Tepla Gora Eco Market

Tepla Gora Eco Market

A community-driven marketplace that connects small organic and handcraft producers from Carpathians, wider Ukraine (and soon beyond) with international buyers.

The idea comes from Tepla Gora Eco Centre, based in Carpathian mountains, Ukraine. We are a natural retreat, ecovillage, volunteering and permaculture centre. Our website is teplagora.org.

The online marketplace for local organic products has been part of Tepla Gora’s vision from early on. But it was due to the war that some internally displaced people (IDP) that stayed at the eco centre have joined the team and together we started looking at ways to build more resilience in these uncertain times. The eco marketplace seemed like a great opportunity to do that in a way that would be a win-win-win: by diversifying our organisation, supporting IDP team members and scaling our impact by supporting local ecopreneurs and the broader community in Ukraine and soon abroad.

Team

Andriy Grushetsky, Iryna Kotsar

Reporting Officer: Andriy Grushetsky

Area

Prototyping, Emergent festival, Next Steps project, Diversity, participation and engagement

Objectives

To support the project manager financially for one month.
To buy example products for trial and/or order professional photography services.

OUTCOMEs

Project Update October 2023

A market stall at Tepla Gora cafe has been set-up and we have been selling local hand-made products to the eco centre visitors. There have been circa 40 sales with a 6 euros average purchase for total of 300 euros.

We have researched and put in place systems for card payments processing (both for offline and online), cash register, accounting and stock management.

Branded packaging and stickers were designed and produced for Tepla Gora branded products.

We promoted the ecomarket during our events and through social media.

The online store language has been changed to Ukrainian to accommodate the interest from our community in Ukraine and to get some online traction quicker.

We have also polished the store design, navigation, texts and have been adding the products descriptions and photos. We added the payment method and integrated delivery service provider functionality.

We are planning to promote the online store in Ukraine first (Q1, Q2 of 2024), and then to add the English version and promote it abroad (Q3, Q4 2024). At the same time we will continue engaging with small craft producers and permaculture farms to add their products to the marketplace and expand the products range.

resources created

contact links

Stories to Decolonise Permaculture

Stories to Decolonise Permaculture

Creating a free resource of stories about the origins and inspirations behind permaculture to aid teachers and practitioners in decolonising permaculture

Team

Rakesh Rootsman Rak, Ewan Findley, Jemma Findley

Reporting Officer: Rakesh Rootsman Rak

Area

Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project 

Objectives

April 2023

By the end of October 2023 we will have
1. A way for people to capture electronically stories of the origins and inspirations of permaculture.
2. A process in place to verify the content
3. A way in which to share for free verified content to the public
4. Run a session for CoLab to explain how people can add content and how to use the content
5. Run a session for Permaculture Association Britain’s Educators CoP to explain how they can add content and how to use the content
6. Deliver a session on this work at the UK Permaculture convergence in September

 

Updated aims due to lack of funding through the Emergent Festival –

The amount allocated means we have budget for 24 hours of work, hence the first 3 parts of the project
8 – 8 – Look at what data we want to capture
8 – 16 – Create a structure to hold the data in a meaningful and flexible way (normalisation)
8 – 24 – Create a way for people to enter the initial sample content.

To complete the project we will apply for further funding from the CoLab Diversity pot.
For any shortfall, we will do crowdfunding to the general permaculture people worldwide.
We are confident we will achieve this, so this initial amount is a great way to get us up and running.

OUTCOMEs

November 2023 Update

The following objectives have been met:

By the end of October 2023 we will have
1. The initial input for stories is via the following Google forms. In the future we may move this to a baserow form. 
2. The main criteria for verification is to ensure the content is a genuine story (not spam), and that it is not discriminatory or offensive.
3. We have set up a baserow database to contain the final content which can be found here
4. This was delivered on 22nd November. A recording of which can be found here on YouTube 
5. This was done in person at the Permaculture Educators gathering in London on 22nd September. We received very good feedback and ideas of how to improve the work. This is also where we finalised the criteria on how to verify data. 
6. This was delivered in person on 23rd September at the permaculture festival in London. It was again very well received. This is where we decided to also accept audio and video recordings, which were not part of the original idea.

 

Rakesh has also delivered the content to several other permaculture practitioners including his students and other key people.
We are now ready to accept stories from anyone who has a good story to tell. So look forward to hearing from you

Communicating Permaculture in Spanish

Communicating Permaculture in Spanish

We feel that when trying to promote permaculture in the Spanish speaking world there are still several hurdles to overcome. One main hurdle seems to be a series of prejudices about permaculture, often confusing the term with an ecological gardening or cultivation technique. We have also personally experienced and received the feedback that the concept is either connected to something that is done only by people who have a lot of money (think big earthworks for example) or by people who use the idea of natural processes as an excuse for being lazy (and want everything for free). 

In this context we feel there is a clear need and opportunity in the Spanish speaking world to communicate the basic ideas of permaculture more explicitly and in detail, including all the ethical and other principles as well as all the permaculture flower petals or RetroSuburbia’s 3 B’s (Built Biological and Behavioural) and show its value by doing so. At the same time we feel this could be creating a ground to give impulse to a variety of permaculture projects throughout the Spanish speaking permaculture community, in all its social, economical and cultural contexts.

The idea is to create a meetingplace for Spanish speaking permaculture practictioners and/or interessees, where material optimized for different social networks could be co-created. These resources would be a toolkit for anyone that wants to promote permaculture in Spanish. This facilitated meetingplace and participatory process would give space to different voices and perspectives of permaculture, trying to reflect its diversity but also offer criteria of maintaining quality and some unifying guidelines. Ideally, the basic material resulting from this process would be available for free online through the CoLab website, open to be built on at a future stage.

