Facilitator Educator
Sustainability Visionary

Robina has been working in the field of community development in New Zealand and overseas for 23 years, and in Permaculture (ecological land use design) for the past 15 years. In recent years her primary focus has been eco-villages and the development of self-reliance programmes for schools and rural communities. This work has involved the training of community leaders as "cultural change agents."

Robina McCurdy is also a trained state and Steiner school teacher, specialising in Environmental Education, Ecological Restoration and Gardening. She is a founder-member of the sixteen-year-old Tui Land Trust, an intentional community in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tui is dedicated to personal development, living lightly on the Earth, working with the rhythms of nature, creating sustainable small village culture, generating ethical livelihood, using appropriate technology, and serving as a centre for holistic education and healing.

While instrumental in the design and implementation of Tui, Robina has been involved in broader community development, permaculture design and teaching, gardening and orchard work, environmental education resources publication, and participatory processes of decision-making. She has run many workshops on permaculture, Earth attunement, organics and community development.

Robina has worked globally in the community village context, in a range of impoverished and privileged conditions. She worked at the Tlholego Development Project, rural North West Province, South Africa, for over two years, facilitating Permaculture projects, designing 'lelapa' (village homestead) biological systems, and conducting PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) surveys with villagers to determine their needs as a future eco-village. She also led a workshop in sustainable ecovillage design for a community of Xhosa people in the process of accessing their own land through the new South Africa" government land redistribution system.

Robina has presented workshops at the Global Ecovillage Conference and the Eco-villages & Sustainable Communities Conference at Findhorn Foundation, Scotland. In 1999 she facilitated an eco-village design process with members of a new eco-village on the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland, where, using a consensus mode process, she guided the group through core values agreement, contentious cultural, environmental, economic and political issues, and in-depth site analysis, toward a full permaculture land use design draft for their local authority permission application.

During 1999 she worked together with Robert Gilman (co-founder of Global Eco-village Network) on the formation of a new community organisation for Findhorn Community in Scotland, and gave training in ecovillage skills, with emphasis on 'social design', in Brazil. She has just completed a design for Valley Farm,, a new ecovillage near Thames, New Zealand. This process included human settlement and land use design, and sustainability analysis of the group's social and economic plans.

Robina continues to lead workshops and train teachers, and is the author of a chapter entitled "Towards Sacred Society," in a book on eco-villages published by Findhorn Press. She is a founder-trustee of Earthcare Education Aotearoa, a non-profit institute committed to the ethics and practices of sustainability at all levels.