One of the fastest growing initiatives of GEN is its educational program, with courses such as the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) running in over 35 countries and on all continents, with the encouragement and promotion of local trainers at its core. The EDE is a 4-week training that empowers communities to determine and consciously design their own course towards a sustainable future. The curriculum has been recognised and endorsed as setting a standard for the United Nations’ ‘Decade of Education for Sustainable Development – 2005-2014’. The EDE is universal in scope but local in application, directed towards honouring and drawing out valuable cultural diversity. Rather than losing valuable local knowledge in the process of ‘modernisation’, the aim is to honour and preserve local wisdom and sustainable traditions, while creatively merging these with innovative technologies, wherever appropriate. The participants in EDU courses don´t just learn skills - they form community, find empowerment, create projects and start-up initiatives. Just recently, the first Women's EDE took place in South Africa and, like many EDE courses, a new initiative was born: 'River of Life' - to inspire and empower women throughout the world to start projects for sustainability.
During the last years, education tools have been complemented by various online tools, helping to build a network of integrity between the
ecovillages, related movements and those who are looking for answers and solutions, the most recent example being the Solution Library. With the help of six brilliant young women from the Islamic world (from Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and Palestine), support from partners in Egypt (CultNat and the Bibliotheca Alexandria), and financial support from the Anne Lindh Foundation, GEN developed this online access portal to sustainable solutions that began with a first collection of 80 examples. The Solution Library of appropriate technologies will be further developed and collaboratively filled by many to replicate best practices in resilience and sustainability. (http://solution.ecovillage.org) As the last GEN conference showed, the young generation of the ecovillages have created a very vital platform to connect and co-operate together: NextGEN. The presence and commitment of this highly motivated and educated younger generation were overwhelmingly inspiring. Presentations of projects from, and for, young people from Brazil, Canada, USA, Thailand, Zimbabwe and other countries, showed the richness and purity of this youthful network: young people who easily see themselves as a planetary family, ready to help each other and the world. While NextGEN has been growing for some years, there is a new sub-group of GEN that was birthed at the conference. GEN Elders is a new network of older people in ecovillages who wish to connect, contribute their experiences, and organize a way of coming together and raising their voices in solidarity with GEN.
www.ecovillage.org