Activating Community Transition

The purpose of the iACT project is:

• To help grow an international network of learning and demonstration centres
• To share good practice in the fields of sustainability, regeneration and resilience between those centres
• To help centres activate community transformation by offering a range of demonstration and learning programmes and resources

The main iACT project outputs will be available in March 2023, they include:

• The iACT Good Practice Guide providing sample Case Studies of inspiring projects and examples of good practice.
• The iACT Toolkit providing resources to achieve good practice in setting up systems, from project design to business planning.
• The iACT Learning Pathways and Competency Guides outline a range of skills, knowledge and experience needed to set up or develop a learning and demonstration centre.
• iACT Centres Map and Project Profiles map the international network of projects showing the features, learning programmes and other offerings they provide.

Learning and demonstration centres have a unique and critical role to play in our journeys toward a regeneratively sustainable and resilient future, with three dimensions to that role:

• Firstly, as physical demonstrations of sustainable and regenerative practices they provide visitors and learners with opportunities for experiential learning which embeds learning more deeply, and which cannot be provided by other forms of learning;
• Secondly, as place-based hubs, they make the broad themes of sustainability and regeneration relevant to their particular local and regional context, in terms of people, culture, climate and landscape;
• Thirdly, they provide a focus for activity and networking, bringing a broad ecology of people together in varied roles from practitioners to educators to learners, and they have a catalytic role in people’s individual and collective learning journeys.

Through these features such projects help activate community transformation.

• Permaculture Association (Britain) – lead partner;
• Cloughjordan Ecovillage (Sustainable Projects Ireland CLG);
• Centre for Ecological Learning, Luxembourg (CELL);
• Permakultur Danmark;
• Green School Village and the Permaculture Association of Bulgaria;
• Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c), University of Lisbon, Portugal;
• Laboratorio Sicilia 2030, Italy