By Konstantinos Tsiompanos | Managing Director
Dearest supporters and friends of Sporos,
Happy New Year! Winter is finally here in Lesvos. Days are short and nights are long and cold. We are taking the time to rest and reflect on the year that passed and to plan the year ahead.
In the past year we achieved so much, thanks to your support. We taught permaculture for free to many children and adults from different paths of life, we built school gardens, grew a lot of organic food which we shared with people in need, started new projects and made a positive impact in the lives of many people.
The last trimester we continued with our permaculture training for refugees. In collaboration with our partner NGO When We Band Together, we have been introducing permaculture to many refugee women living in the camp of Lesvos. At a dark time when women in Afghanistan are deprived of the right to education, we open our arms and welcome them in the permaculture family, offering them both knowledge and a green and welcoming place to come to and get away from their worries and problems.
We are proud to inform you that our Stop The Burn project, which we talked to you about on our last report, won another award! In the spirit of integration and solidarity, the monetary award will be used to employ two people to help implement the project, one refugee and one long term unemployed local. With their help, soon we will start assisting olive farmers with our woodchipper in an effort to stop the harmful practice of burning prunings.
We are also very happy to announce the newest member of our team, Shahzaib from Pakistan. Shahzaib recently got his refugee status after a seven (!) year wait and is now our new farm manager. Having been inspired after attending our last PDC, he asked to join our team and we were more than happy to welcome him to the family.
Another new member of our permafamily is Amin, also a PDC graduate. Amin was really blown away by our course and told us that he would love to learn how to be a permaculture teacher. So we put him straight to work and got him to teach two classes in our last PDC of the year, one on Social Permaculture and one on Alternative Sources of Energy. We then secured a place and a scholarship for him in Alfred Decker's recent 'Training Permaculture Teachers with a focus on Refugees' course in Spain. He came back recently full of knowledge and ideas which we cant wait for him to put into practice in our coming courses.
Dear supporters, we can't thank you enough for your help in achieving all the above. None of it would have been made possible without your trust and support. We wish you a new year filled with health, love, joy and prosperity. See you in a few months with more updates about our work. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you! Drop us a line anytime on our social media or on our email with your ideas, suggestions, resources or just to say hello.
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By Konstantinos Tsiompanos | Managing Director
By Rachael LeClear | Program Director
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