Category Archives: FORUMS

ACTIVITIES BY LOCATION, ARTICLES, CONFERENCES, FORUMS, Pennsylvania, Virgina

Welcome to ecocycling™!

bikefoodEcocycling™ was brought to life in 2007 with the goal of increasing awareness about current environmental issues through grassroots activities such as our educational forums, Ecocycling™ team, beautification projects, recycling-trash clean up programs and more! Our teams are often out working to create a lifestyle that encompass the core values of naturalists and environmentalists while cultivating non- bureaucratic procedures to accomplish our goals. We encourage you to delve deep, learn about our organization and hopefully become involved with our programs by being a regular supporter.

OUR STORY
The  Ecocycling team which helps to grow and spread awareness regarding the environmental issues facing us as individuals, families, and communities. Our riders keep an ear to the street and make sure our voices are heard by maintaining a direct involvement in the community. Since we’re often not in a hurry but would rather develop relationships with those we meet, we have often been called the “Turtles of Racing” because to us it is not how fast you get to the finish but what you have accomplished along the way!

Our educational forums and conferences help to bring groups together in order to move towards a more sustainable future through the sharing of information, resources, and abilities. Our involvement in “greening” the landscape is taken to the next level with numerous beautification programs. From simply planting a single tree to creating urban and rooftop gardens we help to transition developed and often cold looking city scapes to a blanket of lush and living greenery. When we are not planting for the future you may find us cleaning up the trash and waste left behind by others though our recycling and pedal up to clean-up programs.

At Ecocycling™ we not only offer hands on learning & volunteer projects but we also have important sustainable programs to keep you actively engaged and involved in the process. Ecocycling™ provides people with the tools and knowledge to make a difference in our environment.

ARTICLES, Ecocycling, FORUMS

The Ecocycle ♾️

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The Ecocycle distinguishes different development phases of our work: Birth, Maturity, Creative Destruction, and Renewal as well as the type of leadership or team members that belong to each phase (see Ecocycle graphics below).

Facilitator Nancy White pointed out that mapping our activities against those phases can help identify bottlenecks: The risk, for example of giving birth to ideas for change or projects but not being able to invest time, energy or funding to go through the development stage and reach maturity (“Poverty Trap”), which points to the importance of prioritizing activities and fight the right battles. Another risk, she says, is, at the Maturity stage, not to question or stop activities, so that they can evolve and make space for renewal (“Rigidity trap”).

The Ecocycle
Visual by Björk Brynjarsdóttir Article by Harkiran

Participants first made a list of activities using post-it notes, and then worked in pairs to help each other identify where to place the activity on the eco-cycle. In 4 bigger groups, they reposted the activities on a larger ecocycle illustration and, taking a tour of each of the 4 ecocycles, commented their findings in plenary.

The group pointed out that the placement of activities seems to depend a lot on how junior or senior we are, how excited we are about an activity that might be new for some and very routine for others. So, for example, data collection and analysis can be for some of us a moment of birth, and for others a mature activity. The group also saw quickly that it is important to reach a balance in activities between the four development phases in order to avoid chaos, or bureaucracy overload for example, and maintain innovation and the creation of new areas of work.

Here are some specific highlights of the conversation:

Maturity: The struggle with activities that are mature, and relate to management tasks and bureaucracy were mentioned by many as a head ache. It points to the general issue of gender researchers feeling overwhelmed with administration and not finding sufficient time for research. This discussion is not new in CGIAR. Are managerial tasks best taken over by scientists, are asking many in the room? Another participant thinks that the interaction with other social scientists is at a maturity stage (“we understand each other”) while there is still a lot of confusion when it comes to reach agreements with the biophysical scientists.

Creative Destruction: Participants struggled a bit with “Creative destruction”. Nancy White made it clear that this is a creativity stage (not something negative), a stage of change and innovation, a moment of questioning and confusion that leads to renewal. One participant gave as an example the need to deploy our listening skills to biophysical scientists in order to be able to change mind sets and create and work together.  It was also mentioned that it is important that we involve a larger group of next users and partners in the creative destruction and renewal phase. This increases the chances for them to support the birth and implementation of our ideas and activities.

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