Vision

EcoPraxis works collaboratively with community-based enterprises to put the vision of sustainable community economies and sustainable resource use into practice through grassroots research and community learning projects.

Key Community Practices

Sustainable Community Economic Development is the practice of connecting what a community has to what it needs.  In this process, community members, working with one another, improve their economic well-being, increase control over their economic lives, and build community power and decision-making through embracing the principles of sustainability and democracy in community planning and development.  Sustainable community economic development nurtures resiliency and self-reliance.

Sustainable Resource Use is the practice of cultivating relationships for greater resourcefulness.   What makes communities healthy is the diversity and quality of their resources and the ability of local enterprises to build relationships with each other and create synergy out of their diversity.  Sustainable resource use involves letting go of our consumer mentality and waking up to our responsibility in caring for our community’s resources.

Key Practices of EcoPraxis

Grassroots Research or Community-Based Participatory Research is a collaborative approach to research in which community members participate fully in all aspects of the research process (framing the research questions, data collection and processing, interpretation, dissemination, and determination of use of the results) along with the researchers by training (i.e. EcoPraxis).   It is an iterative process, incorporating research, reflection, and action in a cyclical process.  Grassroots research requires sharing decision-making power, resources, credit, results, and knowledge, as well as a reciprocal appreciation of everyone’s gifts.

Community Learning describes the process  by which communities transition from business-as-usual to more just and sustainable ways of living and doing.   The idea of community learning is not to achieve fixed goals, but to gradually work towards common ambitions through innovation, integration, and transition.   Community learning is premised on the idea that the outcomes of any social change process are highly uncertain and thus require collective experimentation — learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning.  Community learning involves community conversations and project-based experiments in new ways of doing things.   The power of community learning is that everyone can contribute in his or her own way and in doing so the search itself becomes the process of sustainable social change.

Related Practices Adopted from Friends

Net Provider Practices: Being a “Net Provider” is about implementing a whole-person, whole-system approach to lifestyle changes and sustainable practices.  The purpose of the Net-Provider “Project” (see http://my.compassionateactionnetwork.com/group/SBCI)  is to architect and collaboratively implement sustainable and scalable “Net Provider” demonstration projects. These projects are intended to transform individual and collective “Consciousness”, values, lifestyles, practices, processes, policies, and technology. The goal is to move from a “Consumer” paradigm to an economic “Net Provider” of water, food, energy, infrastructure, wellness, information, human services, and compassionate human relationships.