ESC: Sowing Community

SEQUOIA SCCL We are a group of people organised in community, composed of 9 resident members (5 adults and 4 minors), plus a surrounding network of collaborators and participants from other communities. Our legal form is a housing cooperative in assignment of use, which we see as a way of making possible collective ownership within the current system. We self-manage ourselves collectively, sharing spaces, resources and projects. We have been in existence since 2013 and in these 8 years we have developed the living space as well as productive activities such as building a wood-fired oven to provide bread to the house and the people who regularly collaborate with the project. We have also grown a vegetable garden and arranged the yard where either ourselves or other groups sometimes organise cultural activities. Since the beginning we have been receiving volunteers through the WWOOF platform and since 2018 we have been participating in the Erasmus +/ESC programme by receiving volunteers who collaborate with us in the vegetable garden and yard, bakery and cultural activities. PHILOSOPHY Our intention is to give life to an integral alternative way of living which can cover the basic needs (accommodation, food, care, etc.), with a high degree of self-government, while remaining always open to the arrival of new people and ideas. All this without compromising the importance of being part of local networks and like-minded projects with whom we exchange knowledge and resources. As an ideological manifesto, we provide our founding values: -Ecology (conscious and balanced integration into the natural environment); -Cooperation (sum of individual capacities to cover collective needs); -Experimentation (creative and inspiring relationship with knowledge and resources); -Communication (non-violence, expression from love and not from fear, networking). PERSONAL PROJECT As a distinguishing feature we would like to highlight the "personal project", which consists of a free-themed project where the usual volunteer roles are reversed, by giving the volunteer a leadership role within the group. The aim of this initiative is, precisely, to learn to lead in a respectful way, while generating meaningful bonds with the environment. In the unlikely event of not knowing what project to develop, Sequoia will propose project ideas.