers from eighteen different countries, each with diverse and fascinating backgrounds. Through their time at GESA, we set out to provide them with new tools, skills, knowledge and a supportive network as they tackle some of the most challenging socioenvironmental issues of our age.

With a program comprised of three parts, participants were taken on a journey. We moved from deep personal inquiry and immersive nature connection, to learning how to build a communications campaign and hold courageous conversations, on into development of new projects and initiatives.

Here, through a collection of photos, we share elements of participants' journeys and stories.

1. The Opening Retreat

Image 1: The first part of this retreat was based on the transformative teachings of Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects, a powerful set of tools for acknowledging one’s pain and sadness for the state of the earth, whilst simultaneously taking responsibility for one’s personal and collective agency for positive and socio-political and environmental change.

Image 2: The second part of the retreat involved Theatre of Transformation, a pioneering methodology of human development, education and training. Combining art with politics, participants learnt to weave poetry and theatre into their stories to bring vividly to life the challenges of global peace and security, and to activate diverse audiences around the world to become co-creators of positive change.

 2. Oxford University Academy

Image 3: Whilst the Opening Retreat focused more on inner work and personal development, this 9-day intensive academy focused instead on critical evaluation. Participants delved deeply into key issues underpinning our current planetary crisis. Joined by resource people from multiple fields, this portion involved inspiriting plenaries, group discussions, practical workshops and trainings, field trips, and one-on-one mentoring sessions. Here, participants take part in the session ‘Spiritual Activism’.

Image 4: One practical workshop focused on video making. Following a foundational theoretical component on the technical and ethical basis of filmmaking, participants spent an enjoyable day putting their new skills into practice. They experimented with the equipment to conduct video interviews, and produced creative short videos in small groups, which were later screened at a movie night.

Image 5: Each morning began with a ‘creative prelude’ led by one of our brilliant participants. Here, Emma, trained in circus arts, gives the group a lesson in acrobatics.

Image 6: Replacing conventional coffee breaks were the much-loved and legendary ethnobotany breaks, which have been a feature of GESA since our first academy in 2011. Every day, each participant shared a slice of their culture and home country by bringing samples of food and/or beverage for everyone to taste. The tasting was preceded by a short introduction or story to provide context and history to the food being shared. Here, Elif invited us to sample some sweet delicacies she has helped a Cappadochian Turkish organization to brand and market.

3. Practical (closing) Retreat

Image 7: The final phase was designed to create a space for participants to put their learning into practice. With that in mind, external communications experts joined us for a one-day session on ‘How to build a communications campaign’, around issues participants are passionate about. Finally, two full days were dedicated to project presentations. Each participant, either individually or as a group, was given the opportunity to share their future project ideas and collaborations.

With our 6^th GESA successfully completed, we are excited that another twenty alumni, plus new inspiring and dynamic resource people, will now join the Global Environments Network (GEN). They add to its diversity and power, as well as its capacity to catalyse transformative social and environmental change in the world. Thank you for your part in sustaining this network!

*NOTE: Many kind donors contributed via this project in July 2018 to our new GEN initiative to enable Amazonian Indigenous communities to address malaria. All your July donations were successfully directed to that specific initiative. Your generosity triggered significant matching donations of essential supplies and medications in Venezuela: thank you! We will shortly post an update at the project’s own dedicated GlobalGiving page.

With just under a month to go before the start of the 6^th Global Environments Summer Academy, we are feeling the excitement build as plans fall into place. We have invited resource people from diverse backgrounds who will be bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience to GESA this summer. Alastair shares with us his work around sacred activism, whilst Rama will guide us through the Theatre of Transformation. We will explore themes of gender, race and the environment, courageous conversations in the workplace and much more. We have designed a programme that retains successful elements from previous academies, while introducing new innovative ones; including dialogues between eminent elders who have spent their lives balancing spiritual wellbeing with activism and advocacy for a better world, and exploring the sometimes controversial concept of rewilding, not only as a process of bringing ecosystems back to life, but also bringing humans and their societies back to life through a renewed connection with nature. 

