We are a collective of ecologists, peasants, artists, makers and entrepreneurs. We are creating a nature friendly society through learning experiences and sustainable spaces, closer to wild nature. Our sandbox is a rewilding landscape in the South Western Carpathians and WeWilder Campus a rural eco-hub where we bring together urban and rural communities to connect in change-making nature experiences.
National
Romania
Armeniș Municipality, Caras Severin County
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Yes
Our interdisciplinary and community building work was sparked by our work to bring back bison to the wild. This work has been funded through the EU Life programme for biodiversity while the rest is the team trying to figure out self sustaining ways for that investment, towards bison, to start a perpetum mobile in this community in terms of real benefits from nature.
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): WWF Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Orieta Last name of representative: Hulea Gender: Female Nationality: Romania If relevant, please select your other nationality: Romania Function: CEO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Tudor Vladimirescu 29 Town: Bucharest Postal code: 011536 Country: Romania Direct Tel:+40 730 098 711 E-mail:ohulea@wwf.ro Website:http://www.wwf.ro
Name of the organisation(s): Design Thinking Society Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Tudor Last name of representative: Juravlea Gender: Male Nationality: Romania Function: Co-founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 11-13 G. Enescu Town: Bucharest Postal code: 010301 Country: Romania Direct Tel:+40 744 447 777 E-mail:tudor@juravlea.ro Website:https://designthinkingsociety.com/
WeWilder is a community, a campus, an association and our intention. WeWilder Association is a social enterprise which acts as an umbrella initiative to build a nature-based economy in the Southern Carpathians. It has been incubated in WWF’s innovation arm “Panda Labs” as an independent entity, founded by WWF team members and local community members, working with WWF to put in practice ideals for a circular, regenerative economy that sustains or enhances health of natural ecosystems. WeWilder is also licensed as a nature-based tourism company which designs and hosts educational nature experiences with conservation field staff like wild bison tracking, bear and chamois watching, or immersive local experiences like hay mowing workshops, cheesemaking, fermentation workshops, natural remedy workshops. WeWilder operates a rural campus including a multi functional space and community kitchen, offers accommodation close to nature in a hosted comfortable campsite in the wild, 4 tiny in houses around the village hills, including the award winning prototype MuMa Hut. Some of the tiny houses and two village guesthouses were co-created and built up as joint ventures between locals and micro investors and WeWilder.
We have been on a mission to make the great dream of a “green” economy real in our corner of the world since the inception of our community enterprise around 2017. We operated informally for a few years, developing and testing nature experiences in one of the largest wilderness areas in Europe, discovering local talent and assets weaving what is now an eco-tourism cooperative - connecting different entrepreneurs, farmers, artisans in complementary ways.
Our journey started with our naturalist hat and binoculars on, counting birds nests or wild bison dung (sic) and soon realized that neither here, in the most ambitious rewilding initiative in Europe nor globally are we doing very well to recover nature at the speed needed to sustain our economies. And so, for t
Rewilding
Trasition
Community
Resilience
Trust
4. Enhance local’s appreciation of nature
Create a stable free roaming bison population in the South Western Carpathians.
Build up a local systems architecture for a real nature based economy or earth-centered economy.
Co-create a community conservation model relevant to the European context, in a biodiversity hot-spots.
Inspire, nurture and learn alongside urban professionals practicalities of sustainable practices though food, living spaces and journeys in nature.
