Grassroots resiliency points the way to global solution
Despair sucks!
With so much of it surfacing daily — whether shouted from headlines or poured out from the hearts of loved ones — many people have come to mistake despair for reality. But for the 40,000 volunteers working annually on projects sponsored by members of the Coordinating Committee of International Voluntary Service (CCIVS) the world is ripening with hope and possibility — possibility for environmental sustainability in local communities, for empowerment of marginalized people, and even, for lasting peace. These are not buzzwords, but experiences unfolding in CCIVS worksites across the globe, from impoverished communities on the Pine Ridge Reservation in North America to hotbeds of hatred and conflict in the holy land.
Vanessa Bolin, an Indigenous woman whose people are Choctaw, Saponi and Cherokee, reflects on promising grassroots initiatives like the ones CCIVS sponsors. She recently served as a medic for the Indigenous Wisdom and Permaculture Skills Convergence (IWPSC) held on the Pine Ridge ranch of Lakota visionary and permaculturist Bryan Deans, director of the Oglala Lakota Cultural and Economic Revitalization Initiative (OLCERI). In late summer 2018, Lakota community members and nearly 100 volunteer allies from near and far attended the second annual Convergence. Bolin and her Skoskomish partner traveled 1700 miles one-way from her home in Virginia to support her brothers and sisters and share her experiences as a member of the First Nations of turtle island.
“I’ve lived on a reservation; I know all the problems,” says Bolin. “I think people like Bryan and the community that has come together, the volunteers, are building a sustainable way of life. Bryan has this vision of crowding out all the mess with the [sustainable resources] he is building. This should not be the exception. It should be the rule…. This should be all over, and not just on the reservation, but across the world.”
Victoria Lovelock shares Bolin’s ambition and leads the volunteer movement at the international level as Director of the CCIVS, an independent NGO under the banner of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). She brings unshakeable faith in grassroots initiatives like those being undertaken by Deans and others, directly tackling problems in their immediate communities. Not because she thinks this is righteous or heroic, but because it works!
Demonstration projects at the IWPSC represent the CCIVS spirit in action and point toward what is possible when multiple stakeholder groups come together to support a common cause.
Convergence participants, with guidance from workshop leaders experienced in applying permaculture principles, helped construct the foundation and trombe wall for an Indigenous Wisdom Center using recycled tires and rammed earth; broke ground and amended soil for garden beds to grow edible plants and traditional medicines; erected high tunnels around garden beds to extend the growing season; finished construction of a cob rocket stove for outdoor cooking and comfort; and more.
Deans bundles his passion for environmental stewardship with the traditional wisdom of his Lakota elders, reminding us that, unlike profit-driven enterprises, tribal elders considered the well-being of seven generations into the future. He speaks softly and without malice, summing up struggles common to many marginalized people:
“Here in Lakota territories the damage has been done in 250 years,” Deans points out. “[T]ime is running out that we can do something. We can use the resources we have left to create soil systems, to do conservation practices needed, to change our building styles and to change our consumption styles to a point that it actually works. What we have to do is prepare the 6th and 7th generations for the social change that has to happen. This is a shared vision that I’m putting out here. We all have to think in a holistic fashion in our everyday tasks. I can’t do it by myself.”
Deans discovered strong allies among nationwide permaculture networks. Initially, the idea to expand support for OLCERI’s regenerative projects through on-site workshops originated with fellow permaculture designer Megan Szrom, who interned at OLCERI over the summer of 2012. Since then, the idea has been building momentum, resulting in consecutive events in Spring 2017 and again in Fall 2018.
Deans also has established alliances with like-minded Lakota program directors, notably, Christinia Eala, Executive Director of Colorado-based Tiyospaye Winyan Maka, and who played an instrumental role in engaging the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) at Colorado State University with the Pine Ridge project. After many years of running homesteading projects across Pine Ridge, Eala saw an opportunity to pursue a long-held dream for both organizations: building a community center which could anchor a demonstration site. Eala and Deans imagine flexible work spaces that accommodate teaching classrooms, reservation-based office space, staging areas for community members, perhaps, even a dormitory.
To make it so, Eala plunged into the painstaking paperwork and was designated Community Liaison to the Community Engineering Corps, EWB’s domestic arm. As a result, student engineers from EWB/CSU, along with Glenn Gilbert, project advisor and structural engineer for the Indigenous Wisdom Center, attended the 2018 Convergence to guide Phase 1 of the natural building they helped design.
