Courses and Events
We are Sunseed’s Sunseed’s Project Manager Ashley and Sustainable Living Coordinator Elisa, and from 12 – 17 August we attended the 2025 European Ecovillage Gathering, which was hosted by Mindenegyüttmegy Association (MEGY), a thriving ecovillage that happens to be one of the largest permaculture projects in Hungary. This year was a special year in the history of the ecovillage movement, as it marked the 30 year anniversary of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), and the first year that the annual gathering was happening in eastern Europe. With this long history in mind, the guiding theme for 2025 was “Tending The Roots: Celebrating 30 years of ecovillage impact”.
Over 700 attendees from all over the world gathered in Mana’s Garden for a week of workshops, seminars, trainings, sharing circles, movement, connection and growth. Each day was jam-packed, starting with pre-breakfast morning sessions focused on movement or meditations through art or other types of gentle practices. Then we moved onto a collective morning circle, with each day focused on some aspect of the ecovillage movement, starting with roots on day one, moving on to branches, then seeds, then finally looking forward to the future fruits.
The main part of the day consisted of morning and afternoon blocks for workshops and seminars, separated by lunch. We attended sessions on various topics such as practical activism in communities, an examination of going “from triggers to teachers”, ecovillages as catalysts for just socio-ecological transition, indigenous and traditional community perspectives, regeneration of an ecosystem in an arid and dry region by our neighbours in Los Portales, the use of restoration circles as part of restorative justice in the Auroville project, and more. Choosing which talks to attend was the main source of conflict throughout the week – there was too much to choose from!
We were very proud to host our own workshop on the first day of the Gathering, which we chose to call “Los Cuidados: Exploring Gender Roles in Community Through the Lens of Housework, Food and Community Care”. We were very pleased with the attendance of this workshop on the main stage, and even more proud of the outcome, which facilitated a lot of fruitful conversation and sharing among the participants on tools they use in their own communities to visibilise invisible care work and promote a culture of shared care, beyond gender roles.
Beyond the workshop, we also hosted a table in the “Meet the Ecoprojects” of the Gathering every day for one hour after lunch. It was a beautifully dynamic space, with lots of visitors coming by to learn about Sunseed, sign up for our newsletter, and ask about how to join the project!
A final aspect of the Gathering that we both really enjoyed was the implementation of sharing groups – small groups of 5-6 people who connected on the first evening and met daily to share our feelings, observations, and reflections on the day’s activities. It was a peaceful moment of connection with new people we met in the gathering that served as a much-needed moment of calm in the hectic gathering schedule.
Upon our return to Sunseed we put together an educational activity for the community, sharing first a little introduction to the gathering and what GEN is and does, what we did while there and some of our reflections on the experience, followed by a mini version of the workshop that we presented during the GEN Gathering.
We are very grateful to everyone who made our attendance at GEN possible, and we look forward to more of a Sunseed presence there next year. Here’s to another 30 years of ecovillage life and co-creation of our powerful communities!
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Each of the 17 writers was invited to call to mind a specific place within the river canyon. They crafted a poem each, which captured how their chosen place had ‘spoken’ to them, attending to what it told them through sound, smell, touch, colour, light, temperature, and so on.
It was my intention for the workshop to be a collaborative experiment in bringing language into Sunseed’s regenerative technology toolbox. As a social-ecological transition project, Sunseed is set up to animate and restore the landscape, and many tools have been built and applied over the years to help the constantly evolving community group achieve this. Through their composting and waste water systems, solar panels, seed-saving methods, native tree nurseries, and kitchen laboratory, to name a few technologies, cycles are closed, soil erosion is minimised, and gifts from the earth are honoured and shared. 
Language conveys meaning best when it can land in the body. From my work in the environmental science and policy space, I know first-hand that it’s best to share messages in a way that can be felt by those receiving them, in order to foster mutual understanding and generate positive action for nature. So, this part of the workshop applied an embodied method to share the experiences described by each poet. 
Once each poet had something down on paper, we organised ourselves around a table that we imagined to be the river canyon. We became waypoints on a route that joined up all of the special sites that we had written about. 
I invited each poet write and share their poem in their native tongue, to express themselves in a way that felt free and natural, and add a diversity of sounds to the Los Molinos night. We hear birds sing in foreign tongues and nonetheless enjoy what we hear, after all. Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, and English decorated the evening soundscape. Some were kind enough to provide translations, as well.
It strikes me that all of the poems speak of quiet moments of connection with the canyon; moments that offered the writers a place to rest their bodies and boost their spirits. To read this collection of poems is to understand how the landscape sustains the attention, care and action of Sunseed’s community.
If you’re ever wanting to walk in Los Molinos, you’ll no doubt feel its potent, peaceful magic for yourself. Nonetheless, I have mapped the way woven by our collective song. Following this route might help you to connect with it through the eyes, ears and fingertips of the creatures who live here as you go.
