Through stories and lived experiences, Ros Wade and Sigfried Janzig will explore the challenges and opportunities for localised, bottom up approaches to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). We will share some inspiring examples of community engagement and action in Portugal, Japan and Kenya. The session will include a short presentation on COMMEET’s community empowerment process – in order to address the global challenges of today we urgently need to change the dominant economic narrative and storytelling is a valuable tool for this. We will look at a range of storytelling and documentation techniques and participants will have an opportunity to share their stories also. A key question will be (to paraphrase Ghandi)- how do we inspire each other to make the changes we want to see?
Speaker biographies
Ros Wade is a distinguished research fellow of the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Solutions and chair of RCE London. She was a lead researcher in the EU funded Fresh Start project on migrant entrepreneurial education from 2017-2109 and is a member of COMMEET community empowerment fellowship. Ros has been an educator all her working life, and has built up wide expertise across the formal, non formal and informal sectors.
She sees herself as an engaged academic who is seeking to be an agent for change towards a more sustainable planet and she tries to put this philosophy into practice in the way she works with others, collaboratively and supportively. Her early life in India where she was born and brought up shaped her interests in development and led her to work for Oxfam for 15 years before joining LSBU. This experience has ensured that her research and scholarship is grounded in the practical needs of stakeholders and that it is relevant to real world applications.
Sigfried Janzing has a degree in History & Mediterranean Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and is currently director of an Archives Institution in The Netherlands. In this role he initiated community-heritage projects with the Moroccan and Moluccan communities. He is advisor at connector for Bangladesh at COMMEET, trainer for Bangladesh Archives and Records Management Society and advisor for Oasis for Posterity NGO in Balagram, northwest of Bangladesh. He travels frequently to Bangladesh for community and archives projects. For the Refugees Network Netherlands he works as job coach.
Astera Mortezai is an experimental artist. She is born in Saqqez, Iranian Kurdistan, in 1980. In her works, with a background as a performance artist and using a great variety of materials, she investigates the consequences of displacement on the body and stages narrative and poetic interactions between body and objects, in which accessories become partners. In 2018, she was granted asylum in the Netherlands where she lives and works now.
Philip Gain trained as a journalist and writer, is the founding director of Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), a Bangladeshi organization involved in the areas of human rights and environment. The outputs of his journalistic work and research–more than 100 books, monographs, special reports, documentary films and photographic works—are widely used as readings in general and in university classrooms. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) in Dhaka where he teaches environmental communication, development communication and advanced reporting. His lifelong mission to promote investigative journalism and action-oriented research takes him close to the communities and deal with natural history, climate change issues, the serious consequences of monoculture plantation, mining, exclusion challenges of vulnerable communities, and struggle for democracy with precision. He is now working to establish a resource centre for the excluded communities of Bangladesh.
Five years ago, Bárbara Moreira took the first steps in her long awaited journey to help develop the rural and scarcely populated areas of Portugal. She has a degree in Marketing Management, a post-graduation in Security, Defense, and Conflict Resolution, and is concluding her master thesis in Integration Policies for Refugees and Migrants.
She founded AIIR, an NGOD, in 2018. AIIR is developing LAR – Love And Respect – a pilot project that aims to create intercultural and intergenerational communities in Ima, Guarda. By fostering the sustainable integration of immigrant families in rural territories of Portugal, while simultaneously supporting the elderly and local community.
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