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CSR and a World in Crisis
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been around for many years without making any major impact. The general public remains rather skeptical about the phenomenon, observing that in the vast majority of cases, CSR is nothing more than “greenwash” to give the impression of corporate concern about the environment and the social consequences of their corporate policies, when the reality is that maximising shareholder value is the name of the game, and ot…
A Field Report from Darabkola EDE
In December 2017 the first week of the Ecovillage Design Education course in Iran took place in the village of Darabkola. This report is a summary of our experiences and learnings, with reflections for the future growth of EDEs and the path of sustainable living for the citizens of Iran.
Last December 13 participants from diverse parts of the country arrived in Darabkola to light the opening fire with folk music. We…
My ToT Thailand Experience
by Mariana Koutaka
“I have just completed Gaia Education Training of Trainers (ToT) in southern Thailand as a part of the Gaia certified Awakening Leadership Training where I learnt and practiced amazing ways to facilitate sessions and also some of the meta skills that go beyond traditional training methods.
I saw the effectiveness of participatory facilitation, in which trainers and participants are able to co-create the process in a way that enriches the knowledge and the experie…
Participatory Learning – a Bridge to the Future
by Hiroko Katayama
“For many years my community has been experimenting with different approaches to education as we know that modern society is in crisis. Having forgotten or dismissed our traditional values of sharing and connection with the land, our education system has created a culture where children and the adults they become are isolated from, and in competition with each other, consuming unnecessarily, and disrespecting the rest of the natural world.
In January 2018 I d…
Measuring up – how the UK is performing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Work begins on the first comprehensive assessment of the UK’s performance against the UN Sustainable Development Goals
A major network of leading companies, think tanks, charities, universities, trade unions and professional bodies has reached an important milestone in measuring the UK’s performance against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Organisations including Gaia Education, Good Energy, the Open University and the RSPB are partners of the UK Stakehold…
5 Ways for Social Innovators to Use the Power of the SDGs
by May East
The Sustainable Development Goals are here to stay. If you are an early adopter and have already aligned your core growth strategies to the global framework or if you are just beginning to explore the added value the SDGs can bring to your business, here are 5 ways that can help you unlock the power of the SDGs to propel your social innovation to greater and more widely shared prosperity for all by 2030.
1. Shift to Regenerative Frameworks
The SDGs will c…
Life’s economy is primarily based on collaborative rather than competitive advantage
Excerpt from the Economic Design course
By Daniel Christian Wahl
A holistic understanding of modern evolutionary biology suggests that life evolves by a process of diversification and subsequent integration of diversity through collaboration (John Stewart in BioSystems, 2014). As our focus shifts from individuals and individual species as the unit of survival to the collective of life — its complex dynamic interactions and relationships — we begin to see that collaborative and symbiotic…
SDGs Training for Multipliers in Review from Migrant Communities to Social Innovators
The Sustainable Development Goals have been carefully developed through a three-year process involving UN Member States, 83 national surveys engaging over 7 million people, and thousands of actors from the international community, making it the biggest consultation in UN history. A people-friendly language was adopted at the very beginning of the process to enable the mass global participation invoked at the inception of the Goals.
Transformative Change: conversations with Fritjof Capra
by Daniel Christian Wahl
On Monday 29 January 2018, Gaia Education and Fritjof Capra’s ‘Capra Course’ collaborated in offering a free webinar on ‘Transformative Change, Sustainability and Regeneration’ as part of our recently launched ‘Glocalisers Webinar Series’. I am delighted to have been able to weave this partnership. So much of my own learning — that has informed the content of Gaia Education’s online course in ‘Design for Sustainability’ (GEDS) — has been influenced by Fritjof’s …
In gratitude to Fritjof Capra for planting the seeds of the Regeneration
by Daniel Christian Wahl
Fritjof Capra and his work have had an important influence on my own path towards becoming a glocal change agent in the transition towards diverse regenerative cultures. I first came across his work in the spring of 2000. At the time, I was living in a caravan in the fertile valley of the Alpujarras in Southern Spain, working on a plan to create an ecovillage and sustainability education centre that would demonstrate to people how to ‘live the solutions, rather than…