8 years ago, WWF-Romania & Rewilding Europe started repopulating an area with bison in the in the SW of the Carpathians, now there are over 140 free roaming bison. We have had the same team on the ground since, living there, deeply immersed in anthropological research, grassroots local initiatives and community engagement. From the start we sought to be true and make benefits from “wilderness” real for locals and in return back to nature. Through bison tracking experiences, team retreats, youth exchanges and Cybertracker tracking evaluations, we sparked demand for ecotourism services and local talent too. 4 houses from the village have been transformed into accommodation The families are also offering meals sourced locally.. Around 5 of the local hunters are engaged in transportation services for nature discovery. More than 60 families are providing local produce or are cooking at events. Furthermore, we are creating a Community Conservation Investment vehicle that identifies local opportunities ( tiny huts, regenerative farming, a bakery, an ebike venture and more to come) and matchmakers with micro investors (individual affluent urban entrepreneurs are preferred instead of "old money" from investment funds). We will manage the ROI+I (ROI+Impact) for both locals and co-investors and 10% of all revenues generated directed to the Community Conservation Fund for local rewilding. We educate ourselves and others by doing: validating the practicalities of ecological design and nature-positive practices.
We have established our key objectives from values that are inherent to the local DNA and are largely based on the local landscape: a beautiful landscape with hills, forests and pastures, small scale agriculture. The quality architecture tradition is based on the use of natural materials such as stone and wood. The gastronomical tradition is very much embedded in the way the locals perceive being hospitable and is already a key asset in helping people appreciate the area. Armeniș is part of a rural culture embedded in nature and this is what we want to preserve and cultivate: uncover the old sustainable secrets to bring external validation and fortify the local community.
We mean to build a bridge between the way the guests appreciate these assets and the local community, who will be encouraged to cultivate them even more and bring to light “stuff from the attic” that the old ones used to have. We are naming these assets “authentic” and in order to transpire them to the beneficiaries, we have created a set of rules: The WeWilder EcoStandard, that we use in the partnerships we have created with the locals for hosting or providing other services (meals, transportation, etc).
Through these rules we are communicating values related to sustainability, to the visitor’s experience, in accord with putting in front the authentic. In time, we aim that these practices will become embedded values at core. Meals are made using local ingredients, accommodation places are built/designed using natural and local materials and traditional techniques and by employing local craftsmen, workshops on local crafts or local gastronomy are included in the ecotourism offer, a calendar of the main community/traditional events is published yearly on channels/places that are visible to visitors etc. Find out more here: https://www.wewilder.com/standards
At core, we are replicating the cooperative way of working by giving an easy way to market for local talent not to abandon their homelands and enrich their future by continuing to live in harmony with nature.. We start with ”town hall” type of meeting to announce opportunities and we also enjoy meeting around the table to just share news.
In discovery trips, tourists and experts or potential investors engage with the local community offering means of validating the local offer, appreciating the landscape, learning and gaining confidence.
Co-creation is valid with the local community when discovering local treasures like furniture, textiles, old recipes and bringing them forward to the public and lived during dozen of hackathons, task forces, design&build camps and exchanges we have organized. Even the Campus was designed and built like this. After a hackathon facilitated through Design Thinking, co-creation continued online through Zoom andWhatsapp groups. All the ideas from the paper culminated on the building site where we co-lived and co-worked, announcing the ”geist” of the upcoming functional WeWilder Campus: good food, open communication amongst participants and enjoying nature while exchanging ideas. Increased belief that circularity in the economy and eco-design is good for business and can unify and increase the resilience, resourcefulness and competitiveness of local economies, by ramping up business model innovation and piloting deeper ecological practices. SME practitioners in hospitality, craft manufacturing and creative industries sectors from the SW region of Romania are empowered by real life practice to be part of a mass / community transition towards circularity/restoration and we are intertwining them in our offer and in the communication.New skills and competencies created amongst nature-preneurs stir the appetite of curious entrepreneurs to "try" the promise of circularity, BMI, regenerative economy through play.
Around 18% of the population of the Armeniș area are directly involved in the economic activities around WeWilder by offering eco-tourism services such as lodging or meal preparation or providing produce such as vegetables, dairy or meat products. By creating demand, WeWilder is allowing locals to have supplementary income channels that will provide them with better living conditions, the possibility of investing more in expanding their activities and the means to invest in their children’s upbringing. In the last three years, the money WWF and WeWilder have poured into the local economy has grown from around 10 K euro in 2015 to over 50 K in 2022, with a big potential to grow in the following years due to the new joint ventures between locals and investments from the outside world, that are going to be channelled by WeWilder. We are estimating that around 3 new businesses will arise per year in the following years, with a medium income of 10 K euro/family.
