Structure

The Wilderness Community is a name given to the implicit potential community of all Life. It comprises of emergent villages or neighbourhoods, themselves comprised of families.  Each village belongs to a place to fulfil a necessary role to nurture the Life community at that place. Each village or neighbourhood comprises of families in communion with each other and their place. Each family is comprised of persons in communion with each other, their place, their village and neighbourhood community, and their wider communities of interest. The tapestry of interweaving communities makes up the ever emerging implicit Wilderness Community.

The Sustainable Community Development Research Institute (SCDRI) seeks to nurture the emerging implicit Wilderness Community. The SCDRI is facilitating self-conscious or reflexive learning about the emerging implicit Wilderness Community.  Self-conscious learning is participatory action research; it is learning that can be passed onto others as part of a community. The SCDRI seeks to learn how to exemplify the process of how an institution can facilitate such community oriented research. The structure of the SCDRI is emerging as we learn how to do so.

The SCDRI is structured to facilitate three types of learning through three degrees of participation in the SCDRI. The three degrees ensure that everyone who wishes to participate is enabled and welcomed to do so to the extent they are capable of and/or wish to.

The three degrees of participation involve relatively greater or lesser involvement. The least degree of participation involves talking about research: face-to-face discussions; online blogs discussion and wiki development, and wilderness retreats. The middle degree of participation involves doing research: development and implementation of potentially funded collaborative research projects and scholarly work. The greatest degree of participation involves reflexive discussion of what is being learnt about how best to  manage the SCDRI.

The least degree of participation is to be an associate member of the SCDRI. There is no financial involvement at this degree of participation. The middle degree of participation is to be a research fellow of the SCDRI. There is potentially financial involvement with this degree of participation as the projects are sought to be fully funded. Research fellows of the SCDRI remain independent researchers (in terms of the SCDRI), and each have their own negotiated contracts for each funded project within which they are a collaborator. The greatest degree of participation is to a director of the SCDRI. There is no financial compensation for participation as a  director of the SCDRI. If the reflexive learning about how to best manage the SCDRI obtains funding, the research project will be carried out by the collaborating directors of the SCDRI working also as research fellows of the SCDRI.

There are no constraints on the degree of participation of a person. However everyone remains grounded in participating as an associate member even though they may also participate as a research fellow, and even as a director. Likewise a person who participates as a director remains involved as a research fellow and as an associate member. All research fellows are involved in discussions as associate members, and all directors are involved in the research and scholarship of research fellows, and in discussions as associate members.

As well as participation in the SCDRI to the three degrees outlined here, everyone else (in potentially all other communities) can also participate through reading what the SCDRI publishes, and/or participating in wilderness retreats, community-based research projects, workshops and symposia the SCDRI facilitates. Moreover everyone who is a member of the SCDRI, whether as only an associate member, or also as a research fellow, or as a director as well as a research fellow, remains first and foremost members of multiple communities being  woven into the Wilderness Community.

The learning has to be true for all traditions and cultures. So all traditions, cultures and their elders are respected, listened to and entered into dialogue with if possible. We also share from within our own traditions what we have truly come to understand and ask questions of what we want to learn about. The emergence of local issues and ideas are facilitated to maintain the integrity and self-determination of communities and cultural traditions, along with the benefits of mutual learning between communities and cultural traditions. Inter-cultural learning is encouraged whilst supporting the integrity and self-determination of traditional and indigenous knowledge.