Skills for self-sufficient and sustainable living

Written by: Omavara Association

Omavara Association in Eastern Finland runs a seven-month course that teaches skills to live sustainably with minimal use of industrial energy. During the course that runs from April to October the students learn how to grow their own food, make firewood, renovate buildings and make useful artefacts – all by hand.

From the five baches of the course several people have chosen to settle in countryside in abandoned farms. In this article Mette Hartonen, graduate of the second course in 2022, shares her insights.

I’m Mette Hartonen, I’m 25 years old and currently living in a countryside community called Uuran yhteisö in Southern Finland. There are seven adults and one baby in our project, wanting to establish a solidary and sustainable lifestyle and own-handed fulfilment for our basic needs. This means growing and gathering food, making our own firewood with mostly hand tools and overall living low in technology, also without a car. We preserve our food in a cellar and cook with a fire stove, no fridge or modern stove needed.

People in our village, called Kasiniemi, have taken us well to be part of the local community and seem really happy to have young people to bring life to the area. We have helped the villagers in everyday tasks, attended to weekly gatherings and got welcoming help from them in in many forms, like borrowing tools or sharing a ride to nursery.

Our community is the first kick-off project of Omavaraopisto, the school for self-sufficiency and practically sustainable lifestyle. Six of us have learned there many of the practical skills we need for this way of living.

The Uura community was formed three years ago, when a group of five former students decided to put their savings together and establish a co-operative to by the place. Living together at Omavaraopisto formed the initial bond, and the will to find a place together to continue.

The self-sufficiency school Omavaraopisto is located in a small village called Rasimäki in Nurmes, Northern Carelia, not far from Finland’s border with Russia. For six years it has been teaching adults practical skills for living sustainably on the countryside. The average age of the students has been thirty years. The course begins a bit before the planting season and ends at harvest time. The 10-15 students live the whole time communally in 3-6 houses in the village. A support organization called Omavara Association has bought four houses and one forest lot in the village with the help of crowd funded loans and donations. In addition, a group of six supports have bought two nearby farms, to create more opportunities for the school and the participants to work the land and experiment with sustainable living (the Kyrönvaara Commons).

Omavara Association has over a hundred members. Several of them join in work camps to do maintenance works with buildings or to give a hand in seasonal farm works. These work camps (talkoot, in Finnish) are important moments to share ideas and skills to a wider section of people. They are also great fun, even if physically demanding.

Most years, about half of the participants of the course choose to stay in the houses over the winter as well. Usually one to three of them also stay for another season to deepen their knowledge and to assist the main teacher. The course includes organic gardening, making own fertilizers, such as humanure and charcoal, forest gardening, gathering berries and mushrooms, preservation, making firewood for cooking and heating with handtools, ecological building and renovating, metal work, and handicrafts from mostly self-gathered materials. Besides the main teacher, Maria Dorff, there are several teachers for the different fields.

Many of them are nowadays former students, who can now share their skills for others. During the course and living in the village, the students have learned many valuable skills for social sustainability, nonviolent communication, consent-based decision-making and having meetings and circles together. We also got a lot of peer-support for our anxieties and sorrows raising from the environmental and social injustice crises.

The warm atmosphere I sensed in the students was the main reason for me to attend the course, besides the environmental and social justice reasons. I have many participants in the autism spectrum and the lifestyle has supported me a lot in giving space to do meaningful things in my own schedule and style. Several students, who have had an ADHD diagnosis have told me that they find it so much easier to learn new things in this school, as they can do it by practice. There have also been participants with a serious illness or inability in movement. Their participation has been modified according to needs and the community has been able to support them in the practical life. Their attendance has also invoked an important discussion on ableism and how to find ways for everyone to attend lessons further away from the main building and so on.

The course is organized together with Kainuun Opisto, which is a folk high school in Paltamo, Kainuu. The roots of the project go long back in time. One of its founders Lasse Nordlund moved to Rasimäki over 30 years ago to explore ways to live as sustainably and fairly as possible. He wanted to grow and produce everything he used, as for everything else fossil fuels and materials are needed. He also wanted to find answers to the social injustice of global production, that’s moved to global south and exploits people and the rest of the nature there.

Over the years of his experiment, Lasse found ways to live using a small amount of money and fossil energy, even the hidden one. When he met Maria and they got kids, the family chilled a bit on their goal, but continued to grow and gather most of their food. Maria found a need to share the skills attained forward, and found Kainuun Opisto to work together in 2017.

Omavaraopisto started to educate people on shorter courses then, and moved to seven-month courses in 2021, so a several hundred people have been able to attend already. Besides an ecological and solidary way of living, the school helps to keep the countryside inhabited. After our community in Uura, two more communities have been formed in different sides of Finland, and many former students also live in the countryside with their partner or family.

More financial and bureaucratic support from the government or the EU would help to share the skills for everyone. Now the participants need to pay a significant sum for the course, for which some support is available. Our hope is that the policymakers could see the importance of the skills to live sustainably and enable that they could be taught in more places, for more people and as an profession. In addition we hope that the policymakers could even better understand, how deeply and thoroughly fossil fuels and materials are fueling the world at the moment, and that to live sustainably, we need to use less energy and materials and produce more ourselves. A sustainable culture lies in fulfilling our basic needs together and taking care of everyone in the community.