Overview

The Vine Communities Center is focused on building resilience within our local communities. The UAE's desert climate makes it challenging to create food security. The country primarily depends on imports to feed its population. Increased socio-political tensions and possible future interruptions to the food supply chain make this part of the world vulnerable to food shortages.

In addition, the increased popularity of consumer culture and excessive reliance on technological enhancements have contributed to cultural knowledge loss within the population regarding essential life skills such as traditional food preparations, desert gardening, food storage, and survival skills. The Vine Communities Center of Sustainable Development works on strengthening resilience within the local population, focusing on the elements of Personal Resilience, Self-Sufficiency, Survival Skills, and Communal Resilience among all age groups for both UAE nationals and the Expat community.

The Center is founded on the fundamental belief in humanity's ability to become resilient in an uncertain future and invests in our ability to thrive in the years to come. We work to enable local communities to learn the skills necessary for local reliance, preparedness, and mutual aid, covering four main domains as the pillars for building sustainable and resilient communities. Those four domains are based on the cultivation of a certain skill set as follows:

• Personal Resilience for Individuals, Children, and Teens (Covering aspects of Mind, Body, and Spirit such as leadership skills, self-awareness through temperament assessment, survival skills, and life skills training)
• Essential Life Skills for Children and Adults (Including cooking skills, gardening, sewing, basic carpentry and survival skills)
• Family Self-Sufficiency Skills (Including traditional food preparations, food preservation, and herbal medicine)
• Communal Resilience for All Community Members (Teamwork and collaboration, positive community activism, and conflict resolution).

Our Approach

We believe that learning is social, experiential, and contextual. Therefore, our programs are a balanced mix of theory and practice. Adults and children are provided every opportunity to try and experiment. Our programs are designed to provide individuals with the "know-how" to achieve their resilience and self-sufficiency goals. We deploy a 'just-in-time' learning model, meaning that individuals get to choose from various short classes that suit their needs and fill their skill gaps to progress on their journey toward self-sufficiency and personal resilience.

We are a community-led project. Therefore, our instructors are local community members with experience. We also welcome adults with specialized expertise who want to use our facility to give a one-off how-to or a DIY session to share their knowledge about related topics with our members or wider audience.

To become a Vine Member, Click Here

To book the space for your personal workshop, Click Here

To learn more about registering as an instructor at Vine Communities, Click Here.

Licensing

Vine Communities Center is located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The center is registered under the Department of Economic Development and ACTVET. The

Vine Communities mini-farm, located at Um Al Emarat Park, is a space for learning designed to provide a model for everyday families to learn the skills necessary for growing their food and learn the basics of food preparation and preservation.