Ecovillage Design Education course in Auroville

Auroville Today: What exactly is the EDE course?

Kavitha: Experienced eco-village educators around the world have worked on the curriculum, which is a way of looking at existing communities or designing new ones from a sustainability perspective. It covers four dimensions of sustainability: worldview, social, ecological and economical, over four weeks.

For the Auroville EDE we added a fifth week to design new projects.

Other courses, like Living Routes, have been offered in Auroville on the theme of sustainability, but there have only been one or two spaces available for young Aurovilians, so we decided to make this course accessible to Aurovilians first and then see if we could get students from elsewhere. In the end, about a third of the participants were from Auroville, a third from the bioregion, and the rest from India and the larger world. We were very happy to have so many in the group from the local region.

What attracted people to do this course in Auroville?

Serena: Some people came from other communities wanting to know how Auroville works and deals with similar challenges to theirs. And the fact that this course was in Auroville made it special for many of them. All over the world, people look up to Auroville as the biggest and one of the oldest intentional communities.

Kavitha: The young Aurovilians who attended wanted to initiate projects we had already discussed in YouthLink, but to do this we needed some more tools and to understand Auroville better.

Give a rough overview of the programme.

Kavitha: The course was designed by YouthLink members with some guidance from Joss in Pitchandikulam and from Ethan from the Global Ecovillage Networking over Skype. Each week was devoted to a particular aspect of sustainability, which we looked at in different ways. We looked at it, firstly, through the perceptions of our group, then we looked at Auroville, then the bioregion and finally the global context. We would close each week with a reflection on what we had studied and learned.

For the first week, we looked at the social aspect. We began by doing exercises within the group to understand our own process of community forming. We observed how, after getting through the initial stages, there were points of conflict when people got tired and and we learned how to deal with them.

Eugenie: During that first week we did a conflict resolution course, then we looked at Auroville history and, finally, at the different systems of governance around the world.

Kavitha: The next week we spent on ecology, during which we visited many different Auroville farms and foresters. We also spent a couple of days in the bioregion.

The theme of the third week was economy. This was designed by Michael and Natasha. The first few days we looked at the global economic system that is so dominant on this planet, and we learned how destructive it is. Then we started looking at alternatives, like alternative currencies and gift and sharing economies.

It was interesting to do this in Auroville because, as Michael pointed out, almost every type of economy is represented here.

Eugenie: One of the things we enjoyed in that week was looking at the local economy outside Auroville, which is how India traditionally used to work. We talked to a couple who run a tea shop in a local village and what struck me most was that there was no accounting; they relied completely on the honesty of the customers who would settle their bills only once or twice a month. It was completely trust-based.

Kavitha: The purpose of the fourth week, worldviews, was to look at what socially-engaged spirituality can be, and aspects such as reconnecting with nature and transformation of consciousness. We also looked at the background thoughts that cause us to create the system we are in now. And then to understand the change that needs to happen to allow us to shift to a more holistic, sustainable worldview. We discussed the paradigm shifts necessary for global awakening and how we want to participate in social revolutions.

Serena: In that week, we talked about the fear and separation that underlie the present worldview, and we did some shadow work where we talked about the hidden areas of ourselves.

Kavitha: In the final design week, each participant presented the project they came here to work upon. Then we selected four topics to focus upon for the week. There was Pitchandikulam, The Hive, a new community project and a game to assist in sustainable development.

Serena: We split up and chose the project we resonated with most. The approach we all used was the ‘Dragon Dreaming Process’. This is a training methodology based upon principles of personal and group empowerment where 25% of the time is spent on dreaming or visioning, 25% on planning, 25% on doing and 25% on celebrating.

Kavitha: We felt the celebration aspect was something we could really learn to do more of in Auroville.

Serena: Three of the chosen projects were Auroville projects. The fourth was inspired by a conflict resolution game we played during the first week. This game was about architects going to a tribal village with the idea of building a bridge to help the villagers. The architects discover they can’t just build a bridge; first of all, they have to learn about the local customs and environment.

This was the inspiration for the game we developed where, among other things, we gave voices to plants, animals, water etc. so they could be included as stakeholders in any development scheme.

Regarding the Auroville projects, did anything new or interesting emerge?

