CO-OPERATIONS
"For me, GEN is the UN of the communities", says Charly Ehrenpreis, co-founder of Tamera and participant of the last GEN conference in Switzerland. "It is our extended family, it is the community of the communities." Robert Hall, longtime member of the GEN council, stated: "With GEN we could create a highly sophisticated organizational structure, which is respected by co-operation partners on many levels, providing a platform for collaboration, fundraising and knowledge transfer at global and grassroots levels." Currently, within GEN, the Global South is thriving: the Ecovillage Network of South America (CASA) and the Ecovillage Network of Africa (GEN-Africa) have strongly emerged in the past years to join the other three broad regional organisations that GEN-International works through: the Ecovillage Network of Oceania and Asia (GENOA), the Ecovillage Network of the English and French speaking Americas (ENA), and the Ecovillage Network of Europe (GEN-Europe). While the communities in the North tend to focus on a scaling down of ecological footprints, in the South the question may be more of a need to ‘scale up’ in order to meet basic needs. Many participants of the GEN conference this year stated that the most heartwarming experience of being in GEN is the connection with ecovillages and projects from the Global South. Testimonies of Congolese and Colombian experiences and success stories from Thailand and Cambodia are most convincing and have an healing effect on the global legacy of colonialism and slavery. Within GEN, traditional villages from the Global South find direct partners in industrialized countries that are neither patronizing nor leading them even more into dependency and globalized destruction, but share the same vision and, to a certain extent, the same lifestyle. Even in the most despairing situations, people are coming together, connecting with the land on which they live, connecting with each other, and creating alternatives and ways to sustain the Earth and each other.