WATERUNITY NETWORKS: BETA LAUNCH
PROJECT SUMMARY
Internally Aligned, Locally Empowered, Bio-regionally Connected, Globally Networked
Water's diversity of life sustains and strengthens Earth's intricate nurturing biospheric web. Cycling interconnected relationships weave together the tapestry of life, uniting all living beings in a delicate yet enduring dance of complexity.
The WATERSHED WISDOM COUNCIL CONCEPT (WWCC) embraces and embodies this inherent complexity. The WaterUnity Networks strives to help us manage our contributions.
WATERUNITY NETWORKS (WUN) is an online and in-place social framework guided by the organizational design of the Watershed Wisdom Councils Concept (WWCC), serving as a collaboration portal, education hub, and wisdom repository.
While connecting networks of regenerative people and processes, we are activating a proactive collective stewardship for resilient Watershed communities.
Bridging our vast inspiration to thrive with the effective implementation of restorative field projects and community-building, we bring a variety of Watershed Solutions to light, with each participant committed to caring for Our Essential Source Water, as most appropriate to their Home Watershed.
Rights of Nature, ecological stewardship and grass-roots citizen engagement are at the heart of the Watershed Wisdom Council Concept design.
Participants will engage in direct, true democracy through the civic innovations of the WaterUnity Networks framework, utilizing the mechanisms of decentralized web3 transparency such as membership, voting, and gamification, as well as earning tokens for reputation, merit and contribution. These rewards can then initiate regenerative economies.
The nature of Water is truly democratic, nurturing All Life equally; this relationship is the driving current and currency of every living system. We need a well functioning, biodiverse democracy to accomplish our shared mission for a thriving world.
Thus, the revitalizing wisdom of the whole Watershed is realized as our collective commonwealth, and accrued on behalf of future generations.
WHAT IF OF WHAT'S NEXT
The WUN system of collaborative advocacy and networking has been envisioned since 1992 and in active alpha developing the structures and strategy for the past 3 years.
Our goal in 2024 is to launch into the beta phase of this initiative by organizing our core council to attract, engage and train tight teams of Water Stewards in a few of the world's most vital river basins.
We're ready to take our initiative from a well envisioned concept to a series of functioning proof of concepts for validating the overall viability and making refinements to our templates.
We are applying for the OpenCivics Genesis Grant Round for the seed capital to help us take this crucial next step:
Develop our Core Advisory Council and hire a small administrative staff for 1 year;
Cover expenses for market research, product development, and initial operating costs;
Map and triage a selection of up to 7 initial river basins to prioritize tasks, issues, and solutions based on their urgency, importance, or available resources.
Depending on the amount of funding received, we will activate the series of pilot programs in select river basins to test our methods and refining the efficacy of the concept in real-world scenarios,
COLLABORATION WITH OPENCIVICS
This OpenCivics quote perfectly embodies the WWCC↔WUN approach:
"Civics is the substrate for civilization’s core functions and the underlying framework for coordination between actors in the commons and in communities, while holding strong to the values of care and stewardship that are designed into the systems we create and deploy."
In addition to the financial support that OpenCivics Genesis Grant Round can provide, we have long considered the OpenCivics consortium as one of our key potential partner platforms.
Because of your aligned expertise within the civic sector of society and a clear focus on eco-advocacy it is our hope, in the future, to collaborate on creating a "Civic Guild" within this WUN Watershed organizing system, with the citizens of OpenCivics as our creative partners.
WUN is completely aligned with the three core pillars of OpenCivics innovation:
Adaptive self-organizing of strong community Resilience thriving amidst of great challenges;
Freedom of Choice to reach for our greatest potential and provide for ourselves–individually and collectively–with the ability to determine the future we wish to past to our descendants;
Finally, the life-generating Vitality that comes from weaving together these interconnected levels of well-being and quality of life for ourselves, our families, our communities, and the biodiversity that sustains us.
WHY THIS? WHY NOW?
We know that our environmental, collective, and personal life support systems are being critically impacted by the uncontrolled human-caused ecological and societal chaos threatening the balance of All Life as we know it. And this is happening faster than we can easily prepare for or adapt to sensibly.
Not only do we need new tools and techniques, this imperative requires humanity to wake up to the hard truth that we have only a small window of opportunity to turn the "Tipping Point" toward thriving, abundant living systems, rather than the dying paradigm we are currently caught up in.
We can not rely on those benefiting from this dysfunctional system to change the status quo. We can not afford to wait to take responsibility. We must begin working together to implement solutions immediately or lose our chance.
To some degree, we all contribute to this catastrophic disruption of our planet's hydrologic cycle. As such, we each have the imperative to find and implement the most effective nature-based, whole-system solutions.
We are called to accelerate our capacity for affecting the greatest beneficial change with the least amount of unintended consequences.
WUN STRIVES TO BRIDGE THE GAP
We have solid science, willing experts and proven, time-tested methods to guide us – our greatest challenge is how to open the broadest pathways to efficiently organize groups of committed citizens for the most significant effectiveness in Watershed Restoration in the shortest amount of time.
It is at this intersection of challenge and great potential that the WWCC↔WUN development plan is addressing with our strategic multi-faceted approach:
Design principles of our navigational charts are based on the premises of Water as the cherished source of All Life not an exploitable resource;
Active local↔bioregional↔global implementation of collaborative actions for the greatest good of the whole;
Dynamic fractal growth pattern keying off of the organic needs and opportunities of the inherent collective intelligence of each river basin and its communities.
WUN extends an invitation for concerned citizens and casual Water advocates to engage in this emerging network of networks on a grassroots volunteer level, in keeping with their available capacity.
