Integration Through Permaculture

Greetings from Sporos our dear friends! We are back with another report about what we have been up to the last three months.

At the beginning of summer we were very happy to expand our work to Athens, where we taught an urban agriculture course. The course was part of the greater Regenerative Camps and Settlements project, organised by Re-alliance, a coalition of field practitioners, policymakers, educators, community leaders and humanitarian and development workers. The project will pilot regenerative interventions within formal and informal camps for refugees and IDPs in order to develop content for further learning materials and knowledge sharing, aimed at promoting grass-roots, community-led interventions and influencing mainstream INGO activities. The course took place in down-town Athens, at the rooftop of One Happy Family community centre with 17 participants from 13 different countries. We are now preparing for our next course for the project which will take place in October inside the Kara Tepe refugee camp in Lesvos. We will let you know how it went in our next report :)

At the farm we 've been very busy with our vegetable gardens. Summer is always a demanding time at the garden, and many hands and time is needed to harvest, weed, prune and generally care for our plants. It has been a particularly hot summer with multiple heatwave periods which affected a few of our plants. However, we still managed to grow quite a lot of food, which we as always happily distributed to refugees. We are grateful for the help of our many new volunteers and for the return of our Ecohub project manager, Matteo <3

The summer saw the completion of our Stop the Burn project, about which we talked to you in our last report. The project was a great success with 30 local farmers benefiting from our free wood-chipping services. So much so that we already have requests from many farmers for next year, who experienced first hand the benefits of chipping rather than burning their prunings.

As Fall is almost here, we have already started planting our winter gardens and are getting ready for our olive harvest season. We are very excited, as this year we will be launching our brand new olive oil brand! We will soon contact you all with more information about this new project which will bring to you our organic extra virgin olive oil, harvested by Sporos team in our olive orchards. Stay tuned.

As always, we want to thank you for your continued support and encouragement. It means the world to us. Onwards and upwards!

Hello to all of you supporters of Sporos across the world!

Spring is here at last and this means loads of buzzing around preparing for the new growing season. Our seedlings are growing like crazy in our greenhouse have now been planted and they happily greet the Mediterranean sun every morning. Our team member Shahzaib has been a planting champion.

Earlier in April we started a new project called Stop The Burn, the project that we won two Green Awards for. This project focuses more on climate change action and we are beyond excited to announce that we have completed almost the first phase. We focus on educating olive tree growers about the negative consequences of burning the prunings from their trees. Every year thousands of tonnes of olive prunings are burned, which has a very negative impact on the environment. This old practice causes serious air pollution through the release of greenhouse gases, which accelerate climate change. We also emphasize that soil fertility is also considerably decreased which has a serious negative impact on future tree health and biodiversity destruction.

Our program aims to promote the use of olive wood chippers instead of the burning malpractice and as part of the program we offer free services of wood chipping with our champion wood chipper to interested farmers. We hope to continue raising awareness with the olive growers and also educate the public about this very harmful practice since Lesvos is covered with 11 million olive trees!

We have also launched a program with 2 primary schools on the island, helping them with knowledge and expertise on the construction of their school gardens and the teaching of STEM classes on aeroponics.  

May is also set for a powerful start as we are gearing up for our Athens project in collaboration with OHF Community Centre in Athens. An exciting new project involving urban permaculture and refugee education. 

In our international news, we are proud to announce that our Managing Director Konstantinos was appointed the president of the Board of Directors of the Permaculture for Refugees organisation which was established recently in Queensland, Australia. The establishment came as a result of the need for an umbrella organisation which can coordinate the efforts of many individuals, projects and partners around the globe working to promote permaculture and its uses to serve the needs of refugees.

Finally, Sporos was represented in the Australian Permaculture Convergence which took place in April on South Australia. It was a great opportunity to promote our work in the Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) network to an international crowd in Australia, the birthplace of permaculture.

Every year in Spring we get reborn with mother Earth and we feel excited for all the new beginnings, new projects and new synergies. This year in winter we sowed a lot of seeds, applied for grants and formed new collaborations with the aim to maximize our impact. Biggest part of who we are and our successful work would not have been possible without you. We feel so much gratitude for all your generosity and support. We love getting messages from our supporters so please do get in touch through our social media channels with what this Spring means to you and any new plants that have sprung on your window seals, balconies or gardens.