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Sustainability Action Areas

Currently we have sustainability activities underway in the following areas: agricultural land and food security, community resiliency and well-being, emergency response and community preparedness, energy, health care, housing and multi-level seniors care, sustainable economics: community currency, transportation priorities and actions, and water. To see what each group is up to click on the individual topic.

Learning

October 24, 2009

Convenor:

Participants:

Nancy Hetherington Peirce, Veronica Hartman, Lawrence Spero, Shelagh Huston, David Carrington, Robbie Huston, Mary Wilson

Goal: Thrival

‘Thrival’ is defined as moving beyond simple survival to become a thriving community.

Objectives:

  • Increase learning capacity
  • Learning on a personal level what to do (without power for example) and the large context (no power? What happens to the global community?)
  • Making connections between different initiatives – considering how our actions affect others
  • Gaining the ability to think wisely about complex issues
  • Gaining a broad view of sustainability
  • All of us re-learning for ourselves
  • Need to learn what’s behind the “simple, convenient” ways of being we have uncritically accepted

What’s a learning community?

  • Committed to intentional experiences for learning
  • Committed to acting on the learning (Knowledge translation)
  • Collaborative, networked
  • Sharing and learning together, not only waiting for the experts
  • Sharing beyond the narrow boundaries of those in the group
  • Gathering and transfer of information
  • Dissemination of information
  • Responding to issues that seem to be important
  • Keep Going

Short and Long Term Actions:

A. Long term Action: Increase resources for learning

Short term action:

  • Develop a human resource bank of people who are knowledgeable about things
  • Public access to resources (for example internet access)
  • Humans available to help people contextualize (knowledge brokers).

B. Long term action: Increase ease of access to learning

Short term actions:

  • Physical centre where people can come for learning (Commons) – multiple entrances/exits)
  • Provide incentives – community-building such as food and coffee
  • Internet access also requires places to access internet
  • Make the commons a place where knowledge transfer occurs

Resources:

  • The Commons – as centre, and also for dissemination
  • Garden Club (Friday night group
  • The Library
  • Island Futures
  • The sustainability network
  • Phi Betta Kappa
  • Agriculture Association
  • computer user group
  • Hope centre
  • School
  • Island School of Building
  • Boat school
  • Etc., etc.

Measuring Success

Recognizing that the human to human connection is critical – “success” cannot be measured by size of an information bank.