Soon, the Filipino spirit of Bayanihan or nationbuilding spread like wildfire. Grocery shelves were emptied and campuses became relief packaging centres overnight. Yet in the background of the scenes of volunteer spirit and compassion, large piles of plastic bags and packaging waste from donated goods were everywhere. As illegal or legal logs flowed through cities afloat the swollen rivers became one of the culprits, new waste from donated goods piled up with human bodies and mud in areas of ground zero.
If climate change was caused by our carbon footprints, then our response to this is to reduce it. Sarah Queblatin, a Filipina environmental educator was moved by the situation and made a call for people who were asking the same questions. Volunteers from Mother Earth Foundation, Juan Tama, Ideals Creatives, Youth Trip, Creative Space, and the Peacemakers Circle Foundation immediately responded. After office gatherings gave birth to the intention of modelling some sustainable relief ideas and coming up with a circular model for relief goods response. Thus, the Green Releaf Process Model was born.
With the hurricanes that followed, Green Releaf became an online presence through Facebook using social media to gather working on nourishing and sustainable relief and share them to the public. Soon, simple actions from volunteers started sprouting.
A Transition Initiative for Maia Earth Village
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HURRICANE KETSANA (2009)
- Sarah Queblatin, The Peacemakers Circle
- Froilan Grate, Mother Earth Foundation
- Orlan de Guzman, the Peacemakers Circle
- Sharon Vaswani, Youth For Unity
- Clare Amador, Youth Trip Philippines
- Marielle Nadal, Ideals Creatives
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Asha Peri, Creative Space
Juanita Naidoo, International School Manila - Juan Tama
- Dennis Chan
HURRICANE WASHI (2011)
- Sarah Queblatin
- Pi Villaraza and Daniw Arrazola
- Juanita Naidoo
- Mahiitosh Eguia
- Katrina Tan-Conte
- Ryan Mendoza
- Clara and Ria Maciulis
- Bek and Christian Young
- Giselle Tribaco
- Amalia Misa
MANILA MONSOON FLOODING (2012)
- Lakapati Basa, Kusina ni Lakapati
Founding Volunteers
Maia Earth Village, a member of the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania and Asia, is an intentional community in Bacungan, Palawan, Philippines that recently hosted Green Releaf as one of its projects under its Transition Support Program. Our work is to bridge communities inspired by the work of the Transition Town movement around the world which has been inspiring cities and communities to design their energy descent plans to come into self-sustainability where a self-sustaining ecovillage setting like Maia is one of the ideal settings to aspire for.
Founded on consciousness and sustainability, the community created itself based on a whole systems permaculture flower called the Maia Mandala which drew inspiration from the 7 Key vibrations of the human body often called as chakras (wheel in Sanskrit). With these colors, the community designed its natural housing, gardens, experiential retreat programs and workshops, and community living practices.
During Hurricane Washi's disaster response operations in 2012, it was Maia together with Bahay Kalipay, its partner retreat center, that brought live food education and workshops using green smoothies at evacuation centers in Cagayan de Oro.
Now as home for Green Releaf, Maia hosts the integration of transformative and healing work with permaculture, natural home building, and regenerative community design through its training workshops and programs in these areas.
No more U - Turns. Time to pave new ways for change.
A major highway under water during Typhoon Ondoy in 2009
Our Drawing Board for the first model
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
It began with a question inspired by the above words by Albert Einstein. We asked, "How can we solve the problem of climate change without the very same actions that caused it in the first place?"
When Hurricane Ketsana (Typhoon Ondoy) left several cities and provincial communities in devastation and displacement in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines in 2009, a huge response to support in relief and rehabilitation was was in action. Ranked as one of the deadliest typhoons in the Philippines in history, the hurricane has left a glaring testimony of a radically shifting climate.
