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!