By Konstantinos Tsiompanos | Managing Director
We have exciting things to report as we had our busiest Summer months in our history! The heat didn’t stop us, on the contrary, it made us more determined. Local and refugee community came together during our workshops, young ones as well as not so young ones enjoyed the nature and the harvest from our Garden of Friends. Everyone discovered how good yellow cherry tomatoes taste together with fresh basil leaves, onion and a splash of olive oil all from our organic produce! Simple, but we have been eating it all summer long together with our guests and volunteers.
The Spring preparations of our garden is giving ua a lot of produce which we distribute to the refugee community. Our fig trees are super loaded this year. This has been possible with hard work from our volunteers, who kept the gardens at the farm and at the EcoHub site in tip top shape and continue to do so.
Our Permaculture Design Courses have educated 35 people this summer and our Make It Green Lesvos has educated 40 local and refugee children about climate change. During our last PDC in August, we welcomed at the farm a group of 15 Afghani women residents at the camp. For our Make It Green Lesvos workshops with children we partnered with Iliaktida, a local NGO which operates guesthouses for unescorted minors. Make It Green Lesvos has been a huge success as we have now established relationships with children and young people who want to be active in their communities and who we will be supporting along their journeys. It is the birth of our “Green Ambassador Scheme” where we will be supporting our graduates from Make It Green in their school or communities to create and lead green projects.
As all these activities were taking place in our farm, we also had a team of Belgian and British students on site building a tiny farmhouse, using several natural building techniques. The project ran in colaboration with the Belgian NGO “Academics for Development” who designed the building and sent a team over. We ran a natural building workshop with locals and refugees and then the team from Belgium took over the building and delivered to us a beautiful tiny dwelling which we will be a multi-purpose space for the farm, used both as a reception, as a guesthouse, as a storage space and as an exhibition on natural building. Stacking Functions, as we say in Permaculture.
Last but not least, we are very excited to announce that we have been also awarded the Greek Green Ideas Award for our project Stop The Burn, a project related to carbon sequestration and reduction of harmful green house emissions entering the atmosphere from the burning of olive farming waste. We are now looking forward to participate for the Balkan award which is at the end of this month. As we are entering the exciting path to circular economy, we plan to employ people from the refugee community for the implementation of this project. Watch this space!
It’s incredible to see where we came from and where we are now all with your support. With your valuable contributions we have done so much and benefited so many different people this summer. We put a lot of smiles on children’s faces and heard them yell with excitement during our drama game sessions. If you share our excitement please share with your networks so Sporos can continue to do its job: integrate, regenerate, educate.
We would love to hear from you, our community. Give us a shout with suggestions, share your vision with us or even send us a selfie with your favourite pumpkin on social media. Until next time friends!
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