VillageLab is based on the premise that the Ecovillage and sustainable communities movements represent one of the greatest sources of wealth on the planet. Thousands of communities with hundreds of thousands of people are diligently applying their creativity, time and resources to create and demonstrate cutting-edge models for sustainable and regenerative ways of life. Ecovillagers are living the solutions now.

VillageLab is here to connect that wealth with the more traditional forms of wealth – monetary, consulting, incubation and expertise thereby empowering both. We seek to create a vessel and channel for wealth to flow both ways – while we replicate, demonstrate and disseminate the results to the world.

The present Ecovillage Movement represents a distributed laboratory – one with labs all over the planet. The VillageLab will provide a central nervous system for this distributed lab and engage the movement in a coordinated Research, Development, Demonstration and Dissemination program in leading practices in sustainability and regenerative design.

Through the development of this centrally coordinated distributed lab, VillageLab will empower communities with capacity building, resources, information and cross pollination thus solving many of the movement’s present problems.

VillageLab will create a circular flow from the periphery to the center and back again ensuring the cross-pollination of leading practices. This will result in the collective intelligence of the grassroots being collected and collated – processed through a central research framework and then re-distributed so that all can benefit.

In the process relationships will be built that go far beyond monetary resource flows – paving the way for rich collaboration amongst all players.