Young Award

Agro-Perma-Lab (APLab) is a women-led training foundation based in Poland. It was formed in 2019 as a branch of the Polish Food Sovereignty Network (Nyeleni Polska) in response to a need to build leadership capacity within its organisations. The Foundation brings together practitioners, educators and garden designers, leaders of ecological organizations and creative people working at the intersection of art, activism and social animation.

APLab is working towards transformation of the food system using the synergy of agroecology and permaculture: it supports the implementation of ecological and social education projects in the areas of community and ecology, mitigating climate change, transforming local food systems and designing edible urban gardens. The Foundation’s “Lab” approach draws on social movement pedagogical methods- community action research, participatory and peer learning and pilot innovations. APLab trainings nurture leadership skills, bonds of reciprocity, intergenerational collaboration, regenerative activism, design thinking and dialogue of diverse knowledges. Numerous educational resources in multiple forms include podcasts, video tutorials, guidebooks, web-docs and workshop scripts. Projects have included:

• 10-module open source online training in community seed-saving.
• Piloting the first regional Community Seed Home in Poland.
• Co-organising regenerative cultural garden events for Ukrainian migrants in Warsaw in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Co-creating international web-docs: Supermarket Museum & Garden in Your Hands.

APLab is aiming to develop learning progression pathways and permaculture design services that are at once inspiring, educational, economically viable and team-based as a way to scale up and scale out local food system strategies.

Associação Terra Sintrópica (ATS, Syntropic Land Association) was created in 2018 in Mértola, Portugal, when a group of motivated citizens came together in response to various challenges facing the area.

Terra Sintrópica practices and spreads the concept of ‘regeneration through use’. This being the idea that we need to reconnect with the Earth, relating its use and enjoyment with long-term sustainability goals, preservation and recovery of ecosystems and biodiversity. As Terra Sintrópica sees the food system as intrinsically interconnected with issues of desertification, climate change and depopulation affecting Mértola, this is where it focuses its attention.
The association works to regenerate the food system through a transition to agroecological practices, rooted in both community participation and international collaboration.

Since its creation, ATS has developed:

• A Local Food Network, which links farmers, local institutions and consumers
• An Agroecology Centre
• Five Forest Gardens in schools
• A regenerative food meeting and sharing centre
• A Land Exchange project (connecting new farmers with rural landowners)
• The Shelter Land Project, which relates these challenges to the reception of refugees from Afghanistan.

ATS wants to invest more in the urgent need to communicate and celebrate regeneration and regenerators to inspire action.

Cabarete Sostenible (CS) is a project based in the town of Cabarete, a town in the north coast of the Dominican Republic. It is Dominican-led, and uses active participation to ensure community ownership of the project. It began in April 2020 as a response to the urgent need for food that residents faced when tourism closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Cabarete is recognized worldwide as a destination for watersports, but tourism development does not contribute to the prosperity of the local population.
Cabarete Sostenible divides its work into four key areas:

• Emergency food aid
• Civic agriculture and food sovereignty
• Regeneration of the land
• Support to local entrepreneurs.

The project maintains a ‘social justice approach’ which to Cabarete Sostenible means leading with all food sovereignty efforts with anti-racist and decolonial perspectives. So far it has:

• Provided 3,700 nutritious food packages benefiting an estimated 13,600 people.
• Created a community kitchen, garden and farm which draw on ancestral knowledge, permaculture and regenerative forestry techniques.
• Used these spaces to provide workshops for local women to create products with local ingredients and excess harvests from the farm and garden.

Cooperativa Tonanzintlalli was founded by 23 indigenous Matagalpa women to cultivate and add value to organic regenerative coffee grown under the tree canopy, in right relationship with the land and the people in the community.

Through this project, the women are seeking to recover, promote, and defend their ecological and cultural indigenous knowledge, and their economic and political self-determination.

Tonanzintlalli means Sacred Mother Earth. The cooperative is committed to upholding the rights of our Mother Earth and our sacred relationship with her and all her creatures. Its coffee brand, Café D’Yasica, has received a few national integrity and quality awards. It is a symbol of the healing that is possible through agroforestry practices that protect and regenerate the forest and the waters and provide sustenance and income to its people, mitigating the need to turn to extractive activities.

