Build IT Forward - Resilient Community

More and more communities experience the anguish of survival in our noninclusive and environmentally unsustainable economy. It is a fallacy to believe we can create a better world and achieve sustainability and resilient ecosystems without efficient social innovation for the vulnerable. 

Technology can help give their struggles visibility, by gathering, mapping and anlyzing relevant information that can help create Resilient Housing solution models and environmentally sustainable projects, connected to the dreams of the communities themselves and guiding them to aquire the necessary skills to help build them.

The best way to build a community is around meals. It is an ancestral truth we have forgotten, in our disconnected world. In the case of vulnerable communities, these centers also provide for the basic needs for nutrition, affection and self-worth. They can act quickly to deliver personalized assistance in case of emergencies, and a place to join the conversation about climate change.

As individuals, we are valued according to our employability within the economic system. It is a limiting reality that prevents many from using our skills, no matter how basic, to achieve wellbeing for ourselves, our families, and our communities. In times of trouble, like the current pandemic or during climate emergencies, the situation becomes even more dire, as many of those poorly paid jobs disappear. Our solution is to build resiliency by ensuring that the basic necessities of nutrition, affection and human connection through meaningful activities such as permaculture and life skills  hands-on training, continue to exist. The mobile centers also prepare the communities to tackle climate change, by learning how to build themselves the resilient infrastructure necessary to survive and thrive. 

The scale of the problem - the affectation on vulnerable communities during emergencies - in Costa Rica is summarized by INEC (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos), reporting that ¨in 2020 poverty affected 30% of the population, meaning there were 1 529 255 poor people, an increase of 6,1 p.p. compared to 2019¨. ¨... World Bank reported ¨...COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to increase extreme poverty by between 88 million and 93 million (downside estimate) in 2020.

The Mobile Nutrition and Training Centers offer vulnerable communities the space to build resiliency through collaboration. Upon registration, every member receives a unique profile code, using a secure database built with outside help, registering their nutrition needs and basic health information, their housing situation as well as their resilient housing needs, and their desired life skills. The centers start building the community around the local Permaculture projects, which in turn provide nutritious products. The centers provide meals, as per nutrition plans, with menus prepared by the community itself, with the collaboration of every single member through rotation, taking the burden off women, who are fulfilling this role traditionally, and with ingredients that don´t cause malnutrition and poverty-induced obesity. In case of emergencies, the center provides quick assessment of affectations. Building upon this, the centers then start providing life skills training, according to the preferences, matching them with the skills needed to build the future resilient, sustainable housing and infrastructure projects for the community. The centers work in close collaboration with the acamedia and the National Training Center that provides continuing education. The ideal size of the community that is built around one such Mobile Center is to be determined.  

Our solution serves the socially and economically vulnerable population, without difference of gender, age, or racial background. We aim to create a community that gathers around the most important cultural aspect of human life – providing and preparing meals, nutritious and culturally sensitive, mainly locally sourced – and learning the skills to meaningfully contribute to the creation of the resilient communities that will allow us to thrive, alongside a healthy natural ecosystem. The solution, as the fist step in the long-term process, fulfills the immediate needs for nutrition, while creating bonds that promote emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing. Being left behind, forgotten, a spectator to the absurd spectacle of the super rich of the world and the way they destroy our very system that keeps us alive, is currently making us feel like powerless pawns in a sensless game of fortune and greed. It has nothing to do with social, political, or economic democracy. Our solution aims to give every member of the community a voice in the decision-making process and the choice to collaborate freely into building their own resilient, inclusive future. It is easier to start building these new models of democratic, inclusive and environmentally responsible communities with the ones who are the most vulnerable. We can only hope that their success will convince the rest of the population to re-organize their way of living by redefining what prosperity is: a responsible and limitted consumption, community based collaboration towards the restoration of the ecosystems within our cities and outside, etc.  

The centers allow visibility in terms of women and girls participation and they can provide support to overcome any cultural, religious or societal limitations that created them. The ground rules of the centers must clearly state and promote a Zero Tolerance policy towards violence, in all its forms:  physical or psychological.  

The Life Skills Training everyone receives gives people a chance to contribute in building the resilient infrastructure in terms of housing and accessible, democratic city services that are to be built anew or adapted and refitted from old structures. 

Our urban river in Costa Rica is constantly contaminated by several communities of extremely vulnerable people who live in makeshift homes, both inside a protected tropical forest area and along the protected areas on the sides of the river. It is an illegality that the state chooses to ignore because they cannot provide them with a dignified and safe home. Providing these communities with tools to create a resilient life for themselves will, at the same time, allow our fragile ecosystem regenerate and fulfill in turn its protective function. There is no resilient natural ecosystem without a resilient human community.  

Our association, Costa Rica Mundo SOStenible has been working closely with the local community on environmental projects. We recover the green spaces, saving them from abandonment and contamination and turning them into flowering gardens for the local biodiversity. We are slowly creating green urban corridors by planting trees alongside the mobility arteries of the neighborhood. We now understand the social aspect must be integrated into the solution, or else our goal to stop the environmental destruction will never be achieved. We also know that it is not easy to build the trust within the suffering community. They have been abandoned, seen as a growing problem, that it will take effort to make them open up and participate. We must act now, before their fragile homes are swept away in the next climate emergency or more trees are burnt down to give room for more shacks, more rivers contaminated.