In the session, we discussed a wide range of health issues (causes, effects, awareness, etc.).

Our conversation led us to singling out a couple of points, which are:

1- Retailers stacking health bars at the bottom of shelves and promoting sweets at the top to encourage impulse buying, where is the social responsibility in that?
2- Channels of communication that have been underutilized to spread awareness.

Why can’t we muster the courage to walk up to a stranger and inform them that feeding their obese child fast food is bad? Or the Arabic labels in Supermarkets not including nutritional values?

3- Companies encouraging their employees to eat healthier.

Has anyone seen one? There was a unanimous agreement among us that most of them stock up caffeine and sweets with some fruits on the side for saving face. Can people be be coaxed into having a banana if a fruits basket is placed next to a pile of chocolate bars?

Plegde:

By 26th March I will:

19. Identify retailers + distributors who place healthy food at the bottom of the impulse rack in supermarkets?

20. Identify channels of communications that are underutilized to educate people about health issues?

21. Identify work places/ companies which would be willing to run snack culture tests to change eating behavior.

Session Leader’s Contact: Abdulla Al Suwaidi – abdullas90[at]yahoo[dot]com

Onwards to a healthier way of life!

WOW. What an energized circle it was in the learning session, gathered around a sustainable ‘BarCampFire’! I’m still feeling it. Exploring what forms of education can lead us to a more sustainable way of living led to an epiphany that a lot of our learning is social - we absorb our behaviors from the people around us, and for most here, that means our office/work/school environment. So we committed to do something to take control of that, ultimately by creating our own utopian place.

Session recap: What forms of Learning / education can lead us to a more sustainable way of living? How can we create a Place through which we Learn how to Behave more sustainably?

Name of session contact: Kamyar (Dance For Unity) & HUBib (The Hub)

Pledge: By the 26th of March I will:

12. Say hi to everyone in an elevator
13. Tell everyone about SustainabilityCamp
14. Take plants to my workdesk and water them
15. Share fruits with my co-workers/classmates
16. Observe a 2 minute silence before I meet someone or begin a task
17. Yoga for 10 minutes to start my day
18. Start a journey to cocreate a NEW working and learning PLACE that radiates mass sustainability out to its surrounding environment and is itself inside the embodiment of sustainability!!!!!!!!!

Pledgers: You know who you are, even if you missed the session itself – we have your postits! And if you didn’t, but now want to, read on!

Call to Action:

We’ll take your word for #12-17. For those who pledged, or now want to pledge for the ambitious #18, we’re going to make our lives easier by making this a collective effort! Just visit http://www.the-hub.ae and sign up there. That would be the next step, and we’ll have gatherings towards it every few weekends or so.

To the right is a tag cloud of the mindmap we created together in the session. And here is a fascinating summary document of what we envisioned this place would be like: A Sustainable Place in UAE.

If you’ve already pledged your commitment to the above you’ll receive an email from me or if you wish to join, please drop me a line at rachaeljbrown (at) gmail (dot) com

PS: Creativity and Creatives are used in the broadest and most inclusive context. If you think creatively in any function, you are a creative person and hence this post applies to you.

At SustainabilityCamp, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Ali al Nauimi also known as Green Sheikh, opened the discussion with a brainstorm to mobilize participation towards what he calls, Project 11/11/11.
The goal of the project is to create global momentum and unify all organizations, governments, businesses and individuals working under the 3 pillars of sustainability; society, economy and environment.
After a 30 min brainstorm about the various issues affecting people and the common thread that binds them all, participants unanimously pledged support to this project.

Below is a short summary of the action points agreed and committed to by participants.

I just wanted to share with you some personal reflections, one week after our Sustainability unconference.

It starts from a personal commitment that I made: to have 2 minutes of silence in between actions. Well, honestly, it didn’t work! People started to freak out after 30 seconds or so every time I was in the company of others. Then I thought, the essence is the silence, and then changed it to 30 seconds. But still I forget it most of the times! After a week of working with it, I think the main gift for me is to be more mindful of making commitments when highly excited.

The second gift for me was observing this shift from operating purely from the mind to a balance of head, heart and hand, collectively. Many times through out the day I felt things falling into place naturally, and sometimes even magically. Based on what I have learned so far from the collective work, that only happens when the heart dimension is at play. What brought all of us with so much diversity of backgrounds and beliefs together was not an ideology or a shared belief. The source of energy was “what we care about“, coming from the center, the heart. Over and over I was touched by the words, movements and drawings of others throughout the day. It’s a personal belief that a highly critical, and yet very complex topic like sustainability can only be addressed from that collective-open-heart-space. A sum total of our individual heads is not enough anymore!

