Sally Ludwig
Vice Chair
Facilitator, educator, and spiritual activist.
What in your life experience has made working with the JVCLT so attractive to you?
"Connection to the land and the feeling of being at home and belonging to the natural world on a particular piece of Earth has been really important ever since I can remember. It's so important to move away from the colonized property/commodity-based treatment of our Earth.
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The land trust model has me really excited to see what we can do to bring land ownership back into more of a community holding, to treat land as commons, and home as haven. To be secure in a home place where folks can connect as neighbours and community members, support and appreciate one another. To have a relationship with home place where people who want to can grow food and care for the green world and the animals and plants that live with us. Where we all can thrive. That kind of community will be so much more resilient and robust as climate change disrupts our ability to grow food and the supply chains that bring us just about everything that we need, meaning that we will need to be more connected with local sources."
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Which of your skills and talents align with this work?
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"Training as a facilitator, and training as a systemic relational therapist to be able to look at interactions of systems, effective communication, and how to weave relationships that are coherent and collaborative.
My work in the Guelph Transition movement gave me a real taste of practical ways that people can work in volunteer circles and project groups... The movement introduced me to sociocracy as a structure and set of processes, so I'm able to bring some of that knowledge to the team. I’ve learned that great generativity and solidarity are possible when people work together in this way.
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Volunteer facilitation of The Work that Reconnects has taught me a lot about working well in groups, and how important it is to acknowledge our whole selves–values, rationality, emotion, embodied experience–in authentic, empowering interactions.
Aging is one of the things that helps me. I've become better able to love people, able to bring my better self to interactions more often, not always, but more often, in ways that fulfill. I enjoy and respect the beautiful energy and commitment and skills and talents of so many people I've met along the way. This community land trust group is a shining example of a group of those kinds of folks. It's an honour to be part of it."
"My heroes include Mary-Kate and Mike Craig, who are making it happen. I love the goodwill, intelligence, experience, skill and devotion they bring to this work. It’s great being in contact with them, working on the same thing.
The history of beautiful, spiritually-based activists is rich and deep. Joanna Macy is top of the list--I feel so inspired by her. She and her Work That Reconnects energized a shared fire of activism to do whatever I can for the well-being of the world.
My contemporary heroes are people like Greg Kennedy at Ignatius who are finding their own way to show us how to balance our lives in caring for ourselves, caring for the Earth and caring for community, all at the same time, and supporting others in doing the same. Marshall Rosenberg and his development of Nonviolent Communication/Compassionate Communication shows us ways of working together to harvest the differences that bring conflict. When the main intention is to connect, then we can put differences to constructive use, get the benefit of all perspectives on any issue, and strengthen our relationships.
My heroes also include Rob Hopkins and Sophy Banks of the Transition Movement. Sophy brought us the idea of caring for ourselves as we want the earth to be cared for, not the extractive approach of treating our own energy as an asset to be exploited until we burn out. Earth-care means caring for ourselves, as we are elements of the living world. We come out of Earth. We are it, the self-aware part of our world. So we need to be resilient, for the long haul."