Student stories: The Sabina’s Paths, Community Building in Magliano Sabina
Sabina Santovetti, a recent graduate from our MA in Ecological Design Thinking, blogs about the inspiring community projects she has been working on in Italy since graduating.
I am an Italian woman architect of 63 years of age who last year graduated in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College. My name is Sabina Santovetti and just after finishing this enlightening Master’s Degree, the Municipality of Magliano Sabina, a town forty km north of Rome, appointed me to coordinate and guide the community-building dimension of the “Percorsi Sabini” project.
“Percorsi Sabini” meaning Sabina’s Paths, takes place in the Sabina region in central Italy in the northeast of Rome. The project includes developing and delivering a series of training activities and workshops for local young adults. The main purpose of this project is to engage young people in community development and encourage them to take an active role in their local regeneration.
When asked to coordinate the project, I have proposed integrating approaches and methods such as active listening, sociocracy, Dragon Dreaming, regenerative circles, art practices and the Work that Reconnects into community-building processes. This proposal has been received and approved by the municipality team, city council members and the mayor.
We started in January. A group of eight young people in Magliano was identified. We looked for a place that could be our creative hub. We found a great space in the centre of town that was given to us free for the time of this project, 9 months.
In the meantime, I started to create the container to receive later on the students of the EDT practicum, from mid-march until the beginning of April. A group of wonderful people that we’re studying this year what I had the previous one, showed up at the zoom presentation and out of five interested, Gina Gommer decided to come.
We had a great time organizing with Gina a daily laboratory on the Art of Invitation. Our mantra was “How can we invite more and more people into the project and into this new space that will be available until the fall in order to create community and ecological projects? We realize it is never easy but we trust time, our skills and commitment. We are creating laboratories to allow people to introspect into the ecological crisis, give those tools for more equitable, sociocratic, ecological ways of living in the community, and help the G-Lab youth group to create sustainable business projects.
Write to me if you want to join. I am in Magliano Sabina until September!
sabinasantovetti@gmail.com
Post Scriptum: This project, financed by the European Community, gives the opportunity to the Schumacher Community that comes and helps us, to have all their living expenses taken care of.
Written by Sabina Santovetti.
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