In parallel, all the income generated from the economic activities through WeWilder include a 10% Conservation Levy, that goes in a fund that means to carry out local conservation projects with the participation of the community. So far, the funds have been used to green out the operation, meaning eliminating as much as possible plastic and single use plastic from the practices and providing recycling bins to all the partnering accommodations. We are currently working on devising a participatory governance mechanism that will help decide on which projects to invest in. Thus, the local community will make a direct connection with how ecotourism helps protect the environment and will adhere even more to the values of conservation that will help them lead a more dignified and sustainable life.
The local school kids are on frequent outings to WeWilder Campus functions as a strengthening message regarding the positive role of the conservation and ecology activity for the local community, as a worldview and career.
We are a fruit of WWF Romania’s rewilding initiative in the area, which was made possible with EU LIFE financial support. Some of the objectives of the program are to create long term benefits for citizens from biodiversity , yet no changes last without a puzzle of contribution - municipalities, the old and the young as well as the rich stitching a common solution.
A big part of the initiative’s DNA was always to work within multidisciplinary teams. From the very beginning, lack of funding that would support staff was transformed into an opportunity to bring in interns as part of task forces. Different profiles like biologists, storytellers, designers, woodsmiths were lodging in the local accommodations, engaging with the locals and building up trust that the incoming wave of guests announces a good future. Historically, European funding or Swiss funding has allowed also universities (i.e. ETH Zurich) or companies to make a contribution through direct participation.
100+ students from 10+ countries participated in exchanges and took the story of our model of work with them home.
Our present mission, to bring in teams for transformational experiences, embeds a very strong educational message concerning nature and has already brought in representatives from international NGO’s to tackle global challenges. In September 2022 we hosted leaders from NGO’s like TNC, Conservation International, Rainforest Alliance, Care, Charitas, etc; what came out was a one-team-innovation taskforce globally. Our work caught the attention of the Caras county authorities. At the opening of the Campus (October 2022), the president of the county council acknowledged the role of eco-tourism in developing a new mentality and promised his support to build the first “people’s ecoduct” here, in a priority wildlife corridor.
We create supportive learning environments for sustainability that span all activities and operations. We enable teaching and learning that is hands-on, interdisciplinary and relevant to local contexts actively involving students and staff, local authorities, youth organisations and the research and innovation community in learning for sustainability.
We have used various formats. The hackathon works very well for a focused activity of 3-5 days, a multidisciplinary team and a clear aim. We have organised over 10 of those, concentrating on how to design and build the campus or how to design or better local collaboration with attendees with technical backgrounds, designers or communicators. We have used the Design Thinking methodology, guided by a long time collaborator, Tudor Juravlea.
Another method is the task force, where young professionals spend from a few weeks to some months in the area and help out on defined missions, from hospitality, to building or communications.
We are deeply involved in developing a new generation of nature guides, thus we collaborate with Cybertracker certified trackers and we have developed our own Nature Interpretation curriculum, with Georg Messerer.
We also educate through the nature experiences we offer: wildlife tracking, wildflower tours, hay-mowing workshops, cheesemaking, wilderness journeys with over 500 guests/year benefit from this.
Recently, a few companies that joined our campus for retreats requested a Sustainability training from us, such as the supermarket chain Profi, which has a store in every small city in Romania.
The value of these manifestation channels is the cross pollination of knowledge and practices that would not happen otherwise. WeWilder acts as a rural hub that welcomes knowledge from experts and practitioners and then spreads it to the larger public through word of mouth, social and traditional media. Last year, The Guardian and New York Times published pieces about our work.