The cooperative has also played an important role in the cohesion and health of the larger indigenous community. It has funded and led activities such as cultural development for the youth and primary health care services during covid-19.

Dularia is an immersive education centre which empowers socio-economically disadvantaged indigenous Santal tribal communities in West Bengal, India, to generate livelihood through regenerative practices.

Santals are one of the largest indigenous tribes of India. In the state of West Bengal, they work primarily as rice farming labourers using toxic chemical pesticides and fertilisers, which devastate the ecosystem and damage their health. To provide them with regenerative livelihood alternatives, Dularia promotes natural farming, natural building, agroforestry, indigenous herbal medicine, and natural arts and crafts.

In order to facilitate true empowerment, Dularia is autonomously run by a team of Santal tribal members, led by a Santali woman, who take all the day-to-day decisions, with national and international experts who support them each year through workshops and trainings.

To date, its major milestones are:

• Using permaculture techniques to restore a degraded plot into a thriving and diverse ecosystem within two years.
• Building natural building structures integrating vernacular art with modern building techniques, and demonstrating the use of upcycled waste and locally abundant materials as alternatives to cement.
• Demonstrating natural rice farming as a viable alternative to the current toxic practices by applying biochar and “Jeevamrit”, a traditional microbial inoculum, to regenerate soil.
• Developing entrepreneurial skills of Santal Tribal team members so that they can start generating their own livelihood.

Forests Without Frontiers (FWF) was born in 2018 out of a love for forests and the people and wildlife they support, as well as the art and creativity these landscapes inspire. FWF’s current projects focus on reforestation and rewilding of the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, where the founder of the project originates, and in the UK where the organisation is headquartered.

FWF’s work is about creating holistic forest ecosystems that revitalise landscapes, people and traditions rooted in the beauty of nature and the arts. Since starting, it has:

• Planted 150,000 trees in Romania and the UK
• Regenerated 30 hectares of degraded landscape by planting native species at strategic times and places using local knowledges and methods; all trees are maintained and cared for until they reach maturity and legally protected to ensure long-term survival
• Employed 200 local people to carry out FWF’s reforestation activities
• Engaged youth in nearby forests, nature, music and arts
• Tapped into traditions centred around forests such as music and folklore, including creating an album recorded in and inspired by the forests where we plant and featuring traditional instruments played by local musicians who were paid for their work.

FWF is the only non-profit of its kind to harnesses the power of music and art and turn it into a holistic approach to forest conservation and regeneration. We aim to inspire and support as many people as possible to engage with forests, nature and art holistically, thereby becoming a powerful and harmonious ‘voice of the forest’.

The Janeraka Institute was born in the Amazon region, Altamira, from the Awaete ancestry in the resistance of a population with less than 50 years of contact with the global society.

Since then, the Awaete population has faced numerous psychosocial and ecological challenges, such as the consequences of genocide and ethnocide since the first contact, which has been increasing with the construction of hydroelectric power-plants, mining activities, culminating in one of the worst deforestations in the world, threatening the existence of the water peoples, land and forest, in the region and around the planet.

Janeraka is an Awaete word meaning “neither mine nor yours, our house, and the house belongs to the one who takes care of it”. All of the Janeraka Institute’s activities are centred on strengthening the traditional Awaete culture and exchanging knowledge and practices with other forest peoples.

The Janeraka Institute has co-created several projects, including:

• The Awaete Agenda is a knowledge exchange program that seeks to reflect on the relationship flows between indigenous, non-indigenous, and other forest peoples, focusing on indigenous rights and ethics in relationships.
• The Janereka Podcast Channel, to strengthen the practice of orality, awarded by Art Artivism.
• The Kujy Ete Women’s Collective participated in an international exhibition of indigenous art (staged by an indigenous curator) called Ka’a Body: Cosmovision of the Rainforest and created two award-winning documentaries.
• The Janereka Ryru is an Awaete multimedia collection platform designed to decolonize the Awaete heritage for use by the Awaete people themselves.

Khetee (which translates as Cultivation) is an organisation which began three years ago in Durdih, one of the most deprived villages of the Lakhisarai district in the Indian state of Bihar, where most households live below the poverty line.

