OPT IN to the
Living Earth Festival

From Earth Day to Sunday (April 22-25, 2010), the Living Earth Festival celebrates our connection to our great planet and to each other. We all feel it. Spring is coming up fast, and our grass roots are spreading, looking for new connections and new directions to grow.

Our theme this year is Sharing Abundance. We live in the Great Bowl and Spoon; the Grand River Valley represents an area of plenty inside a nation already known as one of the wealthiest in the world. Our partners and participants represent an abundance of organizations, initiatives, and individuals dedicated to meeting the needs of an emerging culture of resilience.

How can we share these great resources to best effect?

What can we grow together that will survive and thrive in our changing world?

And, perhaps most importantly:  what are we doing for Earth Day?

Partners

The Procession of the Species: Help build costumes and floats for this do-it-yourself community parade celebrating our favorite species, and march with us right down King Street!

Blooming Earth Market: The Sustainable Economy is already here! Browse and shop from the very best available local, recycled, and sustainable products.

REEP: The Regional Energy Efficiency Project showcases techniques to make your home snug, safe, and sustainable, with booths and workshops from enlightened organizations around the region.

Nudge: Give us a lever and a place to stand, and we will move the world. Nudge applies systems thinking to social organization, and throws great parties into the mix!

The WARMER Project: Explore your personal experience of change: in our climate and in our world. WARMER uses interactive performance and conversation to ask the question: how do we want to live?

Transition KW: Oil won’t last. What are we going to do when it’s gone? Help prepare your town for transition to an oil-free future.

The City of Kitchener: Always quick to support community efforts, the City of Kitchener is on board for the fourth Living Earth Festival, and looking to the future.

History

Starting in 2007, the first Festival sprung up from grass roots in response to the increasing number of sustainability-related events that focused around Earth day. Community groups partnered with the city to hold themed performances, clothing swaps and other informal get-togethers open to everyone who cared to participate.

In 2008, even more environmentally conscious groups, together with some of the original festival organizers, worked to promote a week-long series of events with the shared themes of sustainability, urban regeneration and cultural evolution. Extensive cross-participation led to collaboration becoming a major feature of the festival's self-organization.

2009 saw the first invitations to form a "Hub of Hosts" made up of enthusiastic community members charged with guiding the development of the festival, strategizing for resilience and growth.

Now in 2010, a core group of last year’s hosts has connected with new volunteers and artists with the goal of expanding our existing audience and networks exponentially, while maintaining our core values and community orientation – and to throw the best party we know how!

Offers

One of our goals in creating the Living Earth Festival every year is to provide a vehicle for community groups to connect with each other. We maintain a network of likeminded people and organizations and encourage as much cross-linking in that network as possible. In particular, we find that just holding an Open Space event is a great way to find the synergies that already exist between our skills, goals and visions. The festival also provides a great opportunity for promotion and community outreach. And not just through our media contacts: look around at any of our events and you will see your own audience among our organizers, volunteers, and community participants.

On a personal level, this is our opportunity to engage in the community and reflect on our own presence and actions. It’s an opportunity to become part of something bigger than ourselves, not as just another cog, but as the motivating force of an emerging ecosystem. Many of our organizers are also performers, and we particularly look for opportunities to connect the intellectual with the physical; to feel rather than to just think.

So how we get everyone involved?

OPT-IN: Open Planning To Integrate Networks

OPT-INs provide an “Open Space” where we can brainstorm together about events, performances, or workshops we would like to see in the festival, and what resources we can gather to make these events happen.

The first Open Space un-conference was created when someone realized that all of the really productive conversations at any given conference were conducted over coffee breaks between the scheduled events. So the idea became to create a conference composed entirely of productive coffee breaks.

Open Space discussions require some simple structure that we will lead you through, but there are only three basic rules:

1. The Rule of One Time: What happens, happens. Now is the best time and here is the best place.
2. The Rule of Two Feet: If you can’t contribute – for whatever reason – leave. Find another discussion where you can contribute, or just take a break.
3. The Rule of Three Friends: We’re planning at least two more OPT-INs before the festival. Please come to the next one, and bring three enthusiastic friends with you. (Grass Roots, remember!-)