MyLife | EcoSustainability

Sustainable Organic Off-The-Grid Communities Are The Future

The EcoSustainability community concept is one of the most central parts of the entire Dolce Vita Global operation and vision. Founders Niklas Christides and Rocco Parisi envisioned that self-sustainable community living could achieved in the future back in 2014. They also recognised that this would connects all the different pieces of the DVG world together. Niklas and Rocco have since the beginning believed in collective power, especially among people who are at the level of consciousness where they do not live only through their own agenda, but rather through their warm hearts.

C1) The first observation is that self-sufficiency is of interest to people and on their agenda, however the reason why it is not comprehensively pursued is due to the difficulty, resources, time and energy it takes when done alone or in smaller communities. As a consequence it becomes a strain and the Quality Of Life suffers.

S1) Our solution is to work on every aspect of the Village operation, ensure all parts are modelled, ideally in advance, and then continuously developed over time. If necessary, solutions and methods could be tested in advance, so that when the EcoVillage setup stage is nearing the tested and running practices can be harnessed there.

C2) Almost all eco-village models seem to be based on the fact that they are extension to living and housing solutions, i.e. people want to change their life, live on farm or in the countryside or alternatively due to the fact that they want or need to control their living structure. We feel this is a problem, because in these cases the core intent and activity will only focus on development after actually starting setup of the village. When things don't have a structure in the background, it almost impossible to make it sustainable, because you are up against it, constantly dealing with arising challenges. This in turn will result in being reactive rather than sustainable due to the constant pressure to resolve challenges. The result is a destructive loop, where you end up fixing an already existing problem that won't go away.

S2) In our opinion, development should always be organic and well planned, you do not need to know everything, but things must be clear at least at the level of thought. This is the reason why we have been working on this issue for about six years, so that we could make sure that we almost fully understand what a EcoVillage would requires operationally and what commitments it requires from its community.

C3) It is quite clear that idealism and leadership figures are a strong common feature in village communities, the purpose of which assumingly is to create unity and stability. In this day and age, innovation and communal projects, as well as progressive attitude also bind and unite people. The problem we feel is that community spirit suffers greatly when realism is replaced by idealism, which over time fragments activities and creates confrontation, even competition for leadership positions, which stands in the way of organic progress.

S3) We aim to resolve the matter through minimizing administration and bureaucracy, which is where the management and operational experience, insight and acumen that Niklas holds is important, as he values efficiency thinking, but not at the cost of unity and common interests. Administration and bureaucracy are not needed to a large extent when things and activities have clear frames and processes. When you don't need administration and bureaucracy, you don't need a lot of leadership either, and for us the degree of self-actualization is what measures the capability to achieve and remain sustainability and healthy in terms of operations.

C4) Power and abuse of power is always a big risk and often the fact that the founders of villages are also the village leaders is in our view a big problem and misconception, because power generally leads to wanting more power (can be an unconscious act or trait, as well).

S4) The problem related to power is solved in such a way that the village administration and activity or operational coordination body (3-6 people depending on the size) changes every 18 months, the same person cannot be in the role two consecutive periods. This ensures that the power of an individual person to decide matters is removed often enough. Every resident of the village commits to the fact that at some point they will probably have to take on an administrative task, it is essential for the collective to function and therefore should not be a question of choice (obviously the collective agrees to this). It is also important that there are people from different age groups in administrative positions.