Cleary Ecovillage Collaboratory

Cleary University in Howell, Michigan www.cleary.edu – an 800 student Business University www.cleary.edu – is developing a unique Ecovillage testbed on campus, with students, staff, faculty, partners and other stakeholders to research and deliver a template or model Ecovillage design and development package. This package would be so designed and tested at Cleary that it can be adapted to meet the needs of any particular community or region. It would include a limited set of cost-effective designs, instruction sets, recommended components, governance approaches, traning programs, economic/business models, cultural options, and recommended sustainability technologies/structures for a 250 person community that can be added to lego like to create larger systems. An example and research and development collaboratory will be emodied on campus over a five year period. The assumption going in is that these communities would want to be at least 80% self sustaining without significant dependencies on larger conventional economic and cultural systems. The development of the package would be based on best practices from around the world and new experimental findings. The goal is to allow a rapid scaling of the Ecovillage way of organizing sustainable living that is quasi independent from large food, economic, trading, transportation, provisioning, and energy production systems that may become impaired as Climate Change increasingly puts them under pressure. As such we see this as a process of designing the “life boats” for a possibly increasingly unsustainable future. The project was approved by the President and Provost of Cleary University based on a preliminary proposal presented to them by Professor Geoffrey Henny, a faculty member of 8 years standing with a strong international career and education background in the skill sets needed for the project to succeed.