The Round Home :
Where Environment And Children Are
Empowered To Care For Each Other
At the Round Home, we look after the environment and we look after the children. But in order to be holistic, we enable the environment and the children to care for each other. Within our environment, our space of refuge, we help stem the effects of climate change by encouraging everyone in the compound to minimize carbon emissions and store emitted carbon by planting and nurturing plants and trees.
We also try crop rotation and crop cover.
We implement smart water usage by purifying water from a natural spring source.
All organic waste goes to vermicompost, the natural fertilizer.
All plastics are recycled.
We have always maintained that empowerment needs to be part of restoration. In order to obliterate the effects of being an objectified, callously transacted human commodity and restore the victims back to the condition of humanity, they need to be involved in caring for others, e.g., caring for other victims or caring for the environment itself. Then they feel empowered and develop a sense of psychological liberation.
More than lecturing and teaching about empowerment, the Round Home enables the children to experience it. The Round Home offers an opportunity for the children to see themselves as part of the process of enhancing nature, making the land more productive, and allowing plant and animal life to flourish. In return, they witness that nature generously gives back. When they see that the food that they eat and that makes them healthy is the result of their active participation, they experience a sense of achievement and empowerment. They are aware that they are instrumental in eliciting the physical, psychological, emotional, and economic succor that the environment offers. Promoting a symbiotic relationship between the children and the environment is part of our effort to go beyond restoration by awakening the children’s own ability to restore others, seeing the beneficial result of their own efforts, and gaining a sense of empowerment in the process.
Music is also part of the environment. The Round Home environment is simultaneously imbued with peace and exhilaration by the music that the children produce with their music ensemble.
Creativity is made part of what the environment nurtures in the children, as the children are encouraged to take in whatever they resonate with in the surroundings and interpret this in the way they choose, through their art.
The environment itself is made therapeutic with attributes of order and beauty, which is a statement that henceforth, there will be order in the children’s disordered lives. - Gundelina A. Velazco
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