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Founded in 1999, Common Vision is a solution-focused nonprofit organization, a project of International Humanities Center. Common Vision’s mission is to cultivate ecological awareness and respect for the Earth while generating social and environmental changes towards sustainable lifestyles. We integrate concepts of ecology with the traditions, music, and art of cultures that live or have lived in harmony with the Earth.



Common Vision has found that the principles of permaculture are not only important in gardening and landscaping but also as design principles for all aspects of our organization and lives. They represent the underpinnings of our sustainability education programs.



Through the California Sustainability Project, Common Vision infuses public schools and spaces with inspiration, infrastructure, and experience to support solution-focused environmental education for urban youth. Common Vision facilitates hands-on projects with students and community leaders that serve to retrofit public schools and spaces into models of sustainability.



As learning environments begin to model sustainable design principles and techniques they become living classrooms that demonstrate and inspire a more harmonious relationship with nature. We see fruit trees and gardens important steps to cultivate in students awareness, respect, and love

for the earth’s delicate and abundant ecology.



We are choosing to create nomadic educational programs because there are no centralized, holistic models of sustainability. Existing sustainable models are fragmented, spread out, and manifested within differing contexts; this requires a mobile educational infrastructure to connect them in a way that makes them accessible learning tools for students. By taking students to diverse sites that model the different parts of sustainability we encourage them to make their own holistic vision of sustainability. Students can then return to their communities with the knowledge and skills necessary to implement effective change.