Kavitha: Regarding Pitchandikulam, the group worked on networking Pitchandikulam outreach projects, including the educational programmes they could connect up with in Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

We also redesigned the Hive project, such as integrating an aspect that involved experimenting with other kinds of economy. We plan to have a shop where we could put Auroville artwork or products and have explanatory stickers on products that are part of the gift economy or sharing economy. We could also experiment with something like a Time Bank [A Time Bank is a community system where a person who volunteers one hour of their time helping someone else gains an hour time credit. They can then use that time credit or their accrued time credits to receive help from someone else. Eds.].

The Hive kitchen could also be run as part of the gift economy. Regarding the hostel, obviously we would need to generate some income from it, but we would also like to provide spaces for people like researchers who can stay for free in exchange for something they offer to the community.

Serena: The other Auroville project was the Joy of Impermanence project, which is a concept for an actual community in Auroville. It is based on the realization that nothing is permanent in life but impermanence can be a source of great creativity as it can lessen the fear of making mistakes. In this community, we only want to use natural materials, to foster a do-it-yourself mentality, and to showcase all the different solutions that Auroville has come up with over the last 50 years, while coming up with new ones.

Eugenie: In order to experiment as much as possible, each house will be different. There will not be one house that looks the same. The results of the research will be fed back to Auroville as we want to document everything, including the human process.

Serena: We have seven core members who will be the first residents. But initially we are focusing on building the team because we want to have very strong foundations before we go into physical building.

The idea is that the community will not inhabit a permanent space but will move to another piece of Auroville land every 5 to 7 years to help protect them from encroachment and to enrich them.

What was the effect upon the participants of the five-week course?

Serena: I think the course helped some people to widen their worldview. Even networking with 35 other participants opened up everybody’s mind. And many people refer to what they have learned here as ‘seeds’ which they will take back to plant in their communities and workplaces.

I spent two years traveling the world making films about communities, so I have a lot of first-hand experience of the content of this course. But what I really learned in this course is the importance of people, of the social element, in sustainability. In the video, Nikethena, one of the course coordinators, makes the same point. In the end, she said, it became a very intense space where she learned not so much from the content as from the group process we were engaged in.

Eugenie: It was also the human aspect that touched me. I lived for seven years in an aboriginal tribe in Australia and made a movie with them: it was a life-changing experience. After that, I missed community. I traveled around Europe for six months trying out different communities but did not find exactly what I wanted. But during this course I experienced community again in a very intense way. And I feel that Auroville is the place I want to stay.

Kavitha: I think I was also searching for how to connect back to Auroville after being out for seven years. When I was very young, I experienced a real community in Aspiration, but since Auroville has grown so big we have lost the personal contact. I felt a lot of pain in the last years because I felt our collective spirit and trust had deteriorated. What I learned during these few weeks is that there are very simple methods to bring it back. We used some of these in our group-building exercises, so now we have a sense of what we need to rebuild the community, and the people who can help us do that.

During this course, we also developed a good relationship with people from Sri Lanka. They have some land they would like to develop there and we thought we could export some of our ideas and experience to them, while we could learn from that society’s deep knowledge of conflict resolution. I think this link-up could be one of the strongest outcomes of the EDE course.

There could be an interchange between their youth and our youth. Before the course, we had designed a youth exchange programme to encourage young people to experience different communities. Now we have a list of communities who would like to participate and we would like to launch it soon.

Presumably, more courses like this will be held in Auroville in the future. What changes would you make?

Serena: Most participants felt the main thing to improve in future was to have a smaller group. Thirty five people was way too many. When you have to move people around to different places or when everybody is expected to speak in a big circle, there are major time management issues.

The diversity of the participants had its benefits but there were also drawbacks. Everybody had very different levels of knowledge and experience, so maybe this has to be controlled more in the next course. If people already have a certain level of shared knowledge, you don’t have to start at zero.

Eugenie: As Nikethena put it in the video, having to cater to many different individuals reduced the complexity and depth of what could be done. A smaller group with a shared platform of knowledge would make this easier.

Kavitha: I agree. Future courses will probably be shorter and more focused but now we have a good basis and the confidence to continue.

Finally, I’m very grateful for the huge support we received from Pitchandikulam’s experience and wisdom and the larger Auroville community. More than 45 Aurovilians were involved in giving talks and showing people around and many others helped in other ways. We are also immensely grateful for all those abroad who have supported this programme, making it possible for many youth to receive scholarships as well as to cover the basic costs of the programme implementation.

We have no idea when or where we may create space for another course like this, but I feel like EDE has already shifted something deeply within our group and within Auroville.

A documentary about the course can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a9vx0U6Exg