Hello dear ones,
It’s been a long time since I have written on the blog. I have been on vacation and right after it, we had a LAND training, and the subject for this week’s blog will be about it.
Starting from 5th of September, some of the members of the Green School Village have gathered in the Eco center of the Public Environmental Centre for Sustainable Development, in Ezerets for LAND training. The leading person of the training was Cathrine Dolleris. She is an invited expert, and a part of the “Capacity Building of Permaculture in Bulgaria 2.0” project for increasing the capacity of the members of our organization. We started with welcoming session and introduction to the place from our host Iliyan. We got to know each other’s names and where we are from. Some of the member I have only met online, and some of them I haven’t met at all. After lunch, we continued with the sessions and presentations of the LAND network in the Nordic countries.
The first eight days of the training, we spent in Ezerets. We had our morning circles every morning after breakfast that were led by Cathrine. We were doing some stretches, had a sharing of what we have learned the previous day, check in with couples and finished with a song that we all sang together. This was so much fun.
The sessions were divided in two parts, one before lunch and the second part was after our afternoon break. We learned through both practical and interesting games and also presentations and more theoretically the meaning of the LAND network. We were presented with how the network operates, its structure and roles. We each got the chance to take some of the roles and to go through the whole assessment process. We learned about how to create a livelihood from our LAND centers and financing. All of the knowledge was backed up by personal examples and experiences from both Cathrine and other working centers. My project coordinator Mihaela also assisted with the sessions, by introducing the criteria by badges, evolved model of LAND criteria. This is her invention and it is the first time that this kind of “step by step” model has been applied. One of the sessions was dedicated to designing a LAND center. It was interesting to go through designing process and which elements can and need to be added to the permacultural design. All the members were very involved through discussions, conversations and sharing their own experience with permaculture, networking and life in general. The subject that was repeated many times was how to make this work in our country and in our organization, what can we take and moderate so it can be more suitable for our experience.
In the evenings, after diner we usually had a video call with international LAND coordinators from Estonia, Norway, Denmark, England, and Finland. In one of the evenings we had a premiere of the movie, that we (Ivo from “Blagodat” and I) made about LAND in Denmark, and also an evening with one of our fellow members, Varvara, who made a presentation about the design for her place and her experience.
We also visited Helene’s Bee Garden, that is also located in Ezerets. It was such a great example of creativity, sustainability and living in harmony with nature. For me personally, it was a great inspiration. In the last day there was an assessment on her project and she received two of the badges from the LAND criteria. Badge A for education and demonstration and Badge D for LAND Network. I use this chance to publicly congratulate her, for getting closer to her LAND accreditation. As a present the center received a gift, the ethic cards and the permaculture principles cards both from David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, that were created during this project
She (Helene) also gave us a session about introduction to sociocracy, followed by a session from Cathrine with a teamwork sociocratic exercise in which all of us created the vision and the mission for the Bulgarian LAND network, that you can see in the first collage. Sociocracy as a form of governance is used in most LAND networks.
The second part of the training continued in Sofia, but for this I will tell you more in the up-coming blog. I hope I find you all in good health.
Love,
Marija
