About Us

We are a public-serving, experiential learning center to showcase and foster sustainable living practices, urban homesteading, community resiliency & preparedness, social justice and artistic expression. Our goal is to incubate a local sustainability hub to allow people to see solutions in practice; to gain access to the knowledge and resources to empower them to take action in their own lives, neighborhoods, towns, cities and bio-regions. We hope to grow this green-center model into communities across the world in partnership with community centers, schools, park & recreation facilities and other local organizations.

Components

Demonstration Stations / Educational Exhibits

In a variety of sustainable practices: Rainwater Collection, Grey Water Systems, Composting, Aquaculture, Renewable Energy Systems (Wind, Solar, Geothermal, Pedal Power, etc), Gardens in a variety of Containers, Rooftop, Window boxes, etc.

Urban Garden/Farm

Vegetables, Fruits, Culinary Herbs, Native Plants, Medicinal Plants, Micro-Greens, Chickens, Bees and other beneficial insects and animals, Nursery & Greenhouse

Workshops

Gardening, Farming, Permaculture & Homesteading, Rainwater Harvesting, Greywater Systems, Natural Building: Cob, Strawbale, recycled/reclaimed materials, Mycelium/Mushroom Remediation, Renewable Energy Systems, Food Justice, Food Security, Slow Food, Composting (including Vermiculture), Arts and Crafts

Green Corps—Resiliency Response Teams

Training & coordinating local volunteers in neighborhood sustainability projects

Art Barn

This is our venue space for events, classes, movie nights and panel discussions and talks, east bay permaculture monthly meeting and more.

Fab Lab

Bicycle Mechanics, Art BIKES, and bicycle trailers, Metal, Wood & Jewelery making. MORE

The Makery

This is our maker space featuring local artists’ creative work using natural materials and environmental themes. MORE

Coworking Space

Our shared working environment offers an alternative to cafes, libraries and your kitchen table. MORE

http://www.livingmandala.com/

Living Mandala designs, facilitates and produces courses, workshops and events as well as offers consultation services that support personal, ecological and socially regenerative practices for green and holistic lifestyles. The mission of Living Mandala is to serve, empower, and promote holistic educators and organizations in order to increase awareness of their work, to create educational programs, to catalyze project activities that implement ecologically and socially regenerative practices of human beings living in greater harmony with each other and their environment.

Grounded in the design science of Permaculture and Whole Systems Design,
Living Mandala works with a triple bottom line of ethics and values: Care of the Earth, Care of People, and Return the Surplus. Living Mandala works with a collective of around 500 skilled educational professionals, and has co-produced over 100 courses workshops, and events the last 4 years from intensive three-week residential Permaculture & Ecovillage Design Certification Courses, weekend workshops, to larger conferences and events like the Harmony Festival Ecovillage, Northern California Permaculture Convergence, Earth Day San Francisco, Financial Permaculture Summit, and others.

http://www.norcalresilience.org/

Vision

The vision of the NorCal Community Resilience Network is to transform our homes, neighborhoods, and communities into vibrant, regenerative places. We are a building a Network of solutionaries – citizen activists, businesses and grassroots organizations who are turning despair into action through people-powered, nature-inspired, and community-based solutions which are addressing some of the most pressing social and environmental problems of our time.

Here in Northern California, we are blessed with an abundance of community groups working to realize the sustainable future we need. The NorCal Community Resilience Network seeks to unite these groups into a coalition that offers strategies for collective impact and builds collaboration for a more resilient world.

Across the globe, people are working to reform, recreate, and reimagine existing systems along more sustainable lines. In our work to build resilient communities, the NorCal Community Resilience Network stands in solidarity with these regenerative efforts and with movements to resist neoliberalism, environmental destruction, and militarization at all levels.

Mission

The NorCal Community Resilience Network  activates and supports community-based and ecological solutions to climate change, economic instability and social inequity toward a Just Transition away from fossil fuels. Our work increases capacity for grassroots projects and programs, builds solidarity across divides of race, class, sector and region, and broadens support for the Northern California community resilience movement as a whole.

Together, we are realizing a Just Transition away from an extractive economy toward holistic, collaborative systems that support human life in self-sustaining harmony with nature.

The First Peoples of this land lived in this way for millennia, integrating the ethics of care for the Earth, the people, and the future through sustainable, “permanent cultures,” which were and continue to be suppressed through colonization. We honor these Indigenous roots of permaculture and seek to address colonial legacies in contemporary social and environmental movements, allowing historically marginalized communities to lead the process of “re-indigenizing the people to the planet.” This is a journey of relearning and unlearning for peoples of all cultural, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds that requires courageous conversations across the divides that separate us.

The NorCal Network envisions its work as part of this collective transformation, in which we are co-creating a model for resilient community care and healing—one that starts at home and spreads out beyond our region to the world at large.