An extensive EU-funded collaboration project with the name ECOVILLAGES, recently started operations and will run for a three-year period 2011-2013. It focuses on a survey of eco-villages around the Baltic Sea with a view to promoting ecovillages as innovative sustainable rural development. During the project, various approaches, problems and methods of starting and developing ecovillages such as in areas like eco-technologies, eco-practices like agriculture/garden and social community building will be documented and toolkits for ecovillage initiators developed. The project is funded by the EU Baltic Sea Region Programme (Interreg) with 1. 46 M EUR, dubbed a flagship of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region and awarded the status of Baltic 21 Lighthouse project by the Council of Baltic Sea States. GEN Europe has become an Associate Partner of the project and will benefit directly by strengthening its presence in Northern Europe. more

Various activities have been held to support the emergence of GEN-Africa as an independent branch of the global network. One of them was Congo Conference which was held from the 11th until the 13th of May 2011, in Kinshasa, addressing issues of sustainable development and permaculture in the DR Congo. The other activity was North Africa Project, a project financed by the German foreign Ministry under the title ‘Supporting the emergence of ecovillage strategies for climate change adaptation and stability in the region’. This comes as an important recognition of the work of GEN. Part of that was also launching a new website which is available at http://gen-africa.org/. This is another step in the process of the emergence of GEN-Africa as an independent national network, supported by GEN-Europe. To join Africans Egypt Conference at Sekem happened on the weekend of 18-22 November, 2011. Over sixty Africans from many different countries and backgrounds, gathered at the farm site of SEKEM, a model for sustainable business development located about sixty kilometers from Cairo, Egypt. Education about ecovillages is crucial for further development therefore we are happy that Africa has attended EDE in Sieben Linden and also organized EDE in Senegal. more

The Global Ecovillage network (GEN) and GEN Africa initiated the first Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course in South Africa at Lynedoch Ecovillage in Stellenbosch, approximately 50km outside Cape Town. The course was funded by Heidehof Stiftung and Lush Cosmetics. 

23 Participants coming from various African countries and abroad gathered at Lynedoch Eco-village in Stellenbosch to witness and take part in the first EDE course held in South Africa. A mixed group of people passionately seeking to (re)connect to other people and find ways to live more sustainably with the earth.  more

These workshops were fully funded by the EU, including participants travel and subsistence costs as well as organization and facilitation. 

Communicate Yourself! Workshop, November 2011 

This intensive workshop was held from the 27th of November until the 4th of December in Sieben Linden. Participants from 18 countries were perfecting their communication skills, shared their ideas and practiced to facilitate and harvest group conversations. The program contained a lot of exercises and gave useful tools to help community building in the future. The participants stayed in contact after the course to help each other's project the best they can. more

Back in 2007 John George from THREAD, Orissa, India took part in the first EDE in Sieben Linden, Germany. He brought with him news and inspiring images of a women’s movement: women taking an oath over fire as they step into leadership – pledging to safeguard their communities, their forests, their children; climbing on tables and pitching speeches to each other; in political protest to counter the potential of Monsanto to destroy seed heritage. Back then, John and I hatched a dream to bring the EDE to Orissa in order to further empower the Orissa Nari Samaj women’s movement and explore the possibility of recognizing their villages as ecovillages. Four years passed before this dream came true. more

We are creating a European Learning Partnership that brings together the expertise of different European organisations for lifelong adult education in the field of social, economical and ecological sustainability, funded by the EU Lifelong Learning Program.