Young Award

Associação Terra Sintrópica was born from a collaborative spirit in 2018, when a group of people (motivated citizens) came together to respond to a set of challenges that affected the territory, such as desertification, depopulation and climate change, in Mértola Portugal.

In a participatory, community-based and multi-stakeholder approach, we intend to become a replicable prototype for the development of best practices in regeneration: Mértola – Laboratory for the Future. Through “regeneration by use”, we promote a local foodnetwork and we test and apply agro-ecological farming solutions.

We run a logistics centre and a pilot-and demonstration farm where the regenerative practices with the best results for the territory are tested, so that other farmers can use them. The initiative increases local self-esteem and it helped to create social and economic perspectives, fostering the settlement of new local residents and entrepreneurs.

The team has been grown to 12 co-workers, more than 60 volunteers and interns have visited and contributed, also have integrated master and doctoral students focusing on experimentation and research.

Acting as a centre for climate resilience in South Devon, Bioregional Learning Centre knits together all parts of society, a wide range of sectors, many kinds of knowledge, a can-do attitude and regenerative practices.

As a learning centre, BLC values and stretches all the innovation already going on and shares the collective learnings. As a ‘systems lab’ we demonstrate through interventions and projects what strategic systems-change looks like on the ground.

Since its foundation in 2017, BLC has:

1. Prototyped a baseline assessment of regenerative potential for a bioregion using Story of Place.

2. Mapped the green shoots of vitality and innovation in South Devon by leading a Bioregional Learning Journey for climate resilience.

3. Brought the voice of civil society into river management alongside water experts, land owners and water itself to pioneer the Charter for the River Dart at Dartington.

4. Convened the Devon Doughnut Collective in co-creating the Devon Doughnut. The outcome will be a contextualized ecological and economic baseline and pathways for innovative action.

The climate crisis and deforestation have had massive negative impacts on smallholder farmers in the savannah region of Ghana, threatening to destroy their livelihoods, communities and environment. The Climate Smart Training Programme was created to address these issues.

Its main activities are:
1. Re-forestation through FMNR (Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration) of trees and native tree-planting;
2. Training and resources to help farmers transition to more climate-resilient, and ecological agroforestry methods; and
3. Training and resources to stop deforestation by using locally made rocket stoves.

Through hands-on training, they share knowledge and techniques, and provide resource materials. Farmers learn why climate change is happening, why trees are so important, and how their actions can be part of the solution. They also uses traditional storytelling methods highlighting Indigenous knowledge, and have created an illustrated storybook and how-to manual.

The project now has over 100 Farmer-Trainers teaching thousands of farmers. It has also selected five lead farmers to pilot its first five rural tree nurseries in 2020.

Comunità Frizzante literally means “sparkling community”. Comunità Frizzante is a diverse network of organisations and informal groups who are passionate about the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps. The group mobilises the participatory production of fizzy drinks to challenge individualised ways of life and alienation from the mountains they are based in, focusing on ecological respect.

The drinks have proved a great tool for investigating and challenging destructive economic practices: with the cola, the group inquires together with teenagers into the politics of multinational food corporations; with the orangeade – produced from the left-over orange pulp – it supports the fight against hyper-exploitative labour of undocumented workers in the orange production; with its grape drink, it questions the grape monocultures invading their valleys, while campaigning for regenerative agriculture.

The project shows how activities of social inclusion can take a non-stigmatising form, which led it to co-establishment a “school of well-being” with the local mental health center. They also run public courses, foraging walks and connect with migrant workers.

Danjoo Koorliny Walking Together is an Aboriginal-led, large-scale, long-term systems-change project helping us walk together as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people towards 2029 (200 years of colonisation in Western Australia) and beyond, be it in Western Australia, Australia or globally.

Through this, we can all become better ‘Carers of Everything’, which includes caring for ecological, social, spiritual-cultural and economic life.

In 2019 four Noongar leaders came together and chose the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia as the host organisation for the project. Since then, Danjoo Koorliny has held large-scale public engagement activities (festivals; story, song, dance and art events; symposia related to themes such as fire, land and waterways, etc.), as well as high-level senior leadership engagement and alignment across sectors. Research has begun; documentation collated and shared; relationships forged; and processes and protocols established for the next nine years.

Danjoo Koorliny is a unique process for how we can walk together and co-create a better future, based on and led by the wisdom of more than 80,000 years of how to live regeneratively on this planet.

Earth4Ever Conservation Foundation works with communities of marginal farmers using permaculture principles, enabling them to be self-sufficient by establishing integrated systems that regenerate the ecosystem they live in.

