Shared Earth has donated £10,000 for the creation of the first sustainable community centre in India. Jeremy Piercy handed over the cheque to the John Lally International Foundation outside Shared Earth’s head office in York, which is to fund a new community centre in Goa.

John Lally was a good friend of Jeremy some years ago and he was also extremely active in the environmental movement before he died in his late 20’s. He persuaded the council to give over a disused landfill site as a conservation area, and helped to raise several hundred thousand pounds to set up the UK’s first eco community centre on the site. This now forms the template for the Goa project.

The new Goa centre in Moira, will be promoting environmental education, sustainability, community enterprise, recycling and agriculture for all the community and also includes a kindergarten. Using an old Portuguese-style house renovated to 21^st century standards, the Centre will be carbon neutral forming a community base for environmental enterprises in agriculture, recycling, garbage collection and other small scale non-polluting industries.

School parties from all over Goa will use the Centre to study the environmental syllabus, not in a dry academic way but in an interactive, stimulating and exciting way. “Hands On” is the ethos of the education at the Centre where children will learn about the eco-system and their role in it. Most children, if not all, have the capacity of wonder and by stimulating that innate sense, we help develop the imagination of future generations.

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