Hello!

My name is Stephen Winter and I would greatly appreciate any insight that you may have on this personal project of mine. It refers to the aboriginal mobs throughout Australia, though my focus at this time is with those in NT and the Torres Strait islands.

I feel very strongly about a concept that I refer to as a "co-villaging initiative" or "indigenous intervillage cooperation" aimed at learning from, strengthening and supporting indigenous villages around the world sustainably support one another. Whether it be villages helping one another on a project, protecting one another from a common threat, providing food and shelter for one another, or sharing wisdom and emotional support.

Certainly, this concept exists on it's own it's simply nature's connectedness in action! I am not looking to create something, but rather to nurture what already exists.

There are several aspects that I am noticing. The strength of diversity that exists within and between villages. As circumstances change, balance of well-being relies on this diversity. This could refer to an external threat or an internal dilemma. The combined power and support of more than one individual or village can provide the means to regaining that well-being.

Secondly, this would be stepping out of the popular "efficient" first-world intervention box and creating an "effective" indigenous one. More grassroots and local truly sustainable and duplicatable.

There is wisdom unique wisdom in every culture, in every village, in every individual. And there is something wonderful about indigenous people and their villages their strengths as well as their flaws.

To clarify this even more, it is also not dealing with just an individual village. What often happens is that once the intervention is over in a village, the support and momentum is lost. Or there might be a village a few kilometers away that needs help, too, and the organization does not end up reaching out to them for whatever reason. If at least two villages are supporting one another, then the chances of true sustainability increase dramatically. So, the focus is not so much on the individual solutions nor an individual village, but on the inter-working between villages to nurture an ongoing support for the appropriate solutions that they need.

The initiative that I see is three fold:

1. Someone helps a village with a solution to a challenge they have it could anything from recovering from a natural disaster, developing more effective food production, stopping child trafficking and so on. Either another village who has found a solution helps them or an organization does. However it happens, they get education and other tools to stop the threat.

2. Then, that village works with a neighboring village to mutually support those solutions.

3. Lastly, these villages do the same (as much as is geographically and demographically feasible). And that would only go out as far as the villages are comfortable with.

This can be applied to any issues that neighboring indigenous villages and hamlets face today.

The indigenous people of the world are amazing when you study some of the history of villages banding together and combating sometimes overwhelming circumstances.

And so I am looking to find individuals around the world who are already working in aspects of this co-villaging perspective, are interested in it, or simply have a comment to make.

Thanks so much for your time and thoughts on this!

- Stephen Winter

updated by @stephen-winter: 10/24/16 04:46:56PM

Hi Stephen,

I have just put this link out through our social media platforms as well - I hope you get some response/information...

Regards,

Dee...

Thanks so much, Dee! And I so hope to do something with this that Ted would be proud of!