The third precious gift that stayed with me strongly is the collective image of the Sustainable village. There were so much life in those images. For me it was an affirmation that, although we have created these life-less unsustainable urban cities all around us, yet still we all hold the memory of a living with life all around us. We are not completely lost, yet! Maybe all we need is to constantly re-member those images, individually and collectively. I have a feeling that they can guide us to a different future, much more powerfully than the promises coming from an already expired “science”. A new world is already here, right within us and between us. It’s just the matter of bringing down the walls of fear that we have created within and between ourselves:

Three Enemies – Otto Scharmer – Presencing

And the last gift to be spoken here, which is highly connected to the previous ones, is in a form of a hope. Something is profoundly shifting, locally and globally, in the way we understood life in the past few centuries. Before SustainabilityCamp I was a pure critic of Dubai community, in terms of pushing for something that is already expired, not leaving any space for something completely new to emerge. But now I see it differently, thanks to everyone who made it possible, visibly and invisibly. Sitting back and being a critic is just very easy, but is it enough for having a better future? The gift is a window of hope, that we will all keep coming back together, maybe in different constellations but in the same open-heart-space to collectively dream and actively create a better future. We just can’t afford to wait for the “leaders” anymore. It’s time to awaken and give voice to the leaders within each and everyone of us.

If you haven’t yet registered for the event, please do so here.

Where is SustainabilityCamp?
Conference Center, Dubai Knowledge Village.

When is SustainabilityCamp?
26th February 2011, 9.30am – 6.30pm

Note:
Please read about all the sessions below and come well prepared to voice your opinion and ideas to impact them.
For the art installation, please bring extra* plastic bags from your home/ office/ car, etc. *Please DO NOT buy more

Room A Schedule

Room B Schedule

Room A Schedule

Thanks again to all participants for creating the content of this event and keeping it as diverse as intended. It is still not late to invite your friends and peers who may not have heard of SustainabilityCamp. So, please pass along this link to them.

Everybody is a stakeholder in making UAE sustainable.

If you answered that question posed by the session title “Yes”, then come on over to this session and tell us why. Answered “No”?
Come on over, we’ll get that body of yours ready.
How?
I’ll be leading a group discussion with you, the audience, about Health issues in the UAE.
However! The goal here isn’t just to point out faults, we’ll be conjuring up new ways to tackle the problem at it’s heart, Awareness.
Double-However! We’ll go beyond the conventional methods of going to schools and labeling products! We’ll be coming up with new, shiny, gloriously radical methods!!
Also, we won’t just sit around and talk, I’ve got other things in mind!
Expect the unexpected!
Prepare Yourself!

This post was submitted by Aabo0.

As Editor of the UAE’s ArtMap I have seen a steady growth of the UAE’s arts scene in the past 5 years with a rising number of galleries, creative spaces and art fairs. Predominately international in their programming, locally based emerging artists are often side tracked for their more established contemporaries.

Yet it is today’s residents that will shape the arts and culture scene of the UAE from artists, musicians, writers, actors, and performers to critics and audiences.

This session will explore the current artscape of the UAE at both an international and grassroots level tackling the questions ‘How do we create a sustainable local arts scene in a city with a transient population?’, ‘What do we need to establish a sustainable incubator for creatives?’ and ‘How do we begin to tackle the task of developing new audiences when Dubai’s residents have other priorities?’

This post was submitted by rachaeljbrown.

We have working with social entrepreneurs who are addressing social and environmental issues and in doing so have experienced, first hand, some of the challenges facing those who are working on building an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable region.
I’ll cover some of our experiences and invite others to share theirs in order to frame a discussion around the following questions:
- where is sustainability situated in the context of the culture of Gulf cities?
- where is sustainability situated in the social context of the region?
- where is sustainability situated in the educational context of the region?

Ever wondered why theater laughs are infectious? Or why football fan parties turn into riots? Ever done something crazy only to question yourself why?

Over the adolescent and early adult years, each of us crafts a unique identity, a sense of self. We look for what defines us and makes us standout in a crowd. We look for attention and appreciation, and strive for recognition in a group.

But we forget how fragile our identities are, and how our carefully sculpted set of standards and moral rights shatter at the wills of The Group. We are quite capable of our own undoing, and just as forgiving of shocking behavior. All we need is a large-enough crowd and a protective veil of anonymity, and by golly we will punch “that guy” who’s rooting for the other team.

The Group is our unspoken master; and I’d like to share a few stories on how The Group can set us free.

This post was submitted by rami.