© 2001 Bonnie Ora Sherk & Life Frames®, Inc.
www.alivinglibrary.org

Now more than ever, we need to create positive, healing, and practical solutions for living, learning, and sharing together in our communities and on the planet. Creating A Living Library and celebrating the Human Garden is an innovative solution.

A Living Library provides a vision and shows a way to create meaningful and healing ecological and sustainable environmental and educational transformation in communities of the world. A Living Library transforms sunken meadows and brownfields, urban sprawl and desolation, public parks and plazas, concrete and asphalt schoolyards, civic centers or undeveloped wastelands into vibrant and relevant community learning environments and highly visible public magnets offering innovative and practical community and economic development.

A Living Library develops themed, content-rich landscapes with integrated community programs, multidisciplinary project-based learning, and state-of-the-art communications technologies. A Living Library is created by all sectors of the community, particularly students, and cultivates the Human Garden, by its emphasis on diversity, commonalities, participation, and inclusivity from the peoples of the world. A Living Library provides a practical and enchanting way to bring us all together and celebrate life.

A Living Library is linked to the curricula of the schools and animates all subjects through real-world experience. Students, together with adults, are involved in all aspects of the research, planning design, implementation, use, maintenance, management and communications of the transformed learning environments and integrated programs. Math, science, history, language arts, arts, and technology come to life through relevant activities an community building using the ecological, multicultural, and built environments as the context for learning.

A Living Library demonstrates that culture, ecology, and technology are linked and all part of nature, As a systemic framework and vehicle, ALL, for short, incorporates and interconnects the local resources: human, ecological, economic, historic, technological, and aesthetic.

A Goal and Opportunity is to create site and culturally-sensitive Branch Living Libraries in different locales of the world linked electronically. Each Branch Living Library will be unique based on its systemically linked local resources and integrated community and school programs. When experienced together, the commonalities and biodiversity of differing ecologies and cultures will create exciting opportunities for understanding connections and communicating, and for sharing, growing, and learning locally and globally.

When we learn all we can about our local place and its resources, from that, we can extrapolate and learn about the world - past and present, and future - while promoting sensitivity, understanding, healing, and peace in our communities and on the planet.

OMI / EXCELSIOR LIVING LIBRARY & THINK PARK

An exciting current example is the OMI /Excelsior Living Library & Think Park that is currently underway in the southwestern part of San Francisco. Three schools (PreK-12) sit on a contiguous piece of land of about nine acres that includes a culverted hidden river and other features - Balboa High School, James Denman Middle School, and San Miguel Children's Center. They are currently separate campuses of typically bleak, "factory model" schools with mostly concrete, asphalt, and chain-linked environments. We are transforming and linking these environments and their curricula by creating a series of indoor/outdoor learning zones that incorporate the ecological, built, and multicultural resources of the site - past, present, and future - as the beginning core-content of the interdisciplinary project-based curricula and transformation process. To begin, our First Living Library & Think Park Garden & Streetscape Transformation has changed a weedy, unused area between two of the schools (Denman and San Miguel) into a bright, organic, vegetable, herb and flower garden and orchard, and two streets, adjacent to the three schools, into an environmental classroom with almost 200 native trees and other native understory vegetation, planted and maintained by the students from the three schools. An Artwalk has been established transforming the chain-link fences and digital technologies are being developed to be integrated into these areas.

Hundreds of students from different cultures from the three schools have participated in these efforts to date. We are cultivating the Human Garden and are creating plans for developing Multicultural Gardens as part of the future opportunities for transforming the larger concrete / asphalt acreage. This aspect of the work is meant to bring people from different groups closer together, build community, celebrate diversity, and help heal the wounds from the recent tragic events in New York City and Washington D.C.

We are also making linkages to schools in Michoacan, Mexico where the Monarch Butterfly overwinters as part of its international life cycle. Students from these different countries will be communicating as they observe and share experiences about the Monarch's journey. This will serve as another important way to demonstrate inter connectedness and aid in healing grief, as well as helping to foster literacy, understanding of natural systems, and differences in geographies, ecologies, and cultures. This program is being developed in conjunction with the Michoacan Reforestation Project and the La Cruz Habitat Protection Project.

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