WEBINAR - Rebuilding Lives in the 21st Century

The 21st Century is likely to be marked with increasing instability and security challenges across the globe, as the combined impacts of resource shortages, climate change, ethnic and religious polarisation and societal inequalities bite ever deeper. More and more displaced communities seem inevitable. This is the prime focus of ReBuilding Lives.

In this Webinar Robert Pye will describe how the organization Ethos is keen to work with interested and concerned members of GlobalNet21 to “rebuild lives.” By developing infrastructure capability building, Ethos is are eager to recruit individuals and organisations with first-hand experience and to uncover some approaches to funding pilot projects and experiments.

This is a great opportunity for Globalnet21 to partner with Ethos, through access to the many conversations we are engaged in, as well as the rich resource found in our members, amongst whom we undoubtedly have people with the necessary attributes who want to make a difference.

This Webinar will be an introduction to ReBuilding Lives and will be followed by a meetup later in March where we will try to bring together those who could make a difference, with the potential means to do so, in order that we might collectively make a positive contribution to aftermath of the turbulence ahead.

Robert announced that they have been working with GlobalNet21 on an initiative called ReBuilding Lives at the very well attended and successful meeting on Future Conflicts & Resource Wars hosted within the House of Commons on October 25th.

Large institutions, such as national governments, international organisations and industry have enormous capabilities to act in this area, but generally lack agility and creativity. Our aim is to unlock those capabilities in new and agile ways by combining them within a networked approach. One example would be to exploit Vinay Gupta’s Hexayurt, a cheap robust shelter design that can be constructed cheaply and easily from materials that are available locally. This approach bypasses entirely the need to deploy tents to a crisis area, as temporary accommodation, as well as reducing the supply chain requirements by an order of magnitude. Ethos recognises the critical need to consider the problem from the end-user’s perspective, as well as looking beyond the immediate, to consider second and third order consequences of actions, and so is eager to engage closely with the communities affected. Some of the aims of the Rebuilding Lives project are to ensure that:

the “problem” we are trying to solve is defined and governed by local people who have personal experience of the problem. the project is “integrated” (no point in building a school in the absence of teachers, electricity, local security and so on). the solutions we get involved in are sustainable in the broadest sense. Ethos is exploring ways to configure pre-existing capabilities in novel ways, whilst involving the displaced communities at the heart of the proposition, to form collaborations that will construct the infrastructure necessary to rebuild displaced communities and maximise their chances of sustainability.

Although membership of our site is free we do expect all those who attend our events to pay a subscription of £10 for a whole year that covers attendance not just to one meeting but also to the vast majority of our meetups and webinars for any one year. It also allows you to bring one guest free to every meeting or webinar.