Transformational Change

Eve Annecke, director of the Sustainability Institute in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is interviewed on the tapes of video, I have to watch. The following resonates with me so much that I want to share it here. “We were very interested in looking what leadership meant on a continent in transition. Leadership is about transformation. Not so much the political transformation, but transformation in the social fabric and at the environmental level. The practices that rooted us in the conventional approach and technologies. The institute is a space for learning. If we think about the needs of children and how alternative futures may look like, then we might start figuring out how we engage each other at the social level and what technologies we are going to use to create a kind of community that is going to take on the challenges of poverty, food security, land reform and the environmental limitations.”

“Transformation is not only how we engage with nature differently in order for nature to hold us in a sense, but how we engage with each other and particularly our children to bring ourselves up in a way that can take responsibility for decisions or choices that have to be made; that can take responsibility - in stead of a culture of dependency: always waiting for government, or the private sector or NGOs. We can say no - we can make these choices by ourselves. But only when we have looked quite deep into ourselves and thought about what transformation might mean.”