Session 2: Community Resilience and Empowerment
COVID-19 Community Resilience & Permaculture Course
Session 2 Community Resilience and Empowerment
Watch the video, read the text, and finish the learning exercise to complete this session.
After finishing this first session you will be:
introduced to flowful’s perspective on permaculture
Introduced to an easy method to check and increase your level of resilience
Distinguish between functions, elements, and methods
Analyze your own next step to increase resilience or come closer to your goals
Flowful’s permaculture perspective
Our perspective on the permaculture world is strongly inspired by Bill Mollison and his understanding of nature connection and human interaction. We understand Permaculture as one way to become a part of nature and as a major tool of Joanna Macy’s great turning, which is rooted in deep ecology, systems thinking and Buddhism. For us, the prime directive of permaculture is for all of our decisions and designs to come from greater importance than pleasing our egos, making a profit or proving what could be possible. "
“The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.””
If this content resonates with you and you feel inspired by permaculture and the world view that comes along with it, you might want to be part of a real-life PDC. To stress the point, we would highly recommend you to participate in an offline Permaculture Design Course in the future to be able to get the full experience and also become familiar with the power of group energy.
How to create resilience and become independent?
Let’s clarify some terms first. When we talk about resilience, we’re talking about your individual or an ecosystem’s capability to adjust easily to change or misfortune, whereas self-sufficiency is the ability to maintain yourself or to provide your own needs. Resilience doesn’t mean the exclusion of other people, communities, or systems. It simply means you’re able to respond to changes. Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer's Manual ( used as the PDC curriculum) already gives us a lot of good ideas on how a resilient ecosystem should be designed and how to set it up for the long-run. The current situation showcases how quickly and radically framework conditions can change in an emergency situation and that designing redundancy in your system from the very first moment is key. Having life-supporting functions met by at least two elements are important to be able to mitigate risk and increase the resilience of an ecosystem. An easy to grasp example might be water supply. If you have a river that runs through your property you have one main source of water and the access to water as a life-supporting function is met by one element. Even though you might feel that it is very unlikely that this river will ever run dry you want to be prepared for this situation. In permaculture, we are designing for extremes and therefore it is good to have access to water backed with a different source. This can be a well, rainwater harvesting, governmental water supply or any other source of water supply.
We created a model that helps you to define your way towards your goal. We will showcase and explain it based on our current example at Gaia Ashram. This model helps to guide us on our way, empower ourselves, increase resilience and become more independent from an outside supply. We want to limit our logistic travels for food and other material supply. One way of achieving this is an increase in self-sufficiency. This method works also for designing your personal life or business or whatever project you are working on -- not only for resilience and empowerment. You can use any main goal you want to achieve and use the framework to figure out your next steps.
3 step approach towards resilience and independence
Put everything that already exists and what you already implemented in your project or on your land into the framework. Use the different levels, functions, elements, and methods to get a better overview. By doing so you get a baseline of your current state of resilience and independence and identify the low hanging fruits.
Walk through the entire process again - filling the gaps and putting priority on the functions you want to be able to meet first. By doing so you identify the next steps to increase resilience.
Implement methods to fulfill your priority functions matching with your values.
A framework to foster resilience and empowerment
Values:
It starts with defining your core values and key design drivers. They will work as your north star and help you to guide your way through. For Gaia Ashram, we put diversity and justice; regional authenticity and nature as well as stewardship and independence. Whenever you are not clear if you are still on the right path, you can always come back to your values and see if your actions, decisions or whatever you feel uncertain about still match your values.
Functions:
In order to follow your values, you need to define the main functions you need to meet within your community to increase resilience and become more independent from an outside supply. In our case, we figured out that food and water supply need to be met first in order to keep functioning. Shelter and culture would be an important function to focus on in order to manage group dynamics and ensure that basics needs are met. The last function we put in was income and trade. As we are surrounded and interacting with an economic system that is monetary, resilience and empowerment also means choosing income streams that are in line with our values and still opening opportunities to fulfill our purpose.
Elements:
Based on the choice of your functions you are entering the element level. What elements need to be in place to ensure that your main functions are met? For food, we were pretty clear that soil and organic matter are essential as well as having access to local seeds and steady plant supply. Furthermore, indigenous culture and knowledge are super important to turn biodiversity into food abundance.
Methods:
The last layer of this framework is defining which methods are important to have the right elements available. Following the food example again: compost is a great method to turn waste into resources and increase soil fertility. A nursery is key to increasing diversity and also ensuring that enough plants are available to meet your food demand. And as the last point, seed saving will ensure that we have access to seeds that are already accustomed to our very local framework conditions (soil, climate, etc.)
What is this framework for?
This method does not show you where to put your elements and how to design an ecosystem or project in an energy-efficient way. It is just the first step. It is guiding you through your individual development and showing your path towards reaching a goal. It also functions as an analysis tool to help you to elaborate if your goal is realistic and if you really feel committed to it on a different level. The graphic above is only a tiny little part of the entire mind map you want to create for your own life or community on your way to more resilience. During the course, we will always come back to this graph and show you why we are using a specific technique, tool or method to increase resilience and on what level you might see the greatest possible effect with the least changes.
Learning exercise:
As a first exercise, you might want to write down your values, functions, elements, and methods that would define your way to a more resilient and empowered life. Feel free to walk through this framework from your preferred perspective (as a part of a community, city or other groups). For now, just focus on one of the main functions you need to have fulfilled in order to become more resilient.
