Fall SOULutionaries Social Series...
showcasing Mark Lakeman - Sasha Kramer - Karl Stayeart

"The Village Lives" the story of the City Repair Project

with Mark Lakeman of http://www.cityrepair.org/, ecological designer, community development consultant and Co-Founder of City Repair, Portland, Oregon.

A 1.5 Hour Visual Media Presentation

As both an organization and a larger movement, The City Repair Project inspires and guides the transformation of the grid infrastructure of the typical American city into a vital social commons. The multidisciplinary nature of City Repair defies categorization. Similar to Permaculture design, it has become a national movement for social and ecological restoration operating in a landscape characterized by isolation and compartmentalization. The project takes Fritjof Capra's 'Tipping Point' as a model for paradigm change by intentionally focusing upon intersections in space and time. City Repair is directly reclaiming those intersection points, converting spaces of collision into places of convergence, and opening the field for what automatically happens when people reunite with their Place: everything.

This presentation compares the historic settlement patterns of village societies with the dominant forces of Western colonization as a context for describing City Repair's work. As revealed through this visually stunning event, the multidisciplinary culture of City Repair combines architecture, urban planning, anthropology, community development, public art, permaculture and ecological design in projects that transform space and transfer power to local levels. The presentation is chronological, proceeding from the most elementary and accessible project scales to enormous visionary collaborations involving thousands of people. Each project restates the same essential principles of localization, community participation and placemaking, but the forms always change and grow. As an overall movement, each project builds upon previous successes to manifest larger and larger impacts.

Through a restorative process in which citizens re-imagine and literally re-build their own commons, City Repair is engendering relationships that revitalize the fabric of our local community within the existing context of social isolation. By re-asserting localized village patterns in the city grid, City Repair establishes both the physical and social foundation for sustainable culture.

Sun Nov 12th , Rockridge United Methodist Church
303 Hudson St, Oakland, CA (near Rockridge BART)

Mon, Nov 13th New College of California Creamery,
780 Valencia Street (between 18th and 19th Streets) San Francisco, CA (near 16th St BART)

The Ecological Sanitation Project, the story of SOIL

with Sasha Kramer, Ph.D, Co-Founder of SOIL, Stanford University and Haiti SOIL, http://www.oursoil.org

Join Sasha Kramer Ph.D., post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University and Co-Founder of SOIL, to hear more about the work of SOIL and SOL during the summer and fall of 2006.  The talk will focus SOIL-SOL’s first project, an ecological sanitation project in northern Haiti. Ecological sanitation is an integrated approach to sanitation and soil fertility, where human wastes are treated, composted, and recycled for use in agriculture. This approach has been successfully adopted in communities throughout Africa, Asia and Europe and can have significant impacts on the environment, public health, nutrition and livelihood.

SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) is a newly-formed non-profit organization with a mission to support research and implementation of community-based approaches to soil fertility, erosion control, and water source protection in Haiti. SOIL promotes integrated approaches to the problems of poverty, public health, agricultural productivity, and environmental destruction by developing collaborative relationships between community organizations in Haiti and academics and community leaders internationally. Building communities, building the soil, building the grassroots.

SOIL works in collaboration with the Haitian non-profit organization SOL(Sosyete Oganize pou Lanati).  The two organizations share a mission and were developed in partnership to simultaneously promote international exchange of knowledge and resources, and local grassroots organizing and administration.

Friday, Nov 17th Alameda Point Collaborative
677 West Ranger Blvd., Alameda, CA

Findhorn Ecovillage: Exploring Permaculture for the Inner & Outer Landscapes

with Karl Steyeart educator and community organizer who has worked and learned alongside urban gardeners in inner-city Detroit, Buddhist monks in Nepal, teenage organic farmers in the mountains of Vermont, and downshifters in Ann Arbor. From 2002 to 2005, Karl lived and worked at the Findhorn Community, where he was Program Director for the Findhorn Community Semester http://www.ecovillagefindhorn.com/, a college-level ecovillage-based academic study program. In the fall of 2006, he co-founded a cooperative living-learning community in North Oakland.

This dynamic presentation will explore the Findhorn Community and Ecovillage, a renowned example of sustainable human settlement, in terms of the “inner” (psychological, cultural, spiritual) as well as the “outer” (ecological, economic) dimensions of permaculture and sustainability.

The Findhorn Community, which began in 1962 in a caravan park in northeast Scotland, is known internationally for its experiments with new models of holistic and sustainable living. A major center of holistic education conducting programs for over 4,500 residential visitors a year from over 50 countries, today it is the heart of one of the largest holistic communities in the world and is the center of a rapidly developing ecovillage.

A founder member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), the Findhorn Ecovillage is a tangible demonstration of the links between the spiritual, social and economic aspects of life and is a synthesis of current thinking on sustainable human settlements. It is a constantly evolving model providing solutions to human and social needs.

Karl Steyaert , Friday, Jan 5th
Bodhi House, 5725 Martin Luther King Jr Way (@ Arlington btw 57th and 58th),
Oakland, (510) 658-8194.
(Potluck dinner from 6-7pm)