BUILDING EARTH COMMUNITIES: by Kosha Joubert (South Africa & UK), Ecovillage Pioneer

Home for Humanity’s Living Curriculum:

Focusing on the Humanity Charter theme: NATURE - Living Together as an Earth Community 

Kosha Joubert (South Africa & UK) is a true pioneer in creating and connecting Earth Communities worldwide. As the longtime CEO of The Global Eco-Village Network, she has lived in, supported, connected and researched every known eco-village and intentional community on every corner of our Earth Home. In this conversation, Kosha Joubert shares her immensely rich life journey, starting with her childhood in the oppressive apartheid regime of South Africa, where she dared to defy the system to co-create and live in one of the first  multi-racial intentional communities. She went on to live in and shape the development of several pioneering intentional communities across Europe, and has worked for over 30 years in supporting the emergence of the Global Eco-Village network across all continents. Kosha Joubert shares how “coming home to ourselves” is a vital prerequisite for intercultural communication and global co-existence. From her own “spiral home” in Findhorn, Scotland, a global landmark ecovillage, she invites us to step into radical responsibility and radical participation – in order to take up, as humans, our full role as regenerators of our Earth home.

As CEO of the Pocket Project, she now focuses her attention on the widespread phenomenon of collective trauma and she evokes the power of our collective wisdom for trauma healing.

BIOGRAPHY: Kosha Joubert currently serves as CEO of The Pocket Project, an international initiative on Trauma Healing. Formerly, she led, as CEO, for many years the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). She is an international facilitator, trainer, and consultant and has worked extensively in the fields of sustainable development, intercultural collaboration and the emergence of collective wisdom. Kosha is a co-founder of Gaia Education, which develops trainings at the cutting-edge of sustainability, and co-author of the internationally applied curriculum of the Ecovillage Design Education. She is also the author of a book on collective wisdom, and editor of books on social tools for building community and ecovillage solutions. 

Kosha grew up in South Africa under Apartheid and has been dedicated to the healing of divides and collective trauma ever since. In 2016, she received the Dadi Janki Award - 100 Women of Spirit - for engaging spirituality in life and work and for making a difference in the world.   In 2019 she hosted the Power of Community Online Summit (10.000 participants) and co-hosted the Collective Trauma Online Summit (53.000 participants). In February 2020, she hosted the Communities for Future Online Summit, dedicated to exploring our response to the climate emergency (21.000 participants)  

In 2019, during COP25 in Madrid, on behalf of GEN, she signed agreements with government representatives from The Gambia, Sierra Leona, Sudan, Liberia, Togo and Burkina Faso for collaboration on the implementation of nation-wide ecovillage development in these countries. 

About the Living Curriculum: This conversation with Kosha Joubert was conducted by Ludovic Mosisca  and Stefanie Kriech, Members of the Home for Humanity Team 2020. The team worked on the creation of a Home for Humanity Living Curriculum – a task that was embedded in the 2020 “Reshaping International Development” Course at the University of St. Gallen, directed by the co-founders of Home for Humanity. This Living Curriculum is part of the HumanivEARTHsity Programme in Transformative Education of Home for Humanity. For more information or to join our programmes, see www.HomeforHumanity.Earth