The innovation resides in changing the business as usual approach of NGO’s that work on multi-anual projects binded by administrative constraints. Our solution is being agile and dynamic by creating a vehicle for business model innovation within WWF to enable inclusive conservation. In this way, we became a stakeholder, matchmaker and technical advisor (sustainability, restorative practices) in the local economic landscape through the WeWilder Campus and joint ventures (conservation enterprises) developed with local community members. Establishing a local entity that coordinates the incubation of local new business ideas/opportunities and matches these with external capital (micro investment) enables accelerated development of an economy that restores nature, a model process towards a landscape level nature economy. Through our validation, in Armenis we already have a local network of ecotourism enterprises and are now incubating complementary products/services like a wild brewery, an ecological drycleaner, a local transport company, textiles from waste, etc. to service the existing businesses in the network & adhering to the same design principles regenerative, circular, non-pollutant, resource effective, nature positive - ensuring sustainable innovation. We accelerate the means through which WWF creates concrete sustained benefits for many entire communities and existing data shows that this bottom-up process innovation is highly replicable and can create impact at scale through aggregation. Within WWF, we have already made preliminary talks of taking this model to Maramures - primaeval forests of Strambu Baiut and maybe even in the future the Danube Delta. Other WWF offices around the world are watching us closely and are offering support and once validated, we will take our learnings and export them in other biodiversity rich areas, with education for nature as a central pillar to the development of the local green economy.
Our model is exportable at a few levels we are working on putting into easy to share knowledge systems.
1. Mapping the potential in the community. We have extensive knowledge on how to discover the cultural treasures of the area and then cultivate a relationship with the people who can best put them into a good light. For example, we have a good relationship with the ladies in the area who make the honey multi-layer cake.
2. Creating a legal vehicle for agility. By putting together traditional NGO people and locals into an association, we discover a way of governance that guarantees trust and gets things done.
3. Engagement events. A “how to” organize hackathons, design and build workshops and multidisciplinary task-forces.
4. Design and build for sustainable living. Our extensive experience in building with wood for sustainability and modern comfort is a good transferable asset, developed in 3 years of collaborating with over 300 people and companies.
5. The Conservation Community Fund. Once it is up and running, it can be scaled to any biodiversity rich area.
6. Most significant step methodology. We aim to offer other SME’s working in the food sector the roadmap to becoming more green. We are conducting a series of workshops as we speak, where practitioners from the sustainability field, anthropologists and conservationists will develop a tool inspired by the SDG’s.
We are actively working in making these systems exportable. A new EU LIFE program submission has a few of those initiatives written up. We have submitted some applications to other financing schemes and we are waiting for answers. The most significant step methodology is under development for 2 years now and it will soon come to fruition. In a 2-3 year time frame, we think we will publish digital and print items, we will organize further dissemination and we will make the first moves to scale in Maramures, Delta Dunarii and possibly other European countries.
As part of the WeWilder team, we have a strong collaboration culture, fostered in over 5 years of collaboration, multiple hackathons and design processes with a good part of the project stakeholders. WeWilder’s operation to date and strategy has been overseen and implemented by the same management team, Oana Mondoc as Community Development and Innovation Manager for WWF, Alina Floroi in a key coordination role, Ancuta Mihaescu supporting as a key finance advisor for two years, Matei Miculescu and Daniel Hurduzeu - founding members of WeWilder, locals and conservation field staff (rangers and guides).
We are well acquainted with hosting gatherings in the field, organising discovery and empathy processes, involving locals in co-design processes multi-disciplinary teams, tackling logistic details and organizing 30-100 persons events, from the Banat Brunch food festival, to innovation workshops for other organizations, retreats for boards of directors or public events including music performances and outdoor activities for larger groups like the WeWilder opening.
Also, as a field laboratory connected to the global WWF network, we have extensive experience working with and connecting expertise from around the globe, tapping latest research, models and success stories, at a distance on Zoom and other tools, so we are confident to leverage this position and global community so we can make the project a success.