They use a participatory approach to address local challenges of water shortage, depleted topsoils and declining bio-diversity (due to unhealthy farming routines) – in translating healthy farming techniques on their own lands.

They use a participatory approach to support marginal farmers – who face challenges of water shortage, depleted topsoil (sold to brick kilns) and unhealthy farming routines – in translating healthy farming techniques on their own lands.

Since it was established in 2019, it has:

* Set up a one-acre Permaculture Demonstration Farm where it demonstrates Permaculture principles in action and conducts hands-on workshops;
* Trained 15 women farmers (across 6 villages) to become key-point farmers and establish their own Permaculture Kitchen Gardens, amid the COVID crisis, with a focus on growing bio-diverse nutritious food while restoring the ecology of their regions;
* Facilitated their setup of the key-point gardens in their backyards, providing a demonstration for their village and inspiring many more women to join. Currently the total outreach is 61 women across 14 villages.

Edible London is a non-profit Community Interest Company established to respond to many of the entrenched social and economic issues facing deprived communities in London using food, nutrition, education, horticulture, counselling and youth engagement as the vehicles to create fairer, more just societies.

It goes beyond just the free provision of food as an organisation that helps regenerate disused/derelict urban spaces into green accessible and educational community growing spaces, along with providing jobs and increasing resilience for those in the local community.

Achievements to date include:
* Distribution of over 1,000,000 meals worth of ingredients for free to those in those communities most affected by food poverty, along with over 80,000 freshly prepared vegan meals
* Saved over 200 tonnes of fruit and vegetables from going to landfill.
* Established a sub-hub food bank giving out 600 meals once a week.
* Regeneration of 4 disused/derelict urban spaces into community growing spaces
* Provided meaningful volunteering experiences for over 350 individuals

Education for Climate Action for Peace (E4CAP) was birthed in October 2019 to combat adverse climate change and to provide sustainable living education and livelihood preparedness training to refugees and stateless teens and youths that don’t have access to mainstream education and cannot work legally in Malaysia. E4CAP is a collaboration between PDC alumni, including refugee teens. The latter leads Teens4CAP initiatives.

Since 2019, they have organised and supported:
· Introduction to Permaculture Workshop (3 batches)
· Teens4CAP ‘Eco-Edible Urban Gardening’ Online Course (6 batches);
· Teens Celebration for World Soil Day & World Environment Day in Malaysia;
· World Soil Day Awards for Teens;
· 3-Month Vocational Internship on Sustainable Living (3 batches);
· ‘Garden to Table’ cooking video series for UCSI University and Living Lab;
· e-commerce for UCSI Living Lab for selling crops and seeds;
· Providing vegetables to refugee centres and 20 single mother refugee families;
· Starter veggie pots for 70 low income families;
· The design and set-up of edible gardens at an Alzheimer centre, a school for special need children, and UCSI University and College.

Farms Not Arms started in 2018 as an international collective working together to develop a long-term solution to the food security, climate change, and refugee crises. It started its work in Lebanon, the country with the highest percentage of refugees in the world, with the goal of building a scalable farm model that would provide sustenance through regenerative agriculture.

Working across the 3 pillars of nutrition, regeneration and social cohesion, the farm is also a community center that brings Lebanese and refugees together to grow food, learn regenerative skills and heal social divides.

The project results from multiple human-design sprints and workshops, beginning with stakeholder meetings between refugees and local communities in the Bekaa, Lebanon in summer 2018. Later, multidisciplinary expert sprints in NYC  iteratively merged inputs from the two into an actionable, solutions-focused farm design.

Under the holistic, systemic food vision of Farms Not Arms, the Lebanese agricultural system achieve would self-sufficiency, and feed all Lebanese and refugees using only 3% of land.

Food Secured Schools Africa (FSSA) is a social enterprise set up in Ethiopia in 2018. Since then it has tested school gardens run in an entrepreneurial model. Instead of handing over aid or charitable giving that is typical for the NGO approach, FSSA looks at people and resources and makes the best of them.

FSSA offers technical support and seedlings to low-income parents who access the unused land of the schools to produce chemical-free vegetables and fruits. Their work becomes a source of income for the parents and a source of fresh and nutritious food for the children enrolled in education programs.

The parents generate income by selling mainly through the School Feeding Program (a governmental initiative to keep disadvantaged children in the education system), but their yield may also be used for their own subsistence, which became very relevant during the Covid-19 crisis.

