Multi-purpose Community & Unity Centers

The Challenge: To find compelling, inspirational and rapidly scalable solutions to address the poverty cycle proactively by promoting sustainable development by building sustainable human habitats specifically designed to accommodate the needs of underserved or at risk communities, while addressing critical sustainability issues applicable to humanity at large. That is to develop a approach that is proactive and whole system oriented.

Vision/theme: Multi-purpose Community and Unity Centers will be physical convergence points for local community revitalization and improvement featuring the most relevant sustainable practices and technologies. We envision a global network of sustainable communities. Places where people can get hands on help and assistance in bringing the various tools, knowledge-sets and human networks together to realize their dreams of living in a sustainable human habitat.

Unity Centers will attempt to involve people from around the globe to support the formation of sustainable communities. Through this process we will help create a new approach to development that empowers local people through a bottom-up economic approach.

Its about bringing people together in a community setting to see how through cooperation people can augment their individual efforts and create more complementary relationships at both the local and global level. The goal is to create a new globally linked but community based bottom-up economy. Through the effective use of best practices this network will promote and facilitate this process.

Project Design: Unity Centers will serve as prototypes for integrated approaches to sustainable development, rapidly replicating sustainable solutions throughout the world. This project will integrate the various oneVillage Initiatives in the form of a tech incubation and local service center that will also provide eco-living solutions to surrounding regions. Field agents and other support staff will live in the Unity Center Ecovillage developing appropriate technologies suitable for regional implementation.

Core Activities/Values: Unity Centers will use ICT for rural economic development and integration to ensure community empowerment, by creating synergistic interactions within the core areas (OVI Pillars). Unity Centers encourage and cultivate the below (and similar) values and the activities that come together to form a web of community interdependence:

	Sustainable Development - Real sustainability involves the careful examination of how we use resources in our lives - the effective and viable deployment of EcoLiving Solutions thus becomes a key feature of a Unity Center;
	Ecotourism - When people travel they are now reconsidering indigenous cultural and natural resources and their intrinsic value and beauty. In addition, people are reconsidering travel so that it is more conscious of these valuable ecological and human resources;
	Storytelling - Stories are a way to humanize information and this particularly important in today's number driven tech economy. So how can we learn to tell each other stories that inspire us to rethink common practice and live more sustainable lives;
	Transformation - The ritual of transformation and transition used to be common in our lives but is mostly absent in the modern world. More than ever in history the people of the modern need to embrace a ritual of transformation to make the transition to real sustainability.
	Awareness - Coming to "attention" is seeing the intricate detail of life's interacting and unfolding systems. As we become more aware of these phenomena, we become more conscious of the impact that our actions have upon ourselves and the world.

The plan is to address the poverty cycle proactively by promoting sustainable development by building model ecovillages specifically designed to accommodate the needs of those struggling to deal with AIDS and other challenges on an everyday level and the communities of people that surround them, while addressing critical sustainability issues applicable to humanity at large to develop a approach that is proactive and whole system oriented.

Methodology: The Unity Center vision will be carried out through the implementation of the oneVillage Initiative (OVI). oneVillage Initiative is an multi-sector, assets-based approach to development for deploying motivated change agents in underserved communities. The first step to this process involves the launch of a Open Digital Village. That means computers+Internet to enable the local research and analysis capacity building process. ICT when properly and appropriated towards social enterprise oriented community development can augment existing networked efforts. By bringing information affluence into each village, the global village will be enriched and strengthened by all-hands participation in the knowledge-based economy.

Centers will include various components and processes design to enable broadband performance and ease of use of technology. A "Connection Portal" is used to describe the interface between the Internet and Unity Center. The Open Digital Village (ODiV) which consists of a wireless network, a hub center, bank of computers, internet connection and local web portal; will be the most basic starting point for the development of more comprehensive Unity Center prototype. This ICT platform will enable external and globally linked field agent support networks such is further outlined in the Community Knowledge Delivery System proposal.

Target Groups: People all over the world like ourselves seeking out EcoLiving Solutions.