Thanks to this Goteo we would like to give continuity to the collective project of Mas del Potro located at Barranc del Cint (Alcoi) and iniciated around 2001 by a group of young activists from Alcoi.
This group, together with a commited community of Mas del Potro supporters and friends, has rebuilt the house from the ruins, prepared the pieces of land and given the enviroment the best amenities for inhabiting the place in a continuous and self-managed way.
Twenty years later, this first period comes to an end and we are taking over.🌱🌿
The new project around Mas del Potro aims creating a Self-Managed Social Center
A meeting point and a place of synergy between agroecology, decentralized culture and social action:
We project the space as an excellent location for developing workshops, activities, courses and meetings which promote agroecology, food sovereignty, enviromental caring and development of networks between people.
We have a library, a workshop and a big room for hosting visits; together with different spaces with potential to host meetings, talks and trainings, both inside and outside.
*There are plenty of cultivation terraces set with driping irrigation and pens asking to be filled with live.
All of this, from a political positioning based on horizontality, ecofeminism and self-managment; welcoming all sexual, gender and affective diversities.
We want to ensure a time-sustainable project
That's why we are interested in facilitation of group processes and community based actions, taking into account allied people and entities together with the residents of the house. Pedagogy, groups gestion and accessibility are the tools we consider most important to pass on our concerns, as well as promoting the onset and consolidation of other iniciatives and people, both in the Social Center and the housing project.
In order to achieve this, we contemplate the possibility of creating a housing cooperative to focus energies on taking care of the house and cultivation lands, developing a lifestyle opposed to the prevailing dogma of individualism and private property.
Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign
🌿 As we had to put into words the goals of the project, we have followed the four dimensions that many projects concerned about social transformtion have previously followed:
- Ecological: To be conscious about the climate and energy crisis we suffer and to suggest enviromental respectful scenarios, taking into consideartion the people who co-exist within the enviroment.
- Economical: To be able to be self-sufficent in a frame of a shared economy for living.
- Cultural and/or educative: Creating and facilitating artistic and self-learning spaces; promoting popular knowledge and at the same time experimenting new formats.
- Social: To promote critical thinking towards problems, inconsistencies and inequities having a local and regional impact, putting in the center the reality of Comarques Centrals.
🌿 From these dimensions, we understand as some of Mas del Potro's goals:
- To make a sustainable agroecological production through the garden, animal caring and alimentary transformations.
- Community living and horizontal organization, which means proposing shared ways of living, where food, shelter and caring are responsability of all.
- To create a common, open and intergenertional space; available for hosting collective iniciatives through activities, workshops, meetings...
- To maintain what Mas del Potro has always been: a place of transit, passage, to shut down, to breath, to look at eachoder, to share and to fight for what we are and want to be.
- To secure the Mas conservation, dating from 1850s, and to habilitate, rebuild and recover new spaces that have fallen into disuse.
Why this is important
Our motivation is to live in a continuous contact with nature, creating a community of people who freely has chosen to live and organize themselves without any hierarchy, willing to put their energies and time on working the land with the less possible impact on the ecosystem. That means commiting on respecting the enviroment, flora, fauna and people inhabiting the land.
We leave the door open to whoever feels like learning about the project or take part in it; always keen to re-think it from the consensus of those involved.
Team and experience
Right now we are three friends that have chosen to take the reins of the project and guarantee its continuity.
The co-initiators are: Sare, Roger and David. We are three youngsters form El Comtat whit different kind of experiences in similar projects.
Sara studied Art History and Sociology in France, together with a master focusing in Arts and Society in Barcelona. After participating and arranging communiy projects in southern France, involving in cities' social fights and collaborating with collectives (mainly in Athens) she gets interested in decentralized socio-cultural and artistic action and the rural memory.
Roger with deep interest on agronomy, botany and food transformation. Moved by alimentary sovereignity, farmer's dignity and LTBIQ rights, takes part in social movements around the País Valencià and differents parts of the geography, nationaly and outside the territory.
David has been linked to live in the country-side since he was a kid. During his studies he got the chance to live in different cities, either in or outside the Spanish territory. Carrying political and social concerns wherever he's moved to, he has tried to shape them throughout the studies, experiences, and the encouragment that contact with others bring.
As collective experience, all three of us are members of APOC (Acció Política del Comtat), young but ambicious project created in order to unite our energies towards the self-sufficience of our villages and creation of cultural and leisure spaces where we could feel safe. Right now, the project that's still running is the garden ACABassaes, in the town of Alcosser.
We are between 22 and 23 years old. As young people we are aware of the difficulties of our generation -precarious- in order to obtain economical resources and undertake initiatives. That is why we need help, networks, collaboration... We know we can do it, and if we get to do it, it has to be the right way!
We see ouselves with the strength, the hope, the motivation, and the capacity to carry out this project. Right now we are in three, but the door won't remain closed; one of our objectives is to create a community of commited people, an experimental space of shared lifes inside the Barranc del Cint.
We will grow according to our rythms, timings, meetings and coincidences...
The Mas del Potro stays and it will be in a collective way! 🌿