In this update, we would like to introduce our GESA 2018 participants. Through a diligent 2-stage application process that began at the start of the year and included a series of online interviews, we identified 22 finalists from over two hundred applications to invite to Oxford. It is an encouraging and exciting time. Encouraging, as we learn about the dedicated individuals working around the world who are focused on nurturing positive human-environment connections. Exciting, as we look forward to the gathering of these individuals, anticipating the depth and scope of discussions and connection that will arise through the sharing of ideas by participants who each bring a unique set of knowledge and experience. 

It was a challenge to choose one person’s storybu here we introduce Sunshine, a student of Ethnobotany, Health & Wellness in New Orleans. Sunshine launched her education and research project—the Global Community Knowledge Project—in 2010, as a way to expand her knowledge to better serve the greater community. Through her project, she worked on small farms and with small, traditional and Indigenous communities to learn about sustainable and organic food production, post-harvest handling methods, natural food preservation, traditional culinary techniques and recipes, as well as using foods and plants as natural medicines. 

In 2017, Sunshine began to merge her experience in the IT industry, culinary arts and sustainable agriculture into one venture in the form of a mobile app. AmnAya is a contemporary mobile solution that preserves traditional plant knowledge through recording sustainable growing techniques, recipes and folk usages as well as pairing each with existing western scientific studies on each plant, while working against biopiracy. Sunshine is currently developing her project findings through AmnAya and recently articulated eight points the app aims to address, including increasing accessibility of institutional knowledge to the general community, promoting community sovereignty and defeating biopiracy. Her plans are admirable, to say the least, and we look forward to welcoming her, and all the other GESA participants, on the 25^th of July. And in case you are wondering, Sunshine is her real name!

We thank you for your support. Donations to this campaign supports the creation of these platforms: Global Environments Network’s summer academies, regional academies and community exchanges. Please consider making another donation to support GESA 2018, where participants like Sunshine, Rickie, Godelive and Maria will meet in an interactive setting that promotes shared learning, connection and multidisciplinary reflection.

A bit about Rickie, Godelive and Maria:

Rickie explores the ways in which the environmental justice and Black Lives Matter movements are part of the same struggle: a struggle against environmental racism, police brutality and above all, the violence of economic oppression.

With five years in the conservation sector, Godelive aims to create a positive change in her community by integrating biodiversity conservation, community health and livelihoods, agriculture, entrepreneurship and sustainable development.

With a background in Political Science and Economics, and Global Change Ecology, Maria, from Colombia, focuses on the pressing challenges of urban sustainability. In the photo below, Maria speaks at the Urban Nature book launch.

Links:

• GESA 2018 event page
• GESA 2018 finalists

Nessie Reid, a GESA 2013 alumna, shares her thoughts on the transformational impact of the academy:

When I applied for the Global Environments Summer Academy (GESA) in the spring of 2013, I was at a crossroads in my professional life. I was seeking direction and mentorship in the field I was most passionate about: protecting and conserving biological and cultural diversity. In 2010, after graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I was fortunate enough to work for the ICCA Consortium: a non-profit NGO seeking to promote and provide appropriate recognition and support to Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCAs for short). It is here where the seeds of my interest in food security and food sovereignty were planted, but it was only when I attended GESA was I able to recognise that it was this direction I wanted to go in.

During the three years of working for the consortium, I carried out field research and organised events in Japan, India, the Philippines, Italy and lived in Indonesia for eighteen months where I worked as Project Coordinator for an ICCA ‘high threat’ documentation series. My fieldwork led me to West Kalimantan where I witnessed a Dayak Limbai Indigenous community protecting, managing and conserving their ‘Bukit Bunyau’ ICCA using generation-old customary intuitions and natural resource management practices. The experience irrefutably affirmed my belief that areas where local communities are able to independently govern and manage their natural environments (i.e. ICCAs) – with full access and control over their food production – biological and cultural diversity is far higher, compared to areas with externally enforced conservation management systems. Whilst documenting the work of a community radio network and organic seed bank cooperative during my time in India, I learnt of the rewards that small scale, community-led projects can reap. Similarly, when co-facilitating a community-made Photo Story in the Philippines, I witnessed a formidable spirit of resilience and innovation as this community fought to defend their ancestral homeland from encroaching mining companies.