Co-creation has been the method by which we have developed all projects and puzzle pieces in our initiative. With a shortage of extensive opportunities for the new generation to engage in education for sustainable development, we found that we can play a role in creating learning opportunities and opportunities for dialogue about the climate crisis and sustainability through informal education and shared experiences.
Finance shift: targeted sustainable investments to gatekeepers of nature. We are doing this by creating economic incentives for locals to become active in conservation, channelling the Decent Work and Economic Growth SDG.
Inclusive conservation, funded through the growth of a regenerative economy. Acting for Climate Action with rapid financing tools that are both local and fueled through the curiosity of tourists.
Sustainable infrastructure: building with sustainable techniques. We deeply believe that Sustainable Communities need to take inspiration from materials used in the past that benefit from the latest technological advances.
Sustainable use of land: keeping the wilderness and avoid excessive agriculture through alternatives, like regenerative agriculture or eco-tourism, along with Halving production & consumption: maintain seasonal diets, short supply chains and local products / Renewable energy + No plastics in nature - Use of solar power and water economy.. Touching on Responsible Consumption and Production through encouraging small scale agriculture, cultivation of seasonal crops and eliminating pesticides.
Our model is exportable at a few levels we are working on putting into easy to share knowledge systems.
1. Mapping the potential in the community. We have extensive knowledge on how to discover the cultural treasures of the area and then cultivate a relationship with the people who can best put them into a good light. For example, we have a good relationship with the ladies in the area who make the honey multi-layer cake.
2. Creating a legal vehicle for agility. By putting together traditional NGO people and locals into an association, we discover a way of governance that guarantees trust and gets things done.
3. Engagement events. A “how to” organize hackathons, design and build workshops and multidisciplinary task-forces.
4. Design and build for sustainable living. Our extensive experience in building with wood for sustainability and modern comfort is a good transferable asset, developed in 3 years of collaborating with over 300 people and companies.
5. The Conservation Community Fund. Once it is up and running, it can be scaled to any biodiversity rich area.
6. Most significant step methodology. We aim to offer other SME’s working in the food sector the roadmap to becoming more green. We are conducting a series of workshops as we speak, where practitioners from the sustainability field, anthropologists and conservationists will develop a tool inspired by the SDG’s.
We are actively working in making these systems exportable. A new EU LIFE program submission has a few of those initiatives written up. We have submitted some applications to other financing schemes and we are waiting for answers. The most significant step methodology is under development for 2 years now and it will soon come to fruition. In a 2-3 year time frame, we think we will publish digital and print items, we will organize further dissemination and we will make the first moves to scale in Maramures, Delta Dunarii and possibly other European countries.
Our initiative fully supports the European competence framework on sustainability through the values that we promote. ”Valuing sustainability” by working with the local community for resilient supply chains and offering development opportunities for the young in this framework. Our operating mode is a communication tool per se for all the beneficiaries that come in contact with us: the way we serve food, the linen we choose for the bedding, the materials we use for building are all talked about in the workshops.
”Supporting fairness” is applied to the equal chances that we offer for people to attend our educational workshops, regardless of gender and economic status. We also have a policy to offer grants for vulnerable participants that are young talents.
”Promoting nature” is at the core of our mission, since we came to being in order to emphasise the importance of the bison as a keystone species in the environment, then organised tracking experiences to convey this message better and we are building an entire local economy that is nature based, that in turn will convince the local community and our guests to have a better propensity towards nature. Thus, our work is a system work that has nature as a working material and in turn, has a conservation effect.
In the frame of „Acting for sustainability”, we are active at multiple levels. We offer our take in order to provide “political agency”, but also critical thinking. We collaborate with biologists and ecologists like Georg Messerer, Toni Romani or Jose Maria Galan, Senior Cybertracker specialist, who are using both a behavioural angle on how a landscape manifests itself due to the presence or absence of biodiversity, but also a macro perspective with experience taken from Africa or other parts of the world.
So we are inspired to take “collective action” with the youngsters from the local community, with the guests that attend in our educational tracking experiences and with the instruments we create.
