The Real Auroville is in the Work
By Bill Leon, Ph.D., AVI USA Board Member
This February and March, Bill Leon, AVI USA board member and member of the AVI USA Evaluation and Project Vetting Committee, traveled to Auroville to meet Auroville project leaders. Bill has played a key role in advising and guiding project leaders and partners through our newly redesigned vetting process. As AVI USA grows, our fundraising process is moving to higher levels of integrity and transparency for both our donors and our Auroville partners. Bill, and Flavia, both pictured below, have been instrumental on this journey.
I recently visited Auroville primarily to connect with project leaders, learn what they are doing, help them think about how they might evaluate their programs, and determine how AVI USA might help them find additional support for their work. I have been on the AVI USA board for over 30 years, so I knew many of the programs and leaders, but I had rarely explored their work in depth. So this was a great opportunity to hear about and see their work first hand. My biggest awakening was that for any visitor to Auroville—first time or twenty-first time—you can get a better understanding and inspiration for your own work anywhere if you make time to get to know people and programs while you are there. The visuals of Auroville are impressive, the activities there are fun and may be healing, but the essence of Auroville is really evident when you see how Aurovilians are applying the integral yoga in their work and lives.
This, as you may know, is a time of transformation for many Aurovilians as they are confronted by challenges related to internal and external leadership, changes to the natural and built environments, and bureaucratic, financial, and interpersonal shifts. In most of my meetings, this was not only relevant background, but often the first thing discussed. But quickly, our conversations moved to the work at hand, the current program challenges, and their plans for enhancing or expanding their efforts. In these discussions, I recognized in the leaders their deep personal commitments, their creative juices, their ultimate optimism, and their dedication to building a society and world that is continuing the evolution of consciousness. They are doing this on personal, organizational, and larger scales and in ways the bring significant, practical, and replicable results that really change people, help people, and regenerate Nature and Spirit.
Here is just one example. I met Arthur at the Auroville Dog Shelter and followed him around as he showed me their humble, inadequate facilities and introduced me to three staff and some of their 300 dogs. The facility had outgrown its budget and physical resources and faced management challenges when Arthur, a newcomer and professional dog trainer, decided to take the helm. Now, all the dogs have names (which, in itself, show you how they think and work), get shots, deworming, food, shelter, shade, medicine, and most importantly, love. Most of these are dogs have experienced significant trauma in their lives in the local villages as strays, yet most are as friendly and engaging as your average dog with a home. It takes a lot of effort to get the food, medicine, find vets to spay and neuter the dogs, encourage adoptions, and find the volunteers and funding to keep it all going. Yet the people who work there do all this with focused attention and a peaceful attitude. Later, in a workshop facilitated by Matthew on how to recruit and retain volunteers, I sat with Arthur and people from other projects as we helped the Shelter brainstorm on ways to engage volunteers more effectively. Recently, they had a puja at a new site where they are building a whole new facility with much better accommodations for their furry friends. I see the Shelter becoming a model effort of compassion in action.
I also watched facilitators play with children in an innovative, free-progress nursery at The Learning Community and at Mohanam’s kindergarten; learned how WasteLess plans, constructs, delivers, and evaluates its widely dispersed efforts to teach school children throughout Tamil Nadu about environmental science and ways anyone can care for the Earth in their own homes and villages; heard how Aurokiya is preventing blindness and improving the sight of people in the bio-region; learned how the Botanical Gardens and Pitchandikulam Forest are educating youth and professional land rehabilitators and managing restoration projects in India and elsewhere; heard how Deepam has expanded to serve the various needs of children with disabilities; learned how Aikiyam and Isai Ambalam schools are serving village children with innovative educational efforts; heard how the Dreamweavers Group has been facilitating explorations and consensus building in Auroville planning efforts; leaned how The Joy of Impermanence is building a strong sense of community without expectations of long-term settlement; learned how YouthLink is growing into a respected voice and action support network to help youth engage in Auroville and its economy; and learned how Yuvabe is helping recent IT graduates gain experience and confidence by helping other programs.
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And these are just a few of the programs that my fellow board members and I visited. We did it because so many other people are stepping up to fund these programs (nearly $500,000 raised in the past year), and we want to know more of the details about their work and accomplishments to share with donors. We were very impressed with what we learned, and we will be sharing more about individual projects in the future. But feel free to contact AVIUSA if you have specific questions about or interest in any projects we all support.
Everywhere you turn in Auroville, you can meet people doing amazing work in innovative ways, and they are happy to discuss it. My advice to all who want to know what Auroville is really doing to expand human unity, is to look at the AVIUSA website’s descriptions of vetted projects (https://aviusa.org/partners/), pick one or more that interest you, contact the leaders, and start a dialogue. Then, if and when you visit, or even if you don’t have that opportunity, you will get a sense of how one can address a need in any community with a sincere heart, a creative mind, and a powerful vitality to make real change in the world. If you do, I think you might be inspired to do something like it or to engage with a project in Auroville or in your own community and experience the joy of collective problem solving and/or creativity that really can change the world.