Robina is a founder-member of the 15 year old Tui Land Trust, an intentional community in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tui is dedicated to personal development, living lightly on the earth, working with the rhythms of nature, creating sustainable small village culture, generating ethical livelihood, using appropriate technology and serving as a centre for holistic education and healing. For the lifespan of Tui she has been engaged in broader community development, permaculture design and teaching, gardening and orchard work, and development of environmental education resources and participatory processes for decision-making. Robina holds a Diploma in Permaculture Design, and is a graduate of "Design for Sustainable Human Settlement' course conducted by Robyn Francis and Peter Cuming (Australia). She is the author of "Towards Sacred Society", a chapter in a recently published book by Permanent Publications and Gaia Trust, entitled Creating Harmony: Confllict Resolution in Community.
Robina's ecovillage work spans impoverished and privileged
conditions. This included co-teaching a Permaculture & Ecovillage
design course at Otamatea Ecovillage in NZ, and at Kuthumba Ecovillage,
South Africa, plus workshops on the theme of building intentional
community in Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Over the past
five years she was involved with biological systems design at
Tlholego Development Project in South Africa, working to transform
an impoverished farm labourers' village into a demonstration ecovillage
settlement . She also co-facilitated a workshop in sustainable
ecovillage design for a Xhosa community in the process of accessing
their own land through the new South Africa government land redistribution
system. Her most recent ecovillage facilitation work was at Burdatien
Ecovillage on the border of Southern & Northern Ireland, where,
using a consensus mode process, she guided the group through core
values agreement; contentious cultural, environmental, economic
and political issues; in depth site analysis; to a full permaculture
land use design draft for their local authority permission application.