Do you feel limited in making a difference as an isolated individual, especially when it comes to global issues that actually seem to threaten our entire planet, like climate change?
What if the solution lies in your local community? What if we all need to re-invent our way of life and what if this depends on what we as a community, and not just as individuals, invent? What if those local inventions are the key to a new lifestyle that we need, a lifestyle in which we are more aware of our local environment and in which we have a key role in managing and governing it? We need to ask ourselves the following questions:
How do citizens have the possibility to come together to do more for social change other than just voting and consuming correctly?
How do we obtain the space to experiment?
How can local civil initiatives be more favored over big capital?
How do neighborhoods and communities get the chance to adapt to climate change?
The Kaskantine would like to contribute to a future proof and resilient city, responding to what we think are the big challenges of our times by acting together as communities and getting more communities engaged: fighting climate change and loss of biodiversity. We could do so much more if we had more space to experiment.
We are looking for decentralized, autonomous, integrated solutions, more locally produced food and crafts, more nature-based solutions, local entrepreneurship and making the neighborhood more pleasant and richer with own resources. We need to make new alliances between citizens and reclaim resources on a local level but also make new alliances and contracts between citizens and the government neighborhood (commoning). Another principle is that water, energy and food cycles are interconnected in one local production system (integrated approach, system approach, circular economy, generative economy).
Lots of things to do and lots of things to reflect on. In this case there is no doing without thinking, and no thinking without doing!
Get involved
By organising different kinds of meetups and methods, we hope to engage with different perspectives and preferences for social activism and critical thinking. This includes:
You can also download our "off-grid technology for social change" manual, or participate in our open source platform where we discuss social change methods and designs that can help the social movement to get a material base. Go to ENA.amsterdam