Up to this point, the vision was to interlink evo villages with evo hubs around the world, to collaborate and learn from each other. We had the village - which was more like an eco resort with a full time team that formed the village - and we had the beginnings of an evo hub in the South of Jakarta.
Around this time, Neal and Drigo met up in Jakarta and took a trip out to Pulau Macan. They had many talks, among them one in which they both identified a deep-rooted need to find ways to evolve the world. Drigo shared with Neal the vision to create an interlinking web of villages, resorts, and city based hubs around the world, and Neal broadened the vision to include other strategic partners. Neal, having traveled the world extensively and been involved with many eco villages, intentional communities, and healing centers, brought a very global and experienced perspective to Drigo's existing vision and thinking on how to evolve humanity. One afternoon around sunset on the Sunset Hut deck of Pulau Macan, they shook hands on collaborating towards the realization of Project Evo and this marked the beginning of the project in its current form.
Our question was: how could we evolve the world to reflect the shared visions of humanity in the fastest and best way possible? We held that humanity had a basic shared vision of peace and prosperity on planet earth - free and easy access to basic needs of clean air, water, and food, shelter, access to educational resources, and to meaningful work with fair wages. We held that humanity was sick of wars, high level corruption, dictators, major companies profiting immensely at the expense of the environment and fair labor practices... We held that humanity was sick of un-inspired education, injustice, the rat race pace of life in cities, and the feeling of disconnection and being lost despite being surrounded by people and nature.
Project Evo was to be our sincere attempt at exploring the deployment of a practical, feasible strategy to quickly and effectively evolve life on Planet Earth to reflect our understanding of the shared vision of humanity.
In essence, our new strategy was that any given city or population center could best evolve via a network of change agents and pioneers. We would identify, connect, and support them to help regional populations shift to a more sustainable and evolved existence. We would do this by focusing first on cities, and bringing together the leaders and managers of social enterprises in 7 different areas:
1) evo villages or resorts within two hours of major cities where sustainable and evolved living was demonstrated
2) evo hubs within major cities that would be home to social entrepreneurs and also demonstrate sustainability through architecture, urban farming, being a coworking space, having a great and sustainable cafe, and hosting an event center that would draw in the cities leaders, change agents, and pioneers.
3) the producers and sellers of sustainable, evolutionary products - including but not limited to food and beverages, natural building materials, intelligent energy solutions (solar panels, wind turbines, batteries), water solutions, farming solutions, clothing, technology, soaps, personal care products, and every useful and inspiring product that one could imagine. The emphasis would first be on products that people used regularly - food, beverages, personal care products, paper, energy, water, etc.
4) services and consulting - the sustainability and evolution experts who can be called upon to help design, create, and manage evolutionary shifts. These would include intelligent energy experts, architects, permaculture experts, educational experts, team training experts, builders, natural health professionals, and all sorts of service providers and experts.
5) academies / schools - places both physical and virtual for learning. These centers for education would include K-12 schools, colleges, universities and other more traditional academies, but also include vocational training centers with a focus on sustainability, human resources development, and evolved living. These learning hubs would also involve spiritual teachings from various spiritual traditions, including any religious traditions that are tolerant, respectful and appreciative of other spiritual paths. Mainly, the initial focus would be upon education and training for social enterprises in the 7 sectors, as well as broadly for general leadership, social enterprise, and personal development skills.
6) media, news, and publications - we see this partner as critical - and mainly involves journalists, film makers, writers, news magazines, newspapers, tv channels, youtube channels, and current sources of online news from around the world.
7) the web platforms that connect local and global communities. Online centers for collaboration, meeting other people, shopping, traveling, learning, and basically facilitating commerce and collaboration towards achieving shared visions and goals. This platform would have a focus on the Sustainable Development Goals and act as an online hub that connects physical hubs around the world with pioneers, change agents, and social entrepreneurs.
Physical hubs were incredibly important and with this new meaningful way to link them not only together but also with other experts, producers and creatives nearby, an effective strategy was born to enable people everywhere to adopt sustainable, evolved solutions in a way that is practical, simple, and elegant. We drew up plans for the vision of Project Evo whereby eco resorts, eco villages, and city based hubs around the world would be connected to each other and other amazing social entrepreneurs via a web based platform. Beyond 1) evo villages, and 2) evo hubs, we identified as key strategic partners 3) the producers of products, 4)sustainability and evolutionary consultants, 5) academies and teachers, 6) eco and sustainability oriented multimedia producers, and finally 7) online platforms that connect communities.
But the strategy was far from being adopted... as we learned, it takes a lot to manage a set of islands and to start a city based sustainability center. Neal kept up his nomadic lifestyle and globe trotted while Drigo stayed put in Jakarta, the thousand islands, and Bali. They collaborated on writing up the vision for Project Evo, but soon had to pause active collaboration as Drigo dealt with challenges on the ground at the evo village and the evo hub. Nonetheless, at this time, the basic vision and writing for Project Evo was established and we started getting the word out and continued to do some research on the side.
