Keystone Communities sustaining life through polycrisis

We are proud to announce that we have received funding for a new project – “Keystone Communities- Sustaining Life through polycrisis.” We are grateful to the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation for their ongoing willingness to support our work of weaving ways of hope, resilience, and local empowerment during a deepening polycrisis.

This project is a continuation, widening, and deepening of our current Ecovillage Resilience project. It will allow us to include more people and communities, provide new learning opportunities, and continue to weave knowledge exchange and solidarity throughout the GEN network.

The Keystone Community project aims are to;

🗣️ Scale and amplify local community leadership for polycrisis resilience

🪜 Build additional capacity, tools, and frameworks for local communities to assess, monitor, and act on systemic risk and respond to disaster

🎭 Enhance social & psychological resilience to polycrisis through the use of art & narrative

What is a Keystone Community?

We use the term Keystone Community as a tool for navigating the way forward together. The name is inspired by our members, indigenous scholars and civilisations, resilience thinking, and ecology.

A Keystone Community, as we think of it, is a species that can play a powerfully positive role in restoring and safeguarding life-affirming conditions in its region. Keystone communities are based on values that encourage long-term thinking and solidarity, that leverage culture to craft (meaning, resistance, recovery and regeneration in the face of crisis), while absorbing shocks, avoiding tipping points, and retaining the capacity for system transformation.

ReGENerating a positive role for human beings

Through this project and our ongoing work, GEN hopes to play a small part in equipping people everywhere with inspiration, resources and tools to claim for themselves the power of imagining a positive role for human beings on Earth, and of creating or upholding autonomous but connected local communities able to act as safety nets and sources of resilience, regeneration, and meaning during deepening ecological and social unraveling – not only for human beings, but for all life.

We are so grateful to get to continue this heart-opening and challenging work with the participating ecovillages and share the learnings for all.