What is Re-Alliance? What do we hope to achieve? These questions and more are explored by some of of the founding members of the Re-Alliance network.

This session introduces five women from regenerative organisations in India, and explores their work in partnership with Regenerosity and Re-Alliance. We hear from Aparna Bangia and Komal Thakur (Earth4Ever Conservation Foundation), Duhita Ganguly (The Timbaktu Collective), Preeti Virkar (Navdanya) and Arnima Jain (Tarun Bharat Sangh). From agroforestry, to permaculture, to seed sovereignty, to water harvesting, their work showcases a range of locally adapted regenerative solutions to increasingly challenging global problems.

What is greywater, and how can you safely use it in refugee camps and settlements? How can you capture and use rainwater for food growing in contexts of displacement? This one hour session shares learnings from a recent project funded by Malteser International and conducted by Re-Alliance and Syrian Academic Expertise around food growing in Syrian Internally Displaced Peoples' (IDP) camps. The session focuses on the collection, storage and use of rainfall and greywater. Working in three IDP camp sites in A’zaz and Jarablus in Northwest Syria, the pilot project tested the viability of creating vegetable gardens to grow food irrigated in part by harvested rainwater and greywater. Research has shown the benefits of gardening to those living in temporary settlements by providing fresh and nutritious food, meaningful activity, a sense of belonging or home, and feelings of well-being, particularly in the wake of trauma. It has also shown how replenishing soils, creating healthy water cycles, space for biodiversity, planting trees and perennial crops, and minimising waste can have an equally positive impact on both human and ecological health. In areas of limited rainfall and high temperatures, nearly all food crops will need additional irrigation water to supplement rainfall. By identifying and promoting simple, low tech options for capturing and re-using greywater and rainwater for irrigation, and creating compost from food waste, growing food can become an accessible option for many households. Speakers include Mary Mellett, Juliet Millican, and Jackie Kearney from the Re-Alliance team; Dr Shaher Abdullateef, founder of Syrian Academic Expertise (SAE); and Richard Luff, independent humanitarian consultant and WASH advisor.

Looby Macnamara hosts a discussion about creating opportunities with the Cultural Emergence toolkit in contexts of disaster, displacement or development. Drawing upon lineages of indigenous wisdom, permaculture design and systems thinking, Cultural Emergence provides a toolkit for creating a new understanding of culture. In this session Looby Macnamara, the author of Cultural Emergence, People & Permaculture, 7 Ways to Think Differently and Strands of Infinity, and the co-founder of Cultural Emergence, shares the potential that this toolkit has to create opportunities in humanitarian and development contexts. Find out more about Cultural Emergence at https://cultural-emergence.com/ See more Re-Alliance webinars at www.re-alliance.org/videos

Showcasing the Treebog: a compost toilet which, when built and planted around with trees, bushes and vines, creates biomass resources from the washing water and the plant nutrients found in the toilet "wastes". Treebogs are an example and an expression of Permaculture Design which can be self-built using local materials and trees. Hosting this webinar is Jay Abrahams, who built the first Treebog in 1992, and co-presenting will be Elke Carpus, who is a representative of Jiwnit from Kamyaak Village, in Senegal, where the first two Treebogs in Africa were built in October 2019. The Treebog was developed by Jay for his own and his family’s use, in their ‘off-grid’ cottage in Herefordshire, England. Since then many hundreds of Treebogs have been built in the UK. Other Treebogs have also been created in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Palestine, and Nepal, and now also in Senegal - each have been planted with trees native to the region in which they are located. In Kamyaak Village in Senegal, each of the double-cubicle Treebogs is used by around 35 people living in the compounds there. Each of the Treebogs were planted with 25 fruit, nut, pole-wood, medicinal and fodder trees. Among these trees was a Papaya tree sapling, which when planted in 2019 was only 6 inches tall. Eighteen months later, it was 15 feet tall and had produced its first papaya fruit!