In two years FSSA has achieved the set-up and the sustainable management of nine school gardens, located in Addis Ababa and Oromia Region, Ethiopia, involving over 300 parents who were able to produce up to 30 tonnes of vegetables per hectare of land.

Jaguar Siembra is a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving Nature & Ancient Wisdom in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia – known as the Heart of the World. They believe that we can contribute to creating peace on earth by coming back to live in harmony with nature without destroying it and mitigating climate change through community regenerative agriculture.

Jaguar Siembra was born as a transmedia project – a series of short films preserving, documenting, and sharing the stories and messages of the ancestral wisdom by native peoples in Colombia. The foundation is divided into two programs to create awareness and climate actions; They plant trees that tell stories!

So far, it has planted over 10,000 trees in food forests, a source of food for the families, animals, and biodiversity, regenerating the degraded soils to provide food resilience and heal the planet with regenerative organic agriculture. It has also established three tree nurseries, with two more in the making.

Last year, it launched its short film ‘The Heart of the World’ and organized several cultural events. Its cacao and coffee for biodiversity projects support Indigenous families with Community Supported Agriculture and equity trade between the Sierra and Europe.

Kenyan Peasants League (KPL) is a social movement of Kenyan Peasant farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists and consumers, whose main aim is to promote smallholder farmer agroecology and resist neoliberal policies that threaten local agriculture. This is done by conducting political education, people’s research, technical training, and national advocacy. KPL promotes indigenous seeds, livestock and plant varieties and the creation of an alternative economy that is driven by provision for livelihoods.

KPL was formed in 2016, motivated by the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) MC10 meeting, which took place in Nairobi in December 2015. During a parallel People’s WTO meeting, a resolution was passed to form a movement to represent the interests of Peasant Farmers in Kenya.

KPL’s achievements include establishing seeds banks in 245 households; conducting case studies to ensure evidence-based advocacy; mobilising 245 households to practice agroecology for food sovereignty; distributing indigenous seeds to 78 households during Covid-19; and organising Seed and Food Festivals and Peasants Agroecology Summer Schools.

Khetee focuses on community development through regenerative agroforestry, with village farmers and women in the founder’s hometown of Durdih, India, where most members of the population are part of the scheduled or other low castes, with many falling below the poverty line.

The project was developed after noticing that many of the farmers in the area were struggling with volatile agricultural output, poor irrigation systems, and weakened soil. Several farmers in and around the village were not able to earn well and their productivity was mainly dependent on the monsoons. Its model farm is used for workshops to demonstrate the innovative and organic practices of farming, its advantages and effect on climate change.

Khetee has adopted the method of spreading words through local folklore, and the team has prepared an act to show the present agricultural crisis and how agroforestry can be a solution. Women in the team have created folk songs to best explain its work.

Masungi Georeserve Foundation is dedicated to the restoration of some 3,000 hectares of limestone formations and to supporting the threatened biodiversity in the mountains of Baras, Rizal, Philippines.

Its Masungi Geopark Project is one of the largest collaborative reforestation efforts in the country, in an area which is heavily threatened by large-scale mining, land speculation, and timber-poaching, including illegal activities.

The team faces multiple threats, such as harassment from quarrying entities.  Despite this, the project has increased measures to protect the area from activities like quarrying and land grabbing.

Their efforts include community development: park rangers are locals of the community, including some of those previously involved in illegal activities within the watershed. The project engages continuously with the Indigenous Community within the area to develop non-timber forest products to help boost their livelihood.

YAKUM works to regenerate indigenous forest and build food sovereignty, through reforestation of degraded land with carefully selected native tree species which provide a high diversity and volume of highly nutritious food for the communities.

They work closely in the field with indigenous youth and women´s groups, to collect seeds and plant trees of important species in Cofan, Siekopai, Shuar and Kichwa territories.

YAKUM has an experienced, committed, knowledgeable and dynamic core staff who live and breathe the work. They beat many other reforestation projects through biodiversity – over 150 different tree species, selected to revitalise indigenous knowledge, nutrition, health and livelihoods.

Amazonian fruits and nuts, like Ungurahua, Morete and Wachanzo, are critically important to improve indigenous nutrition and restore food sovereignty. YAKUM also plants endangered and scarce trees over-harvested either for fine timbers, like mahogany, or for traditional medicines made from their bark or roots. With women´s groups they are also planting trees that produce seeds and fibres, used to make handicraft goods for local use and sale.

YAKUM´s work is co-planned with the communities, and is based around respect, commitment, trust and a mutual passion for plant diversity.