Organización Ecológica Sol y Verde

Our Educational Centre

About Choose Love

OUR ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION CENTRE

OUR VISION

Our founder and director Baltazar started Sol y Verde with a dream: to build our country’s first ecological centre, which would teach permaculture principles and Mayan knowledge specifically to young children and women from all around Petén. He imagined it as a place of knowledge sharing, where rural communities of the Americas could work together across the fields of natural medicine, bioconstruction and agroecology.

This dream was ambitious, particularly when we first received our land in Paxcaman, a heavily pastured and deforested 6 acres without any access to water or electricity, and little to no funds available to us. But we want to show our local communities that the food we grow and the soil we regenerate don’t have to only be used for farming - it can also be used for building - so we began by looking at our land, and our surrounding landscapes, as readily available materials for our main infrastructure. From hay, clay, corn husks to lime from the mountains, everything can be a building material. From this was born our vision for Sol y Verde’s core buildings: our ecological classroom, our library and our green pharmacy laboratory kitchen.

We devoted much effort and energy over the past two years to bring to life this vision, and are so excited to say that as of 2023, after crowdfunding £17,000, we have begun construction with the first building of our centre: the ecological classroom. We are seeking long-term partners to support us through funding the second half of construction which will start in winter 2024.

WHAT IS THE SOL Y VERDE ECOLOGICAL CENTRE?

Our centre will, just like the rest of our work, have three focuses: act as a demonstration space (showing innovative uses of hyper-local materials and bio-construction techniques), be a safe community-led space of learning, and a place of creativity and innovation.

Split between two connected pavilions, our centre will be made of 5 spaces:

An open classroom (where free classes are ran every week for our local community members, across ecological themes)
A library (which will cover themes from rural independence, Maya and indigenous knowledge, feminist works in Central America, migration and permaculture)
A seed bank (from our own species, and endangered specimens)
A laboratory kitchen (a space where produce from our farm can be processed, and where we can develop our natural medicine classes).
Surrounding our centre, we have built 6 community allotments where our local women’s group will grow their own food and medicine.

Our spaces are community-run and are designed to be modular to all sorts of uses, events and partnerships. We hope for our centre to be a demonstration This project is supported by the Evoca Foundation and the University of Tabasco, Mexico.

SKIP TO...

OUR VISIONWHAT IS THE CENTRE?
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

FIGURES AT A GLANCE:

We began works for our ecological classroom in October 2023 and completed it over 6 months. In this time:

500+ students taught in our ecological education programme, by 2025.

38 families found income through this construction.

86% of our materials were sourced within 30km of our site.

6 materials were used - nothing more.

We worked with 28 local craftsmen and artisans from our neighbouring villages.

We’ve run over 18 workshops and training sessions throughout the construction

With participatory building and our workshops, we upskilled over 47 local women and children.

In the summer season, our building has been 12°C cooler than outdoors - all through passive ventilation, climate-driven design, and natural materials.

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