The power of celebration and togetherness
Community activists from across Europe — in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK — gathered online to launch the Communities for Future Sessions on 21st October. We toasted each other and everyone working for a regenerative future, and enjoyed a live music performance.
Celebration easily becomes something we only reserve time for on very special occasions, a couple of times a year. Yet we all know that celebrating charges us with positive energy, opens us to deeper connection and marks moments that linger in the memory long after.
Ideally, celebration is an integral part of all phases of community-led projects, in bigger and smaller measures. In essence, celebration is an attitude and a practice that we can foster in our daily lives — in how we speak, in how we think of ourselves and of others, in how we allow ourselves to pause, to feel and to embrace the world around us.
With all this in mind we launched our series of monthly Communities for Future sessions with — a celebration! We got together in an online space to celebrate the achievements of community-led initiatives in 2020.
We heard voices from different corners of Europe, sharing recent inspirations and stories from local communities. We learnt about Ikikaiku foundation in Finland returning private land back to commons, the German regional Communities for Future workshop presenting community-led approaches to policy makers, how in Edible Edinburgh under-privileged children are coming to community gardens and how Suderbyn ecovillage got the Swedish national Energy Globe Award — and much more. Moreover, we enjoyed a live music performance by the Amsterdam-based composer Kate Honey, of a piece called ‘Resilience’, composed exclusively for this occasion.
We raised a toast — and this was equally for ALL OF YOU working on the ground for climate resilience and for a regenerative future. Keep up the good work! And join us for our upcoming Communities for Future Sessions to share your stories!
Our series of monthly online sessions is meant as a space for building connection and a sense of belonging in an international community of peers, for finding our collective voice as a broad movement of community-led initiatives and for building our capacities as changemakers. We want to enable collaboration and support across geographic distances and across different community-led initiatives that all contribute to the same cause: for building a healthier, fairer and more sustainable world. Everyone engaged in community-led initiatives is welcome, just as well as people interested in getting to know these approaches or in supporting them. Please spread the word and join us in numbers!
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