Our vision for Bjärkan is the ongoing collaborative creation of a resilence project.
We envisage a place where people can come and learn old skills from visiting craftspeople, develop capacity for human collaboration through training events and deepen personal resilience through inner work and relational practices in ecotherapy, nature connection, wilderness immersion, systemic constellations, shadow-work and meditation.
At Bjärkan we are adopting the ethical framework and applying the principles of permaculture so that we can transition from being dependent consumers to becoming responsible producers. Working closely with and learning from our natural environment, seasons and climatic conditions to eventually support livestock and grow our own food.
Our long term vision includes the organic, emergent potential for a small community to live here on the land with the current buildings acting as the community hub.
Phase 1 of our development plan is now complete:
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Website created & Social Media presence commenced
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Pilot first community volunteer camp
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Essential repairs/maintenance on site and buildings
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Walk in and listen to land
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Forestry regeneration plan and permaculture design created
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Met neighbours and started to build relationships
Phase 2 of our development begins in September.
This will include further renovations as well as beginning to implement forestry plan & permaculture design. Alongside this we'll start to set up legal infrastructures and seek investment and funding. We will also be looking to host our first paid events in 2024.
We are seeking funding & investment for the next phase of our development, and will also be launching a scheme to adopt 3 square metre forest plots in the coming months. If our values and vision resonate and you are interested in supporting our project through investment, please contact us.
Who we are
Justine Corrie & Nick Osborne
Justine: I’m interested in relationships. Relationship to self, to others and to the world we are all a part of. All of my work focuses on exploring relationship & connection - and what gets in the way.
What can cause us to feel so disconnected?
I’ve explored and lived within many different contexts and cultures and I continue to enquire into how we can best create the conditions that support right-relationship to ourselves, each other and the world around us.
Alongside my work as a psychotherapist & facilitator, I've been a catalyst for many varied projects, events and causes. I am also a mother, a lover of getting my hands in the soil, a dancer, a good witch and and a mountain-lover.
You can find out more about my work here.
Nick: I am passionate about experimenting with new ways of doing things! In the mid-90s, I visited over 30 intentional community/ecovillage/town/city projects researching how they work, took permaculture and ecovillage design courses, and was part of setting up two land-based community projects and the Ecovillage Network in UK.
I learned that one of the biggest obstacles to humans living sustainably on this planet is not the technology or amount of resources. Instead, it is how well we can work together to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals.
Since then, I have devoted myself to studying, practising and delivering training in new ways for groups/teams/organisations to lead and manage themselves without outdated forms of hierarchy and control.