EcoEconomy Course
direct link to this page >> www.EcoEconomy.NodoEspiral.net
Launching a pioneering EcoEconomy course, an innovative training & support programme for EcoInvestment Networks and Activists, working at any level & scale.
Whether you're already changing the economy in small or larger ways, or just beginning to see the wider picture & have no idea how to contribute, want to launch or perfect your own eco-business or help change the local economy with complementary currencies ... we've created a space to support you to grow as an EcoEconomist. We need ALL conscious citizens to become EcoEconomists now, join us!
Free Conferences as an introduction
This course is also offered - at the same time - in spanish, see
http://bit.ly/CursoEcoEconomía
We'll be sending news about this course soon to people on our mailing list
for occasional news &
invitations to free conferences
What we aim to provide these new brave pioneers are these five elements - what we think we all need, if we are taking some action in transiting our lives, families or communities to a more sustainable society:
YouTube direct link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWs_L_fIE-8
Why this Course
Many people are now embarking on the very important job of designing an alternative economic system that can take over from the currently collapsing one, in big or very small ways.
There are many of us, working on many branches of this same forest. All kinds of work need doing & all are very important, as we need new types of sustainable businesses, new kinds of banks, new kinds of money, to make community currencies much more effective, we need better local connections of all kinds, to educate everyone on how the current economy works to destroy ecosystems & create more & more wars.
A Support Group of Colleagues
People you can get to know in depth, support / mentor & be mentored / supported by who are doing similar or complementary projects in EcoEconomics, with lots of tools to help groups work well.
This pioneering course provides a radically different view of economics than all mainstream to date, & also to courses on alternative or 'green' economics to date, especially in methodology & range of vision.
Easy access to the most up-to date & important information on designing EcoEconomies, directly from experienced practitioners, presented in a well-structured way & on demand (all levels catered for).
An Ecological, Holistic Perspective
Replacing the Ego-Economy with an Eco-Economy requires a re-framing into a basic understanding of how the Earth works & what natural cycles govern the economies of eco-systems: the most sustainable economies we know of.
Lots of High Quality Information
With Business Mentoring Included
Being with & being mentored by experienced entrepreneurs is essential in absorbing the mind-set & practical wisdom of innovators. We will support you to design your own economy well, at every level, whilst changing the economy for everyone.
The 5 month incubator experience provides all this & more through
online teaching & mentoring
with practicals in the real world,
developing your own designs
A Systemic & Integral Approach
Designing really new systems especially requires changing the WAY we think. So we have set up an action-learning system (based on following each others' designs & practice, not just classes), with lots of tools, in order to facilitate this change of mind.
Feminist Economics is included in this course - an often ignored very early pre-decessor of much current 'alternative economics', which is however often diluted of it's most radical messages & models.
When we say "EcoEconomy" we mean everything that's needed to redesign the present economy towards a sustainable model: including how to create one's own (ethical) employment, how to design complementary currencies, use new economic indicators and resource flows, of strengthening networks and inventing new cultural stories to guide the society of the future in a rational direction, at all levels.
What it Is
This aims to be the most complete short EcoEconomy course / incubator / support group available for activists, social entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to help make the changes we need in the world today, to turn around the destructive economics model that we've inherited (and which will clearly not be changed by the people or institutions still profiting from it).
Check out the developing curriculum
with supporting materials here: http://bit.ly/EcoEconomy
For the first time we are also making available this expanded last module (of five) of the Integral Permaculture Design Certificate run by Nodo Espiral of the PermaCulture Academy, offering it as a 5 month long course (the whole 5 modules constitute an even more complete EcoEconomy Course, but this last module is a great introduction).
Permaculture is a sustainable design science with 50+ years of history and practice that studies and experiments with joining design knowledge with the arts and sciences, with the single goal of creating just and peaceful human societies.
Nodo Espiral has been taking Permaculture to a new level over the past 10 years, deepening and developing the dimensions of People Care, Design Techniques and EcoEconomy, adding these to the more well-known dimensions of permaculture which are Earth Care and EcoTechnology.
When it Runs
Coming up in 2014,
The full Program of Classes
(click on titles to see notes in the e-book):
How it Works
You will join an intensive & very supportive 'eco-business incubator' experience, where we will learn all the basic essentials in a wide range of topics important for designing healthier economies, but mainly we will be mentoring the design process in your real-life projects.
These are the main structural components of the course:
Two live multimedia lectures each month, delivered by experts in the field, on the 10 topics listed in the curriculum
Live workshop sessions on request (by skype or conferencing)
Ongoing personalized mentoring on your projects (through a flexible online design portfolio system we'll provide & teach you to use, and which you get to keep after the course)
Immersion in an action learning environment and exchange of ideas with other students who are EcoEconomics activists in different parts of the world.
There will also be some surprises!