Team

Kathy Otto, Jorge Barbosa, Aline VaMo

Reporting Officer: Kathy Otto

Area

Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project 

Objectives

April 2023

 

  • Create a draft image of the recent state of permaculture thinking in the Spanish speaking world, identifying the countries and areas that are proclaiming to have a permaculture movement, visualizing who speaks about permaculture in which areas, what they are saying and in what direction they are developing (family projects, ecovillage, professional designers, regenerative agriculture practitioners…) → spreadsheet
  • Create and reinforce connections between different permaculture practitioners in the Spanish speaking world, with a special focus on those who approach permaculture professionally or wish to do so, by using a participatory process for the design of GG (General Goal) 3.
  • Create texts and images optimized for different social media platforms (facebook, instagram, whatsapp…) that help permaculture practitioners (and specifically professional consultants, designers and educators) in the Spanish speaking world to communicate fundamental concepts and ideas of permaculture. These resources will also help to make visible to a wider audience the value of the permaculture design approach in our current global climate and socioeconomic context.
    • Make the created material freely and easily available on perma.earth and through collaborating agents.
    • Impulse the circulation of the created material in the social media channels of the participants of the process by a hashtag campaign.

OUTCOMEs

October 2023

  1. First Design Process CEAP (for collaboration between group members): https://cloud.perma.earth/s/AfmdoBSLyYxB28n
  2. Form to send to people/projects made on Baserow: Recogida de proyectos de permacultura // Baserow
  3. Design Kathy ‘recopilando datos “communicate PC in Spanish”’ using the Design Web: Recogida datos communicate pc in Spanish • Red de diseño / Untitled view • Kumu
  4. Database of Spanish speaking PC projects or websites that talk about PC: https://cloud.perma.earth/s/jHif3pR6xXJHL7k
  5. Baserow results of people/projects that responded to our mail and filled out the form here
  6. Infographics of data harvested here
  7. Final email to be sent out by the end of October, sending these results to the Spanish speaking PC community, and inviting them into the CoLab again, to see if we can go for another Year of the Emergent Festival next year and collaborate

Designing Work Spaces For All

Designing Work Spaces For All

We are creating and testing an online course that focuses specifically on creating accessible and safe work spaces and community spaces.

 

Project Aims

The course seeks to Promote Diversity, Accessibility, Inclusion, Equity & Justice in work spaces and within communities.

The course will be a resource that can be accessed by anybody who wishes to learn more about permaculture. It will add value to the CoLab space.

 

Team

Charlie Wilson, Daniel Attwell

Reporting Officer: Charlie Wilson

Area

Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project

objectives

April 2023

Daniel has already undertaken much of the work, transcribing audio segments and creating a well-structured course outline. We would like to add graphics and make the course more presentable. This could be done within a week.

Once this is complete we would promote the course on social media, including the CoLab Slack and the CoLab LinkedIn page, and run a first test version. We anticipate a month of promotion would be needed to get a willing team of participants to take the course.

We would first allow people to take the course for free and gather feedback. We would have to wait for people to complete the course, this could take 2-3 weeks. We would then use this feedback to improve the course and create a final version. This could be done within a week.

OUTCOMEs

October 2023

Course creation has been completed. We promoted the course and had a number of participants who offered feedback.

We used the feedback to make necessary edits. Please feel free to take the course and apply it in your work spaces and then leave feedback for us to further develop it.

We hope it will add value for Permaculture projects to apply the design tools shown in the course and help give greater diversity within these communities.

 

Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund

Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund

Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) is a peer-to-peer process that commences with shared, deep-listening and, given that the peers are trained to function in both counseling and clienting roles, advances to a process involving structured, non-advisory attention from counsellors and discharge for clients. Roles are always exchanged in every session. Training is an essential element of RC.

The project seeks to engage Colab members to both give and receive one-on-one sessions to a level appropriate to their training and consistent with the peer-to-peer spirit fundamental to the RC ethos.

Please note: from the start of 2024, the Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund was merged as part of the MVA Project.

 

Team

Andrew Langford, Vida Ashmole

Reporting Officer: Vida Ashmole

 

Area

Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Next Steps project

objectives 2023

1. Collect needs from the CoLab wider membership.

2. Set out the program in service of general CoLab needs before the end of April 2023.

3. Delivering the program by End of third quarter October 2023, with associated artifacts and recordings.

OUTCOMEs 2023

We are working on developing our capacities to run the Oppression, Movement Building and our Relationships as Activists (OMBRA) workshop as an introductory overview of RC as a free course for all comers. We are doing this through regular monthly meetings and are referenced in this process by our Area Reference Person and the originators of the OMBRA workshop.
Meanwhile we are reconfiguring existing courses to focus on navigating conflict and de-colonizing our own thinking, these course being: –
Eliminating Common sources of Conflict from Group Dynamics (I am playing with renaming the Designing Productive Meetings and Events course here and am open to suggestions)
Reclaiming discharge – developing our capacity to courageously attend to eliminating hundreds to thousands year-old patterns of separation (aka oppressions and internalized oppressions of many flavors) including racism, the class system, domination of nature, sexism, imperialism and many more …
Liberation from oppression – understanding how oppressions arise, how these are spread and maintained and how these trap us in dysfunctional, irrational societies. The primary emphasis of this training is on practicing proven processes that enable us to turn the volume down on these noxious dynamics with the intention to eliminate them as thoroughly as we can.

resources created

contact links