Community Map
Maia Earth Village is a 12-year Earth Village project built on whole systems thinking, sharing and living. Maia hosts practitioners from many fields and backgrounds, living sustainably in service to the local community. Through the years, we ran adventures through the following colors: |
RED (Health)
Through the years, we have run an assistance program for those with various medical concerns. As important as this has been, we envision a world where sickness is alleviated through prevention and sustained efforts that raise living conditions defending against the problems that come with poverty. In Maia, healers and doctors from Asia and Europe hold hands in the creation of a healing village concept in our two Earth Village projects, Barangay Maranat Tres and Barangay Buena Vista. Aside from running our yearly healing retreats (including training doctors in natural healing), we are focused on planting food as medicine, cultivating as many species of healing plants as we are able. Under our Transformation Medicine programs, innerdance serves as a research and dialogue platform in which doctors and healers study the use of music and vibrations in medical practice. In our Earth Village, we practice and broadcast music-based journeys in our music studio, where healing playlists are sent to areas these can help in; in the last years, we have been supporting addiction programs, clinical systems, prison systems, and most especially, helping parents design healing environments for their children. |
ORANGE (Resource)
We dream of closed loop systems that makes sure we conserve as much energy that is inherently available from many sources. We recycle our plastics which serve as construction material, while our toilet and food composting systems ensure that in our community, there is no such thing as waste. Through the years, we have worked with schools and local government units in waste segregation programs. We trade food options with local families that give us ecobricks which reduce plastics that litter and endanger people's health and the earth's ecosystem. Maia helped to co-found the global Ecobricks movement that started in the Northern Philippines. For this reason, many of our structures and school furniture are made from waste materials collected across the region. |
YELLOW (Energy)
We have worked very hard to learn how to gather water from the streams and the sky, to harvest electricity from the sun and also food from the earth. Maia is 100% off the grid, where we are able to host our guests and run our busy online teaching schedules with little impact to climate change. After typhoon Odette, many parts of Palawan lost power and internet connection. Currently. the province is experiencing an energy crisis with the provincial grid in danger of shutting down. We are currently working on ways to model how local villages can live simply yet sustain basic energy supply for children needing to study at night and to conduct research for their schoolwork. For Maia, we demonstrate how our research programs that require electricity may be sustained by systems independent from coal and oil-run electricity. |
GREEN (Gardens)
We have conducted permaculture design and training programs for many local communities, modelling indigenous practices appropriate to the tropics which also utilises progressive design ideas. We have been saving and sharing open-pollinated non-GMO seed species to other projects and villages. Our bio-charcoal techniques capture and return carbon to the soil, reducing climate change impacts whilst regenerating the earth through holistic agriculture. Currently, we are working with the tribal people of Palawan, initially providing support so that illegal logging and field burning practices stops and are replaced with eco-livelihood opportunities. We have opened up our land to those who wish to grow their own food, while providing climate change-adaptive trainings to complement indigenous techniques. |
BLUE (Livelihood)
We have provided sustainable livelihood to low-income villages, providing skill-based trainings to the young and old where there are always ways to integrate ancient and modern methods. After raising salary rates above the local standards, we have also invested in farm and fishing alternatives for those needing support to live in the traditional island ways hit severely by pandemic and typhoon. One of our partner puroks, Magarwak community, depends on weaving bangs (indigenous mats) using pandan leaves harvested from the mountains of Puerto Princesa. We have raised the economic value of their products and have succeeded in helping the community to come together. Recently, they were celebrated in the city as one of the model puroks to have established the best ways of self-organising small community. Many of our local villagers now have skills in ecological construction, permaculture farming practice, community organising, nutrition, art and crafts which they bring with them when they find work in other projects. |
INDIGO (Education)
We started an Earth School program for local children as their working parents could not attend to them while also showing up for their Maia work. The multi-lingual Earth School serves as a day care for toddlers and for older children, a place for play, art, dance; Here, they learn how to read and write, offering them the social skills to prepare them for global environments. Many children have grown up and are now productive members of our community, taking part in keeping our gardens, healing and other village spaces vibrant. Starting this year, we are set to build the children a dedicated school building and garden which they are co-designing with their parents and the guests at Maia Earth Village. |
VIOLET (Home)
Ancestral Land in Southeast Asia is continuously being purchased by those with resources, displacing those who do not have it. One of our main goals today is to give the land back to locals who have the skills and energy to rehabilitate it, in partnership with the ways of natural forest systems. |
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We are currently working with members of government, NGOS, the indigenous people, medical practitioners to the conversion of an 80-hectare property in Palawan to protected rainforest as well as home settings for deserving local and indigenous villagers who need access to land for their homes and their own backyard gardens. Here, we hope to preserve nature whilst practicing in small parts, the many programs Maia has been a part of in the last twelve years:
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