We'll propose some very interesting EcoEconomics designs that you can participate in, as practical group exercises. All voluntary participation, so don't worry if you don't have a practical project to work on yet, or if you have quite enough to work on with your own.
In this truly integral course, we will also provide space & encouragement to explore the historical, ethical, sacred & spiritual aspects of economics, also.
The course will be completely bilingual > English - Spanish, so all students will be invited to participate in both if they wish to practice languages.
Who We Are
The Mentors & Tutors facilitating this course & support group are all experienced practitioners & activists in the various facets of EcoEconomy work, bringing a great joint wealth of grassroots community work in experience as well as a breadth & depth of knowledge to the team.
You can click on their respective picture to see full biography in the EcoNova Conference profiles page, where you can also access their free conference talk. The wisdom & experience of all 12 of the tutors (& more) are included in the course, and at least half of these tutors will be available personally when you do your course, but which ones will depend on their availability throughout the year.
Price & Enrollment
461€ all-inclusive: for 10 multi-media classes, your personal online design portfolio (& coaching in using it), live tutorials and ongoing consultancy, coaching & mentoring on your personal projects, for 5 months.
Note that up to 60% can be paid in Permis, our permaculture network complementary currency.
If you enroll one/two months before starting the classes, paying the minimum of 184€, we will show you how you can help us with the course preparations (mostly course admin & preparing the e-book) & with this work you can earn Permis, which you can then trade for the rest of the course - to the extent that you earn them.
To enroll, you can follow instructions in the Enrollment page.
Please remember to write saying you are enrolling on the EcoEconomy Course.
Who ...
Who is it for
This course, support group & incubator experience is designed to be flexible & to adapt as much as possible to your personal needs, so it is open to a variety of interest, levels of previous knowledge & experience & directions that you want to take, in any part of the emerging sustainable economics spectrum.
So you could be someone just waking up to the realization that the economy is changing & want to better understand the reasons & futures of the change, and what you can do & support in order to ride the changes as well as possible.
You might be realizing that, without our conscious consent, we're all participating in an economy that is actively destroying human lives & entire ecosystems - and want to understand how this works a lot better & have some time to think, in a supportive environment, of what you can do to change this.
You may be one of the thousands of people who have lost their job or are in a precarious financial situation & find it difficult to think how they can better support themselves & their families, especially if the ideals & ethics of justice & sustainability are important to you. We can help you think of possible self-employment options & to start to design the strategies for implementing the best ideas, or perfecting existing ones.
You might be someone already engaged in changing your local economy from time, & for example running, helping to run or thinking of starting a transition group or project, local currency, community bank or solidarity economy network. Whatever level of experience of this you have, we can help you get to the next level quicker, and hopefully also help you avoid some common pitfalls.
The very limited view of conventional economics is represented by the thin red line half-way up this triangular diagram.
The whole-picture view is a lot more interesting & useful in the long-term, and what we will be exploring during the whole course.
We will also explore the question of How can we design our personal transition from living enslaved to an exploitative economy... to be part of the change, creating dignified work which allows us to support our families in an ethical & truly productive way, whilst we enjoy serving the world with our unique talents?
It is essential that we have a good understanding of the most basic & vital economies or markets of the Planet: the cycles & networks of exchange of Nature, that current ignorance & economics is destroying, & without which there is no Life on Earth.
We very much embedd all EcoEconomics design models on this proto-economics base. .
The Support Team
- So far, in simple order of joining, they are -
Stella Strega-Scoz
Stella has been a social activist since 1981, & has been passionately engaged in figuring out how to organize for social & environmental justice for as long as she can remember.
An experienced community eco-innovator, she ran award-winning early Transition Initiatives in London in the mid-90’s (See GreenAdventure) which - amongst other things - integrated various complementary currencies in facilitating the development of the local economy, like making an organic produce box scheme (delivered by bicycle in a run-down inner city) affordable to low-income families. She coordinated the setting up of the first TimeBank in London, working for the NewEconomics Foundation in 1997, was an invited speaker at many conferences on Agenda 21 & community regeneration during the late 90s, & was invited to be part of a British Government think-tank on how to regenerate the inner cities in 1998.
Having experienced & witnessed many great community projects succeeding but even more failing or struggling, in 1999 she started to develop better training & support for community activists, together with a permaculture activists & teachers support group she facilitated, by running some of the first permaculture design courses taught by teams of practitioners, & designing and teaching an early 'People-Care' course for activist which incorporated business & team-work tools with collective intelligence & personal development models & methods, in order to make community organizations more effective.
Since 2001 her home has been a permaculture farm in the Canary Islands which is now becoming an eco-village & has been the base for a decade of experimental action-learning program in permaculture. This in turn informed more of the Integral Permaculture curriculum, now a year-long action-learning program that provides ongoing mentoring of the students' real-life home & community designs.