I brought all these ideas and learnings to GESA and it was during the three-week period – with peer-to-peer learning, coupled with mentoring from GESA resource people and Global Diversity Foundation staff – that I was able to discuss, brain-storm and envision how to most effectively put my plans for ecological and social justice into practice. Up until this point, since leaving university, I had ploughed on with my career, never really giving myself enough time or freedom to stop and scrutinise if I was really affecting change. Despite people’s best intentions for ‘saving the planet’, within the NGO, activism and environmental movement, burn-out is a common manifestation and I believe we lose many great people within the movement due to it. GESA allowed me the breathing-room to stop and really consider what felt meaningful and alive to me, rather than just ticking the “right” boxes.

After GESA, I returned to the UK and became co-director for This is Rubbish: a food waste Community Interest Company which raises awareness about the preventable scale of food waste in the UK through policy research, community and arts led public events. In November 2014, I became Rural Artist in Residence for Cape Farewell where I created the on-going The Milking Parlour: an artistic inquiry exploring and opening up questions about the future and current situation of our food and farming system. Since receiving the residency, I moved to an organic family-run farm in South West Wales, from where I manage the Oxford Real Farming Conference: one of key organic and agroecological farming conferences in the UK, and Biodiversity – a Journal of Life on Earth.

My experience at GESA empowered me to pursue a meaningful and rewarding life of environmental change-making and more recently, environmental leadership and management. I was so inspired by GESA that I am now in fact the coordinator of both the academy and the Global Environments Network (GEN), which gathers alumni of summer academies and other events into a transformational leadership network. With other members of GEN, I am busy planning this year’s summer academy, which will take place 25 July – 11 August in the city of Oxford, UK, collaborating with the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science.

GESA brought much change and meaning to my life, providing me with a platform where I was able to speak of my experiences and begin to explore how to channel them into the next chapter of my life and work back in my own local community. If you want to read more about GESA 2018, click here. The deadline for application is 31^st March, so you still have time to apply!

Plans for the 2^nd Latin American Socio-Environmental Academy [Spanish title: 2ª Academia Latinoamericana de Liderazgo Socio-Ambiental/ALLSA] are well underway. Alumni of other Global Environments Network events are leading the planning, integrating their concerns and vision for change.

Scheduled for 30 June - 8 July 2018 in Guatemala, ALLSA 2018 will focus on the intersections between youth, climate change and migration in Central America, the Caribbean and North America.

Why climate change?

Several countries in Central America and the Caribbean region rank amongst the top ten in the world for long-term climate risk. As climate change worsens, this unique region of interwoven lives, economies, foodsheds and cultures will face ever-increasing challenges associated directly or indirectly with climate change: gendered and youth migration, cross-border violence, resource extraction-related conflicts, depopulation of rural areas, and loss of traditional knowledge bases, food security and sovereignty.

Ana Elia, Global Environments Summer Academy alumna, co-organiser of ALLSA 2015, and of the upcoming regional academy says, “This comes at a crucial time. According to UNICEF, in the coming years climate change will increasingly be the cause of large-scale migrations of people, led in most cases by youth who are more willing to take risks. Latin American and Caribbean youth leaders need to connect local and international networks to find adaptive solutions to the complex threads of challenges associated with climate change.

We believe there is a pressing need to create platforms open to youth from different disciplinary backgrounds to encourage… critical discussions on climate change. …We are designing the 2018 academy for committed, proven young emerging leaders to deepen and expand learnings, explore critical pedagogies, develop social networks, improve communication skills and strengthen leadership skills that advance practice and understanding for social and ecological resilience.” she continued.

The 2^nd Latin American academy builds on important lessons we learned from the inaugural Latin American regional academy in Dominican Republic, alongside other regional and summer academies held over the years since 2011. For ALLSA 2018, academy alumni, under the auspices of the Global Environments Network, are partnering with Global Diversity Foundation and UNESCO Prize laureate SERES, a grassroots nonprofit working to cultivate and catalyse Central American youth leaders to build just and sustainable communities.

To read more about the 2^nd Latin American Socio-Environmental Academy, click here

Links:

• Global Environments Network events listing
• GDF North America programme
• SERES website