Anna from GEN International

Hello!

My name is Anna. I am originally from Sweden and after years of travel and a decade living in the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland, I am now living in the beautiful Pyrenees mountains in the south of France. I moved here not so long ago. It was hard to leave Findhorn, which I love very much, but I wanted to live closer to the land and had the opportunity here. Now I live with my partner outside a small village. We’re restoring an old barn, and I am designing our food forest and permaculture garden while learning French, talking to our chickens, and getting to know my local community here.

The past 13 years of my life have been dedicated largely to ecovillages. I met my first ecovillage while travelling in South Africa, and immediately feel in love with both the experience and the concept. I also learnt about GEN, and of Findhorn. I went back to Sweden, re-started the Swedish ecovillage network, and started a PhD in Social Anthropology about community as a tool for transformation. That’s how I first came to Findhorn - to study life there. I started engaging in GEN Europe, working to establish the network of national ecovillage networks in Europe, and in 2015, I started working for GEN International. First in projects about social innovation and education, then as Education Director, and then for the past 2.5 years as our Coordination Circle Lead Link, coordinating our whole team and our activities. I feel truly blessed for getting to work in such a hopeful area, with so many people dedicating their lives to living differently and in harmony with themselves, each other, and the Earth.

During these years, I have become more and more interested in how ecovillages can better navigate through crisis, and how they can help the systems and places they are part of, to do the same. I am still a researcher at heart, and I love figuring out how things work! To me, community holds the key to so much possibility, hope, security and resilience, and I feel we have a duty to grow and to share what we have learnt as a movement so far - to invite more and more people and places into our circles. I also feel called to challenge our movement to do and be more, to show up in new arenas, and to dare to question both itself and current paradigms. Maybe that’s why I was so excited about this project from the very first meeting I had with our funder, the VKRF foundation! Since that call, I have become much more knowledgeable about resilience, resilience assessments, and what I now call the polycrisis - a situation when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade our prospects, like climate change and war happening at the same time as a significant decrease in fossil fuel availability, for example. I also feel profoundly inspired by approaches that include more than human nature in exploring the care, mutual support and solidarity I think we need in these times.

To me, we’re living in a time of endings and potential new beginnings, and this project is one way that I try to support those new beginnings to be beautiful and respectful to all life. Thats one power I see in the ecovillage movement now - engaging people on the ground in nurturing meaningful possibilities in times of endings, as a global network and as 6000 local communities not only responding to the polycrisis, but giving birth to another way of being while doing it.

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Greetings everyone!

My name is Laulin, pronounced ‘Lau-leen.’

I grew up in the Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage in Tepoztlan, an hour-and-a-half South of Mexico City, since I was 4 years old. I was born at home in Berkeley, California, USA on July 10, 1986. My mother is a US born art therapist, videographer, ecologist, and environmental activist. My father was a civil engineer, a curandero healer, and a Zapotec indigenous leader. These roots gave me a strong multicultural and bilingual foundation.

I’m a second generation eco-villager and the NEXT-GEN representative of my community in this group. Beatrice Briggs and Giovanni Ciarlo are the other 2 representatives of Huehuecoyotl in this project. In these times we recognize the urgent need to activate and inspire people, especially youth, to co-create the tools and skills needed to face the future challenges together.

I’m a passionate multidisciplinary entrepreneur, specializing in sustainable and regenerative education. I’m a certified yoga instructor and teach English and Spanish as a second language. As a promoter of culture, I also participate in the direction, organization, and production of national and international events that foster self-knowledge and harmonious living.

I’ve lived in different regions of Mexico, the USA, and Uruguay, where regenerative movements originated and converged, promoting the development of human consciousness through art, ecology, environmental activism, ritual, and culture. This year I launched a slow fashion clothing company, as well as an organic wellness and beauty line called Botanical Alchemy, and feel inspired to continue my community’s lifework dedicated to Earth regeneration, social change, and transformation.

At the beginning of this year I had an epiphany. A pivotal intergenerational alliance was forged that has led to the development of a compelling and exciting vision: The Huehue Eco-Center - Tepoztlán Bioregional Alliance, at Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage. The Huehue Eco-Center builds upon Huehuecoyotl’s 40 year foundation to preserve, restore, and celebrate the ecosystems that support life on Earth and mobilize the human population in this bioregion to become stewards of the mountains, forests, and watersheds that define our home. I’m thrilled to be collaborating on this very beautiful, and of course, challenging project to bring forth the next chapter of our ecovillage’s re-evolution and regeneration in service to our Earth Community.

Thank you to all the people involved in developing and facilitating this project and to those of you who have had the courage to commit to embarking on this journey together. I am really excited to be part of the GEN Resilience Project to connect with other Next GEN youth and GEN elders from other ecovillages so we can strengthen our alliances today and help each other develop, practice, and implement tools and skills for a resilient and vibrant regenerative future.

With love,
Laulin

More about me

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Hi Laulin, wonderful to read about you and your projects. I love the conscious next steps and bioregional approach of the Huehue Eco Center, such important work. It was great to meet you briefly in the call yesterday - super happy to have you onboard!

Hiiii Anna,

So great to hear more about your journey with ecovillages here. Grateful for all of your work in GEN for the last 7 years <3

Do you have your PhD work stored somewhere? I would love to read it ^^

Hi Anna and GEN Team,

We are so grateful for this effort to bring all Ecovillages together and think deeply on topics of resilience that matter for sustainability.

I am Dr Aditi and stay in Govardhan ecovillage, 90 kms away from Mumbai, India. I have 21+ yrs of diverse experience, but felt most meaningfully engaged recently when as family we shifted to Govardhan our ecovillage 2.5 yrs back. Indebted with gratitude we held sacrosanct the gift of Mother Nature and contribute to ecosystem with several of our regenrative initiatives like 300 Kw solar energy, 90 mn ltrs RWH pond, 100% sustainable solid and liquid waste mgt, 100 cow family members, horses, sheeps, goats, donkeys, butterflies and birds. We have spotted migratory birds who fly from Sri Lanka to Himalyas chose to stop at our ecovillage. I also represent our ecovillage at policy dialogues in UN bodies like UNEP, UNECOSCO, CBD etc. We are in the process of establishing ESG systems which will also support our present work in Ecovillage Resilience project.

Really excited to embark on this collaborative learning journey together.

Hi !
I am Yuluka from Colombia. I am an Ecovillager since 2014 in Aldeafeliz but I has been related to the CASA network through the “Communitarian Living Culture” network that I originally represented there. My personal work is around the Inner Transition with the design of a workshop named “RenaSer” that I share in different formats and levels and is based in my own book “Words in Harmony” . At a community level I am a Sociocracy trainer and an activist in the name of the Mother Earth Rights and I have a research hotbed in that area in the Law Faculty of Uniciencia (University in Colombia) .
My favorite things to do is gardening, singing, and painting, I am a ceremonial herbs smoker of the lineage of the Sacred Little Smoke that comes from the North America, Moon Dancer and Medicine woman.
I am loving being part of this beautiful process of research.
Thanks!!!