Women's Empowerment Group

CCRVI's founder and President, Will Flanders, has been actively involved, since July 1995, in the ManKind Project ("MKP"), an international organization providing powerful training programs for men. (See www.mkp.org for more information.) One of the projects he was involved with since August 2006 is the Western Mass Integration Group Incubator (the "Incubator")- an expanded version of MKP's standard integration group training. After Will stepped down as the Incubator's founder and trainer in January 2014, women who knew men who had participated in the Incubator asked Will to start a similar training program for women. This training program began in December 2014, ran for four years, with three different groups of women. Over these years, Will took an increasingly smaller role as women took on leadership roles and he stepped down completely in December 2017. The program has resulted in the formation of a powerful, skilled women's group which continues to this day.

Greenfield Food Study

In 2013 CCRVI provided grant funding for the creation of the Greenfield Food Study for the City of Greenfield, Massachusetts, based on research performed by Greenfield Community College students and those of the Conway School of Landscape Design.

Shelburne Falls Food Security Project

In the Winter of 2009, CCRVI undertook the first in what we hope will be a series of projects evaluating the capacity of the Shelburne Falls Village to feed itself. In collaboration with the Conway School of Landscape Design, we worked with three Conway School students to evaluate the capacity of the residents of the Village of Shelburne Falls, MA, to produce all of our own food. See the full report published at www.issuu.com.

West County Resilience Project

Between 2009 and 2010, CCRVI supported regular meetings, workshops, and activities to promote community resilience in the western part of Franklin County, Massachusetts, with the intention of assisting the community to be better prepared for an array of possible difficult community challenges including floods, pandemics, ice storms, peak oil, global climate change, and/or economic system collapse.

Apios Institute - Permaculture Education and Research

CCRVI sponsored the start-up phase of the Apios Institute, located in Western MA. Apios promotes the development of permaculture as an innovative approach to growing local food as well as living more intimately with the Earth and each other. Click here to read more about the Apios Institute.

Renew Building Materials and Salvage

CCRVI sponsored ReNew, located in Brattleboro, VT, during its start-up phase. ReNew was a non-profit, tax-exempt, building materials recycling store, started in September 2005, which hand-deconstructed unwanted buildings for salvage materials, sold a variety of used, surplus, and green building materials, supported the development of affordable housing in a number of ways, and provided related educational programs.

Earthstory Gathering

From 2005-2015, CCRVI served as the fiscal sponsor for the annual, week-long, Earthstory gathering of environmental activists, held in various places in MA and VT each August.

Community Mapping Project

CCRVI supported a volunteer community mapping project in the Montague Plains (a unique ecosystem in located in Montague, Massachusetts) which identified the environmentally - destructive human usage patterns in the Plains - including where people dumped trash, where they rode ATVs which caused erosion problems, etc.. The project resulted in a map of the Plains which allowed the citizens of Montague to address these problems more coherently and clean up the Plains. CCRVI, through a grant from Northeast Utilities, obtained and provided to the project, a set of PDAs with attached GPS units. The PDAs used mapping software developed by a CCRVI volunteer. The Montague volunteers used the PDA/GPS/mapping software units to identify sites on the ground which were then be located on the map.

Visiting Native Elders

CCRVI provided grants to the Red Eagle Lodge, a Montague, Massachusetts, based group which brought Native American teachers/elders to the Bioregion and sponsored related activities.

Economic Crisis Research and Education

CCRVI supported the development of an educational program, including lectures, DVDs, and slide presentations which describe (a) the current crisis state of the financial system in the US and the world, (b) the current global crises in food, water, energy availability and global warming, diminishing and/or deteriorating natural resources (including oil, forests, grasslands); (c) the benefits of shifting to a more locally-based and ecologically-wise culture, and (d) ways that local communities can begin to move toward a more locally-based and ecologically-wise culture.