A four day festival in Brussels (2017) with over 80 community members joining to share alternatives in health and social care - a set of workshops and informal talks, spiced with urban games, collective cooking, gyne kits and a Congolese party!
We started out with the questions:
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How to collaborate effectively from local to global contexts
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How to deploy projects rapidly across borders without losing decentralisation
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Type of legal and economic standards we need to change in order to ensure health for all
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How to reinforce self-determination in communities
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How Edgeryders assists in moving discussions into action and help organisations grow
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What to do when we feel burnt out or demoralized in our projects
We learned that we need to build healthy and productive online and offline communities to support us. OpenVillage is a network of houses with an autonomous network affiliation. The online/offline is authentic pioneering work. They blend seamlessly into each other, depend on each other, need to be connected. They need to work in a decentralized way and localised, which means each house will host a community working peer to peer and consistently exposed to mentorship and training to ensure the projects are visible and sustainable.
Images credit: Barbel in edgeryders.eu
Key Outcomes
Our path forward i.e. the first house in Morocco, is to prioritise and nurture projects that are good in themselves, but are also are also creating positive externalities for other projects and people.
Our collectively drafted visual report from the OpenVillage Festival is available here.