We already provide weekly orientation and onboarding calls to encourage their active participation, opening access to a comprehensive set of organizational tools, knowledge, and mentors already engaged in these innovative regenerative methods.
Along with this citizen engagement and access, WUN offers the opportunity for a comprehensive training process where the occasional participant may become a committed Water Stewards on track to form Wisdom Councils in their own Watersheds.
WUN offers eco-restoration practitioners already working in the field the support and expanded capacity required for addressing the consequence of the climate crises, directly where it is impacting our local and regional biomes.
The WUN framework also can supply project coordinators the trained able-bodied workers to assist in accomplishing their field projects.
Additionally, WUN intends to coordinate methods for mapping, data and metrics in order to unify our efforts across ecosystems.
All this is efficiently managed through the self-organized grass-roots civic engagement of nested small citizen groups, interconnected from source to sea and committed to following the nature of Water as our navigational charts.
Our marketing actions include engaging music, art, media and culture to draw attention and gather first adopters. We are working with influencers, experts, award winning artists and producers in the field to produce message songs, albums, media events, give TEDx type speaking engagements, host workshops and conferences.
The range and scope of these aligned efforts depend on the level of financing our coalition can secure for each team and each endeavor.
INITIATE A REAL RELATIONSHIP WITH WATER
This whole-systems design aligns literally with the nature of Water as our core foundational structure and common covalent bond.
As surely as Water flows to the Ocean, our work in these nested small local councils restoring our local Watershed will naturally ripple out to regenerate the greater planetary hydrological cycle.
Within this interconnected global network of eco-practitioners, the very act of revitalizing our local Watersheds will build our interconnected network of resilient communities.
Utilizing our easily scalable and replicable blueprint as our way-finder, we'll grow organically like a forest's mycelial network, considering the needs of ALL our human and non-human neighbors in coherent, step-by-step phases.
We start with the core understanding that the primary imperative (and significant gap to fill) in these challenging times is for our species to first shift our perspective.
WUN OFFERS VIABLE SOLUTIONS
We are inspiring the readiness to learn how to work collectively, all together towards thriving abundance for All Life born and nurtured by Water.
In our alpha phase, WUN was concentrated on building relationships and gathering a coalition of committed allies aligned with our shared Water-centric ethos where each ally provides a vital piece of the bigger puzzle as they work in their specific sectors of society–as required to accomplish our collective mission.
Now we are prepared to activate this strong network alliance of radical collaboration to intentionally accomplish the tangible action steps for the required whole-system solutions.
PRIMARY PARTNERS
Since 1992, this broad and comprehensive vision has been steered by our lead designer and focalizer, Eliza Herald. Her journey began when a direct encounter with a mama gray whale in San Ignacio lagoon in Baja inspired her to make a career shift from a landscaper to film and video production, leading her now to her role as whole-system designer.
The Watershed Wisdom Councils Concept and the WaterUnity Networks have been born from these experiences. In this process, she has become well versed in the effective power for how small groups of dedicated individuals working collectively can get a complex message communicated and can, in truth, choose to change the paradigm of life on Earth.
BETSY DAMON, respected eco-artist and activist leads KEEPERS OF THE WATER, a nonprofit organization with over 30 years of experience weaving art, science and community into projects demonstrating how Water, as the foundation of all planning and design, can remediating our living water systems to transform our relationship to Water as the Source of All Life.
Keepers of the Waters has inspired scores of successful projects and relationships in the field of Watershed remediation on a micro and macro level, including creating the Living Water Garden, the world's first water cleaning municipal park in Chengdu, China.
WORLD WATER COMMUNITY is an independent online platform providing a diverse ecosystem of tools and collaboration spaces to bring this vision of restoring Water into action with a cost-effective and efficient manner.
This is our main satellite hub, an online space for communications and community-building hosting the network of Watershed Wisdom Councils interconnected from "source to sea and beyond".
ABUNDANT EARTH FOUNDATION is the current fiscal sponsor of the Watershed Wisdom Council Concept and has aided greatly in the development of WUN.
Launched in 2018, the organization supports grassroots projects meeting the evolving needs of communities related to climate change, social inequity, and malnutrition worldwide in order to accomplish the ecological and social restoration needed on a local level to sustain life on Earth.
YOUTH EVOLUTION ~WEST AFRICA (YE) is developing a participatory empowerment process teaching Watershed stewardship and restoration to the underserved youth and women of West Africa. The Water Sanctuary Community Center, starting up in Guinea Conakry, is a first capacity-building template.
With an action plan to include access to water filters, as well as the training and education required for improving the opportunities and living conditions, YE aims to reduce migration and offer hope for a brighter future. Once established in Guinea, the plan is to introduce the concept to all of Africa.
REGENERATIVE ALLIANCES
Other global online platforms and organizations include:
TIME IS NOW
It is time for "All Hands on Deck''! Although, first we must create a solid deck to stand upon.
The local ↔ global alliance of WUN is gathering together a rising tide of activated Watershed Stewardship, aligning with Water as the Source of All Life for the intentional rebalancing of our Earth's natural biosphere and Water Cycle.
Our practical goal is to champion scalable, replicable, Living System Watershed Restoration projects, applied at a local community and bioregional level, offering humanity our most accessible, cost-effective, high impact solutions with longest-term benefits.
Together, applying the principles of change theory and collective intelligence to align with our Living Source Water, the most powerful force on Earth, we can serve All Life ~ to revitalize our world's vital Ocean Lakes. Rivers and Watersheds Communities back into pure source integrity.
Dive in, the Water's fine and Every Drop Counts!