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Development of the Recycled estate demonstration garden, seed bank and forest classroom - help us spread the word on sustainability
Start date: Jul 1, 2014, End date: Feb 1, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

At Recycled estate our main goal is promoting of permaculture and other practice techniques on sustainable living, above all through practical implementation. Since our beginning in 2002 we continuously organize educational activities (workshops, seminars, organized visits etc.) for adults and children. We believe in hands-on approach and try to offer as many good practice examples to the visitors of our estate. This year plan to build a forest classroom among the trees at the estate to better host them. We use our garden to teach people how to grow their on food but also to propagate the heirloom seeds, for which we plan to start a seed library. Basically, we want to further develop parts of our estate that are essential to practical teaching, which is the most motivational and has the most striking effect on the mind, especially with children. This year we feel ready to host volunteers for a longer period. We are confident a young person can learn a lot from us and later implement it in their on life, maybe even start a new project in their home town/village. Our four volunteers are young people from Spain and Portugal, interested in learning sustainable living techniques. They might be unemployed and looking to learn new skills that might help them sustain themselves or are simply motivated to develop a more sustainable lifestyle. Their work will include working in an organic garden, organizing of the seed library and working with natural building materials on the estate's forest classroom. They will learn mostly through work, but there will be some theoretical learning through lectures and mini-workshops, which also includes learning the language. They will have the opportunity to experience life in a small, rural community, mostly made of elderly people. A group of young people making an effort to preserve traditional knowledge of the region will be a good influence on the local population, in which only older people remain, with young people moving to the city and discarding old traditions. At the same time, Recycled estate is an intentional community, made by young people with a goal to live sustainably, and in which all decisions are made by consensus. The estate is often full of visitors who attend workshops or just look around and it is not rare for it to be overflown by school children on a visit. The volunteers will learn a lot about sustainable living practices, permaculture, organic gardening, seed saving and natural building. The sending organization will have a young person brought back richer in knowledge and experience, hopefully motivated to start some new exiting projects. The improvement of our estate (the developed forest classroom and garden) will make a big difference for the people who come to the estate to participate in workshops and educations. It will give them a chance to experience what we talk about in practice and we hope motivate them to copy it in their own towns/schools/kindergardens. It will attract even more people to our estate and help us spread the idea of sustanability even further. We hope we can inspire others to spread the knowledge they accumulate, to make it their goal to inspire people (especially young people) to care about sustainability of their lives, to revive the villages across Europe, stop centralization and rejuvenate the countryside, return to organic production of food, natural building and developing and maintaining a tight and supportive local communities that can interact and learn from each other.

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