She is a founding member of the Associación Gaia Tasiri which supports various innovative permaculture projects - one being an eco-business that a student developed during an early pilot experiment of this EcoEconomics incubator we are now offering. Stella's main design interests are the development of Bioregional Economies & maximizing Collective Intelligence.
In 2006 she coordinated a Complementary Currencies (CC) Conference, the first of its kind in Spain, which created a first comprehensive resource on CCs in Spanish. From 2007 Stella has been engaged in various local Transition Island initiatives and setting up a program to support the development of small EcoBusiness whilst building up the NodoEspiral of the Permaculture Academy (set up in 2003), & its constantly improving & expanding range of practical support & high-quality mentoring for social activists.
Heloisa Primavera
Heoloisa is a recognized & much appreciated international & multilingual EcoEconomist with a great deal of experience of on-the-ground work with complementary currencies, one of the founders the Red de Trueque Solidario in Argentina, amongst other pioneering initiatives.
Starting as a biologist & professor of sociology, an operation in 1996 constrained her physically & this permitted her to observe a series of popular movements (like the silent marches of María Soledad & of the Carrasco case) which demonstrated a will for change. "And as sociologists we always study things when they're already dead, I proposed to do the opposite: I wanted to connect with the people and act".
She got her chance in '97, when she connected with the organizers of the Exchange Club (Club de Trueque - equivalent to LETS scheme in english) of Bernal, then starting to organize exchange markets. There she offered to add to the exchange of products also the exchange of knowledge & training.
Today she is taking a Doctorate in Complexity Thinkin (Multiversidad Edgar Morin), is a professor at the University of BuenosAires, a sought-after international speaker on community currencies & the development of local economies.
In 2011 she was the coordinator of a project by the Canadian & Argentinian Governments to implement the use of the first distributed notebooks in public secondary schools in Argentina, which will soon involve 4 million students. Currently she is consultant in Abundance Economies for the Laboratorio de Innovación of the Programa Conectar Igualdad (www.conectarlab.com.ar)
Another project just started is the re-design of a social currency & community bank with the first green mayor who created in the 90s the first local social currency in a small town in Brazil. In November 2012 Primavera was part of an invited international team of consultants to advise the transition government in Tunisia on the construction of participative democracy & sustainable development.
Rebecca Reiber
Whilst raising a young family Rebecca was a consultant in organizational development, working mainly with NGOs & micro-medium businesses, after a 12 year career in international business (import/export).
She loved organizational development but missed the international aspect so she started working as an independent consultant, which took her to Russia & then Panamá. In Panamá she fell in love with the country, the people & the landscape.
Her work developed from organizational development to community development, something she loved so much that she took a masters in Sustainable Development, Community Development & Training for Social Action. She learned a great deal from this masters & made lasting international relationships.
From her moving to Panamá an idea began to form that now, after 8 years, took form as an EcoVillage project.
We're delighted to have Rebecca on the team, she brings her administrative & business skills & experience as well as her international perspective & fluent bilingualism (english & spanish) to this pioneering course.
John Rogers
John Rogers has 20 years' experience of local currency development.
He ran a local exchange system in Wales from 1993-2003 and co-directed the Wales Institute for Community Currencies at the University of Newport from 2003-2007.
He now offers training and consulting for local currencies through Value for People: http://valueforpeople.co.uk
He is a Fellow of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria
and a Senior Associate with Community Forge: http://communityforge.net
In 2012, he co-authored "People Money - the Promise of Regional Currencies" with Margrit Kennedy and Bernard Lietaer, published by Triarchy Press. One reviewer described the book as "a sort of bible for alternative currencies".
Stephanie Rearick
Based in Madison, Wisconsin,
Stephanie Rearick is founder and Co-Director of the Dane County TimeBank and Project Coordinator of Time For the World.
In addition to her work in timebanking and promoting ground-up economic and community regeneration,
Rearick is co-owner of Mother Fool's Coffeehouse.
Rearick worked for Greenpeace for six years of young adulthood, helped launch Madison Hours local currency in 1995 and served for several years on the steering committee of independent local political party Progressive Dane.
Rearick also works as a musician.
She will contribute all this practical experience in the subjects of ground-up regenerative economics, timebanking, mutual credit, redesigning work and compensation, how various tools can work in concert.
Jose Zamora
Jose lives in the Canary Islands, Spain, since 1998, and was born in Cuba in 1992.
He has a degree in Informatic Systems Engineering, and is a very eager Integral Permaculture action-learner.
Because of his ease to learn and understand complex systems, he was awarded every year in the University for being one of the best 20 engineering students in the Canaries, and he invested this money in shares of the EcoVillage project where he lives and works, as a founder member and the youngest in the team.
He's been working with NodoEspiral since 2011, and will be providing tech support for this course.
He's specially passionate about fertility & biodiversity regeneration and human empowerment, and he'll also enjoy developing during the course some of his ideas of very "edge" ecobusinesses based on his passions.
