Tag Archives: EcoVillages

1’st in the series entitled – Make your own Rules By Karl Fitzgerald of ‘Grounded’ – Community Land Trust Advocacy. With Robin Clayfield (Crystal Waters Ecovillage, Qld), Megan James (Tuntable Falls, NSW) and Peter Cook (Moora Moora Ecovillage, Vic) Here’s a link to the website where there is the 1 1/2 hour recording to watch and also a written transcript. If you’re interested in Community design and living, particularly the design of governance and decision making, how to live and work together, intentional communities and villages, this is a great resource. Great initiative by Karl, and he will be doing more…  

Robin and many others at Crystal Waters EcoVillage in South East Queensland support resident Michael Ney who has begun producing a world class magazine. Eco Village Voice is an online community featuring a quarterly magazine including videos, podcasts and webinars. Eco Village Voice provides educational articles on many aspects of ecovillage living, as well as encouraging communication between other ecovillages to help each other and for the sake of our planet‘s wellbeing. We aim to celebrate regenerative and permaculture ethics – care for land, care for people and fair share.  Here’s the website for more information. Members have full access to our magazine in PDF downloads, as well as web pages with all the articles AND a web flip page viewer. Also includes podcasts and webinars plus our video channel. Valid for 1 year access. $5 USD per month x 10 paid upfront. = $50 USD annually. Two months free …

A new online magazine, Eco Village Voice, presents special events and the first is the Eco Village Film Festival in Maleny, QLD. This film festival celebrates the rise of sustainable communities aka “ecovillages” who are using appropriate technology to combat the effects of climate change, and are focus more on care for the planet than consumerism and are promoting a healthy lifestyle for the future of humanity. Separate website – https://www.ecovillagefilmfestival.com Eco Village Voice is essentially an online magazine – global quarterly, local monthly. Our monthly ecovillage supplements, with Crystal Waters Ecovillage being the first, is a way for ecovillage residents to network and publicise their activities. It also integrates an independent social media platform for anyone interested in ecovillages and permaculture, or regeneration and sustainability, and more! See: https://www.ecovillagevoice.com

A new documentary celebrating the past, present and future of Crystal Waters is just being released. It is possibly the most extensive exploration of an ecovillage in a documentary yet produced… I’d love to hear of other examples. In 2018, Crystal Waters, a world-first permaculture settlement and wildlife sanctuary, is now 30 years old – located near Maleny, South East Queensland. Given a UN Habitat Award in 1996, Crystal Waters is known worldwide for its permaculture related educational courses. Community members run monthly markets, bakery and cafes, bamboo and timber plantations, a fire brigade, cinema, even a cemetery. A visitor park offers cabins, caravan sites and tent sites. Over 100 dwellings and community buildings showcase diverse building methods – rammed earth, mud brick, straw bale and pole construction. The flow of the program entwines history and present views in a colourful and engaging manner. It may not answer all your …

Did you know you can design harmonious and effective groups who thrive towards their aims and purpose as a collective? Yep, it’s called Social Permaculture. And this is what Permaculture pioneer Robin Clayfield and social change-agent Erin Young are brewing for the SOCIAL PERMACULTURE WEEKEND on 18 & 19 May at Crystal Waters Permaculture EcoVillage, near Maleny in South East Queensland. This unique weekend is a rare opportunity to be guided in developing your social design fluency by applying the nature-based principles of permaculture. Using interactive and dynamic experiences, Robin and Erin will share with you insights to regenerative people systems and approaches contributing to happy and healthy humans on the levels of the individual, organisational, and societal. Various angles of effective social design will be covered, including group ecology, community governance and decision-making, group effectiveness, social space retrofits and confidence in acting for change. This course is for those …

The ABC was interested in the 30th anniversary celebrations of the formation of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, one of the very first EcoVillages and the first Permaculture Designed Village in the world. The community held it’s 30th birthday party in July and the following article, which has an interview with Robin and her daughter Pele along with other residents, was one of the outcomes, along with a great cake and many shared memories. Click here for a link to the ABC Article that went on their website. Here’s a quote from the article – “An eco village on the Sunshine Coast was an experiment in communal living when it first started. Thirty years later the village is still thriving, and the rest of Australia is catching on to some of its pioneering ideas.”