Khetee worked with village farmers and women to develop the use of agroforestry to both improve living standards and reduce climate impacts. For Khetee, creating regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economical, ecological, or social shift. It goes hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationship with each other, and with life as a whole.

Khetee works for community development through regenerative agroforestry. It focuses on land restoration, supporting livelihoods, improving food and nutrition security and reducing poverty in the Indian state of Bihar. It trains small and marginalised farmers in the methods and techniques of developing agroforestry and its maintenance.

To this day Khetee has:

• Developed five different model farms
• Converted and restored 5 acres of degraded farmland
• Trained more than 150 farmers in regenerative agroforestry
• Developed thirty community champions on agroforestry through its Khetee Fellowship Program
• Conserved nearly 100 different varieties of native seeds.

Meli Bees Network engages and strengthens communities developing regenerative practices in the Brazilian Amazon.

Through what it calls “relationships of trust”, the network supports communities to maintain and/or further develop regenerative practices. The network aims to create positive impacts on local biodiversity, community resilience, education and cultural heritage protection, food sovereignty and economic security, community science and international visibility. Meli is inspired by the meliponini bees (stingless bee species native to tropical and subtropical regions around the globe) which through the production and gathering of their food provide vital ecosystem services that allow their habitat to thrive.

Currently, Meli engages 30 communities (16 smallholder, 10 Indigenous and 4 Quilombola communities). With these communities, the network has:

• Started regenerative agriculture in 35ha of previously degraded land
• Started three native beekeeping areas with +100 beehives in total
• Supported 10 indigenous villages (+500.000ha) to protect their primary forest
• Developed multiple workshops on traditional storytelling, native beekeeping and regenerative agriculture.

Meli Bees is a growing network and is open to welcome new communities which show an interest in developing regenerative activities. Meli Bees Network gUG is registered in Germany where it focuses on the development of a decolonial form of international cooperation, establishing international partnerships and fundraising. The organisation is also starting a global movement, as community leaders that met through Meli’s activities are now starting an independent Brazilian association that will strengthen their governance and autonomy.

Based in the city of Bath in Somerset (UK), Middle Ground Growers has developed a viable economic and ecological model for small-scale regenerative growing.

Its team comes from the low-income communities they came from, and its project works in a context of wealth inequality.It sees the work of closing nutrient loops on the farm as the same work as closing wealth loops in the local economy: each benefits the people and land’s well-being.

Middle Ground Growers’ has a thriving 15.5 acre farm which provides fresh organic food to over 200 households. It aims to provide up to 10 subsidised or free veg boxes every week.

It hopes to expand this work and develop the UK’s first sliding scale regional Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) network so it can provide an ongoing supply of fresh healthy food for all communities in an affordable, equitable and regenerative way.

It is developing a cyclical and circular approach to farming. For example, exploring the use of ramial woodchip from coppice to fuel the farm’s compost, and developing systems to utilise the natural spring water on site, pumping it to the crops, which store the water before letting it gradually drain through the orchard, the wetland and then back to the source.

The Waorani Organization of Pastaza (OWAP) unites 30 Indigenous communities of the Waorani territory of Pastaza in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Under the leadership of internationally recognised Waorani activist Nemonte Nenquimo, in 2018 OWAP stepped into action following the Ecuadorian government’s announcement to auction a new oil concession covering more than 200,000 hectares of Waorani territory. OWAP’s global campaign and legal battle resulted in a historic legal victory against the Ecuadorian government, protecting ancestral territory and setting an important legal precedent in the region.

Today, OWAP and its majority female leadership work to advance the rights of the Waorani people, strengthen community resiliency, and protect more than 230,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest threatened by deforestation and resource extraction.

The organization works directly with Waorani communities to:

• Revitalise ancestral cultures and empower young leaders through a novel intercultural education program.
• Advance and uphold Indigenous rights to protect forests through litigation and grassroots organizing.
• Build a sustainable, non-extractive future in the Amazon by strengthening local governance systems, promoting food sovereignty, and supporting women-led economic alternatives to resource extraction.

