2016 Convergence RED Talk Presentation: Gaia U: 10 Years of Supporting EcoSocial Designers. What’s Next?

2016 Convergence Panel: Our 200 Year Plan: Designing our Future Together

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Liora (Alejandra Liora Adler) has been active in the field of social permaculture, with a focus on community and event organization since her studies in Psychology and Education in the 1960’s.  Her hands-on experience led her to participate in a traveling theatre community (The Illuminated Elephants) that left California, USA for a two year tour in Mexico ending with her co-initiating Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage (Mexico) in 1982.  She is also the co-founder of la Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz, a mobile ecovillage which traveled in caravan from Mexico to Brazil overland over 13 years beginning in 1996.  Liora was an integral part of this project for seven years and was a lead organizer for an 800 person gathering, Call of the Condor, which took place in 2003 in Machu Picchu, Peru.   She was instrumental in the creation of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, the Ecovillage networks in Jamaica and Cuba, and served on the Board of the Global Ecovillage Network from 2000-2004. She was one of the New York UN representatives during that time.

Having lived in ecovillages and intentional communities for most of her adult life, she has a first hand knowledge of the joys and challenges and has offered presentations and workshops on Ecovillages as well as Community Participation and Decision Making globally.  Together with Andrew Langford, she founded Gaia University, now into its 9th year, a non-conventional university dedicated to supporting peoples’ self-initiated action learning pathways in the fields guided by Permaculture ethics (transition and pluriversity). www.gaiauniversity.org. She currently lives with her husband on an almond orchard in the Capay Valley of CA, and alongside her Gaia U work will assist him in the demonstration of the use of permaculture techniques for the regeneration of almond and other nut tree orchards.

Andrew Langford is the co-president Of Gaia University. Andrew is an unusualist, a possibilist and a lover of small-scale living associated with large-scale thinking. In the early 1970’s, influenced in part by the book

Andrew and his family supplemented their income through this 10-year period by cultivating an intensive smallholding, growing vegetables, wheat, pigs, chickens, geese and sheep. This smallholding provided essential resources and taught Andrew a profound life-lesson: people with willing hands and access to even modest amounts of fertile land and viable seed can provide for a good portion of their own needs, and this relative self-reliance confers upon them a great deal of freedom.

This experience primed Andrew to be an early adopter of permaculture design thinking when it first spread through Europe in the 1980’s. He soon became the first permaculture design teacher in Britain, and had a successful business  designing at garden and farm scale for private clients, and designing urban retrofits for local governments. He also his applied his qualifications from a Diploma in Management Studies and an M.Sc. in Organizational Analysis and Development to set the Permaculture Association of Britain on a successful course towards establishment. In 1993, Andrew designed and implemented the Diploma in Applied Permaculture system, an action learning worknet for the development of professional permaculture designers that has become a basis for capacity building operations in several northern European countries.

Andrew is a strong advocate for participatory learning and decision-making and is skilled in a variety of facilitation methods, including Future Search and Open Space Technology. He is the author of Designing Productive Meetings and Events, a field manual for UN Agenda 21 facilitators, and a recognized teacher of Re-evaluation Counseling, which promotes the discharge of internal distress and resolution of rigid, patterned thinking as primary routes towards the emergence of healthy, intelligent human cultures.

In Gaia University, Andrew champions action-based learning arising from thoughtful and protracted engagement over more common cerebral academic approaches. He oversees the development of an IT infrastructure based largely on open source platforms and supports the Gaia University community in the activation of complementary currency and project networking systems based on agile, leading-edge designs.

2017 Workshop: International Permaculture CoLab – Advances of the Next Big Step