Together we can build a better world, one village at a time.
By Stina Kerans.
The regeneration movement talks of everything being linked together as a part of a living whole. This whole is described as a set, or series, of ‘nests within nests’—each fractal being a part of a bigger fractal.
I see the Sun Villages model in its full-blown form (i.e. incorporating all aspects of day-to-day life) as being a nest within the Regen Places Network nest, because it too incorporates all aspects of life, but at the next level up—i.e. via organisations and groups - it acts to unify and collaborate with them all.
Similar to the regeneration movement, the Sun Villages model grew out of Permaculture in 1977 and has been evolving ever since, with the financial formula being the last and final aspect that has emerged.
The key takeaway is that the model represents a fundamental shift in how we approach housing, investment, and our future—valuing people, therefore all forms of value and exchange, something I learnt about, and really resonated with in my early 20s.
Back in the mid 1970s, I had no income (there was no such thing as a single parent pension) and I was living on my little 'autonomous' farm with my two little girls. I was dependent on a sort of informal trade with a few different parties who also lived on land near an old village that was slowly starting to 'repopulate'. By assisting others wherever I could, such as; being a shed hand during shearing, marking lambs, tailing, fencing, drenching, milking a cow, butchering meat, and numerous other things) I not only learnt about sustaining myself, but was also rewarded with the use of farm equipment and some occasional labour when I really needed it.
In the first 12 months I had dug, formed, and poured a septic tank, the foundations of my future off-grid, fully solar house, a slab for my little 12' x 12' room (to supplement the 15’ caravan that the three of us slept in) and finishing it within three weeks, as well as fell and milled my own fence posts to fence the whole property as well as a chook pen, built a chook house with wood off-cuts from the local sawmill, plant 4 acres of potatoes by hand (borrowed a tractor to plough the field), and planted over 200 trees that I had propagated.
Birthday money was spent on concrete and fencing wire much to the disgust of my last remaining, very wealthy great aunt! Money that I earnt off the land went to 10,000 bricks for my house—collected with my 21/2 ton truck over many weeks and many trips from the local brickworks. I required the assistance of my two girls to push them with their feet to the edge of the truck tray before our attention turned to dinner preparations. The most wonderful thing was that after taking my last load, a full refund arrived in the mail with a note saying that if they couldn’t help someone who was so willing to help themselves, then life wasn’t worth living!
Had I worked for the funds to do all that I did over those 12 months, how long might it have taken?
There’s something to say about being ‘pushed’ to find a way to survive, and I certainly experienced living an ideal village life without the use of money.
Sun Villages has always been, and still is, my attempt to incorporate, or integrate those times into a life that both enables and empowers others to be able to help themselves, along with the community in which they live.
Read lots more about the evolution of the Sun Villages model in the book, which is available here in PDF format for $9. It’s said by many to be an entertaining read, apart from all the education in it.
Visit the website to find out more about Sun Villages