Perfect Village Communities is a social enterprise based in Burundi, working especially in rural communities. It was founded in 2020 by a nurse who noticed the direct impact of environmental degradation on the community’s health, as people struggled to meet the cost of healthcare.

PVC’s vision is a healthy planet for a healthy community. It wants to empower people to regain a sense of pride in the community which stimulates a desire to care for and protect rural culture and the environment. It seeks to heal people’s health via environmental and agroecological education, through activities tackling hunger and poverty.

PVC works to ensure every member of the community is empowered with skills to become self-sufficient and employable, to manage projects and social enterprises, to train others, to connect with the international network, to revive their traditional medicine and to strengthen the social bonding through sharing abundant food instead of the current burden of hunger and poverty.

It has already:

• Produced and planted 500,000 diverse seedlings and trees (including indigenous, medical and crop species)
• Regenerated 5,000 ha farmland and mountains drawing utilising permaculture and agroecology.
• Successfully partnered with various local organisations to create 3,000 new jobs and offer health services to 12,000 patients.

Rocciaviva is a group of young people based in southern Italy.

It’s common for local young people to leave the area in search of other opportunities, but Rocciaviva’s founders made the decision to return home and create regenerative opportunities in their local community, sharing skills and knowledge they have learnt while away.

Rocciaviva’s mission is to cultivate well-being, environmental and social regeneration by sowing change, through:

• Construction of a community and a network on the territory
• Reforestation of degraded areas
• Expanding ecosystem restoration to different lands in the south of Italy
• Spreading permacultural values (sustainable way of living)
• Creation of educational and cultural opportunities for the local community and visitors.

Rocciaviva has already planted 12,000 plants, restored a lake as a water retention system and ran educational and community events such as seminars on permaculture, and has made a strong positive connection with the community it works in.

Rwamwanja Rural Foundation is a Ugandan based, refugee-led grassroots organisation. It works specifically with communities in refugee camps and other marginalised communities affected by climate change in East Africa.

Refugee populations the foundation works with are at high risk of hunger and malnutrition, exacerbated by high prices caused by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition, ecosystems that supply refugees with food, medicines and other livelihood needs are no longer providing their full services because of overexploitation through intensive agriculture, mass irrigation, overfishing and deforestation for firewood and charcoal needed for household energy.

These degraded ecosystems are less resilient to climate change impacts, creating a vicious cycle that amplifies the climate vulnerability of refugees and other displaced populations, by affecting livelihoods and health.

The Foundation was established to empower refugee youth to fulfil their potential and enable them to transform their lives. It aims to ensure these communities can restore local ecosystems, increasing climate resilience and biodiversity, while benefiting from regenerative agriculture activities that improve access to nutritious food. It brings together permaculture, Indigenous farming techniques, local languages as well as modern, affordable and easily accessible digital technologies to enhance reach and overall impact.

The Foundation is:

• Providing training programmes in regenerative agriculture and reforestation
• Developing hubs to conduct training
• Turning refugees and other members of local communities, particularly women, into entrepreneurs

It hopes to reach 9,000 people in the next five years through its 12 training hubs.

Sporos Regeneration Institute was founded in 2019 by four activists and operates on the island of Lesvos, the main gateway of refugees into Europe.

It aims to act as a bridge between the two worlds, bringing locals and refugees together, helping people to understand and respect each other by facilitating integration and hosting activities that bring disparate communities together in an effort to create lasting social change. Its mission is the regeneration of the environment, culture, and human relations.

Its offering includes:

• Free permaculture design courses (PDC) for refugees.
• Forest schools for children to reconnect with nature and develop their environmental identity.
• Courses on regenerative farming, organic gardening, natural building and more.
• Internships and vocational training in permaculture, agroforestry and regenerative agriculture.
• Building school gardens.
• Teaching relevant courses in local schools.
• Conducting outreach work (such as project consultations, guest lectures, practical and theoretical support, and local and global networking).

Highlight achievements to date include how it has:

• Regenerated 11 acres of land
• Worked with 150 school children
• Had 80 permaculture design course graduates
• Produced thousands of kilos of fresh produce free to people in need
• Provided seeds, seedlings & training to dozens of local growers.