Lakota leaders have come to realize that OL/CERI is not just a single project for a single tribe. Rather, CERI (Cultural and Economic Revitalization Initiatives) are achievable initiatives for many Indigenous communities. Eala and Deans now look to empower related efforts on behalf of other tribes, many located in reasonable proximity to EWB chapters nationwide.
Similar indigenous awakenings are unfolding globally, reports Lovelock. She explains that 200 voting member organizations of CCIVS represent extensive voluntary networks that dispatch and host volunteers to worksites through grassroots not-for-profit organizations in over 100 different countries. In addition, CCIVS includes associate (non-voting) members and corresponding organizations that also propose and run community-based projects.
Lovelock’s zeal for grassroots initiatives arises from years of experience starting from the bottom up. “I’ve gone through many different levels of the organization,” she says. “I started as a volunteer. I’ve been a facilitator, I’ve been a trainer, I’ve been a work-camp leader.… I volunteered, and it changed my life. Fifteen years later I’m still here.”
As current CCIVS Director, she says, “There’s times when I’m in the office and in a hyper-institutional context, because I do a lot of representation to UNESCO and to the UN. But when [I] go back to the grassroots and meet with the members and see what’s going on … it gives me the energy I need to continue.”
As an example, she cites a Palestinian Territories project she visited in Jericho. Although the planned olive harvest was disrupted, the CCIVS member organization deemed that they could insure the safety of the volunteers. She marvels at this resilience, pointing out, What’s super rich with the international voluntary service is that…in spite of conflict, [international] volunteering is continuous in Palestine.”
Lovelock says, “It’s really about bringing people together from different nationalities and different backgrounds in order to work together for a common cause, and that common cause is defined by the community. It’s a bottom up approach.”
In an effort to better communicate the scope of work going on across the global network, CCIVS members identified five big themes and six different support measures that represent common threads running through the projects. Themes include: peace and human rights; environment and sustainability; poverty reduction and health promotion; cultural heritage and diversity; and participation and social inclusion. Within these themes, CCIVS members define their goals and then create projects that support local problem-solving, self-reliance, and resiliency programs at the grassroots.
Like Lovelock, David Axtel, a project coordinator with founding member Service Civil International (SCI), communicates the allure of peace-building experiences. His passion was ignited by Peace Corps service, and after he enrolled at the University of Colorado, he sought ways to continue. The first opening came while attending programs by CU’s International Club.
“One of the programs in the late 1970’s was a guy that had done nine work-camps with SCI,” Axtel says.
Motivated to learn more, Axtell contacted SCI and within a month had helped organize a project on the Navajo Reservation. From that day to this, Axtel has had no desire to quit. He gradually rose through the SCI ranks and now serves as a SCI-USA project coordinator. He was the first to offer Eala the means to recruit international volunteers for summer homestead builds on Pine Ridge beginning in 2009. Eala structures the experience using the CCIVS model — consecutive camps from 2–3 weeks in duration, each accommodating up to fifteen volunteers, with generally no more than two volunteers per nationality in each camp — an extraordinary multi-cultural encounter.
“Any person that volunteers knows the impact of that experience on their lives,” Lovelock says. “But it’s so hard for us to explain what we do.”
To address the difficulty of measuring the impact of a volunteer experience, CCIVS has been working closely with the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Champaign. The goal is to develop appropriate metrics to evaluate the impact from two perspectives: impact on individual volunteers and impact on the communities they serve
So far, the findings align with a growing body of evidence supporting the international voluntary service mindset over the development mindset of aids workers. Equipped with proof, Lovelock is cautiously optimistic that data will help CCIVS raise critical resources needed to expand programs on the ground.
Lovelock stands by the 1970s saying from a Queensland, Australia, indigenous group that is at “the core behind everything that we do.” It goes like this:
“If you’ve come to help me you’re wasting your time, but if you’ve come because you believe that your liberation is linked to mine, then let us work together.”
Bolin agrees.
“As a people, our ceremonies, our prayers, our resiliency, our belief in each other and the land, that’s what keeps us going.… I have a sense of hope for the people. We need to build up hope here, all over, on every reservation.”
Through CCIVS, 40,000 volunteers stand ready to help.
