Lantana Mela is on at MM Hills on Oct 6th.

Lantana camara was once a troublesome weed that colonized nearly 60% of the forest land in MM hills. Also known as Spanish flag, the plant is a native of South America.

Sustained efforts made by ATREE’s Conservation and Livelihoods team have helped transform Lantana from a disturbing weed to a utility plant. Working with Lantana camara has become an attractive livelihood option for the Soligas as well as other tribal communities.

Perhaps you may want to spend this Saturday meeting with the craftspeople and seeing for yourself the lovely works of art and craft that can be made with Lantana.

Lantana camara is a tough, hardy plant which thrives well in low rainfall conditions and is not affected by bugs or microbes. To know more about the Lantana initiative at ATREE, you can check out this link: http://www.atree.org/lantana_confl_07.html

Here's the agenda for the Lantana Mela

11.00 am: Invocation by Divyajyothi members

11.30 am: Laying of Foundation stone for Community-based Conservation Centre, MM Hills
by Mrs Parimala Nagappa, MLA, Hannur - Chief Guest

11.40 pm: Distribution of certificates to the Lantana Craftspeople

13.00 pm: Lunch

14.30 pm: An interaction session with the Craftspeople

15.30 pm: Field trip

19.00: Cultural program: Janapada geethegalla nruthyarupaka by Soliga artisans and Adima Kala Shale, Kolar

Event Organizers : Lantana Craft Centre (LCC), Divyajyothi SHG (Self Help Group)Federation, University of Agricultural Science, Bangalore and ATREE.

ATREE's Rural CE Workshop on Oct 9th

Dear Friends,

Attached is the notice for the Rural CE workshop on October 9th, 2007 at ATREE. The primary focus of the workshop will be to look at the existing CE (conservation education) initiatives in our field sites, and see how best we can come up with a CREATIVE ASSESSMENT PLAN for each of these areas. Each team will ideally share with the group what they think needs to be done and this can be consolidated into an overall plan.

The assessment itself while looking at Conservtion Education in particular will also build up baseline information that will help us plan further CE work in each of these areas. We look forward to your presentations (please feel free to use any format to present) and the kite flying that will follow. Both Gladwin and I are looking forward to veering away from the usual questionnaire type of assessments and would like to make it as experiential and hands-on as possible. We will all need to pitch in to decide how best we take this forward.

Please bring along anything (non-textual material, photos, art work, crafts, seeds etc) or written material that will help in building up our plan. If there are any clarifications or pre-workshops discussions you need, please do get in touch with me.

A line confirming who will participate will be appreciated. I am also sending this to some of our Urban CE folks with the request that they also attend if interested.

Thanks and regards,
Sunita

Member and Programme Coordinator,
Kalpavriksh, Pune & Adjunct Fellow,
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE),
Bangalore, India

Here's our tentative agenda for the meeting on October 9th, 2007


10.00 am: Introduction to the meeting

Expected outcomes/outputs including the assessment methodology

Gladwin and Sunita

10.30 to 13.00: Presentations by teams from ATREE’s 6 CCC field sites (with CE as the focus)

o KMTR: Soubhadra/Ganesh/Savitha
o Natham: Sarvanan
o Kanakpura: Kavitha
o MM Hills: Kannan
o BR Hills: Siddappa/Sunita
o Vembanad: Priyan/Jojo

Each presentation can be about 15 minutes long followed by a discussion that is within the context of the purpose of this meeting, and will lay the way for the afternoon discussions.

Moderator: Gladwin

13.00 to 13.45 pm: Lunch

13.45 pm: “Generating a creative assessment methodology for CE”- Gladwin/Sunita
14.30 to 16.00 pm: Group discussions and presentations on what each site team would ideally like to have as an assessment plan.

Moderator: Gladwin

16.00-17.00 pm: Wrap up and consolidation (work plan, task list, team)