OUR Ecovillage, on 25 acres near Shawnigan Lake on unceded Coast Salish territory on Vancouver Island, has operated as a Regenerative Living Demonstration Site and Educational Research Center since 1999.
What began in the early 1990s as a group of housemates in Victoria, British Columbia, dreaming of land-based learning grew into a registered non-profit multi-stakeholder cooperative—OUR stands for “One United Resource”—governed through a sociocracy model designed so that no individual holds the land for personal gain; all who steward it do so on behalf of the community. Co-founder Brandy Gallagher has described the founding impulse simply: people wanting to work together for the common good and reclaim shared space.
That founding vision now shows up as a working permaculture farm, natural buildings raised from cob and strawbale, a farm-to-table eatery, and hands-on courses in permaculture design, natural building, and sustainable food production that draw thousands of visitors and students from around the world each year.
The village’s cooperative structure, spanning social, ecological, economic, and worldview dimensions, has won recognition even as it has proven genuinely difficult to finance and insure within conventional systems built for simpler ownership models—a friction the community treats as part of the pioneering work itself. An ongoing campaign to place the land in a conservation covenant aims to protect the site, and the education it offers, permanently.
Why It Matters: For anyone exploring what regenerative living looks like in practice rather than theory, OUR Ecovillage offers a quarter-century-long working demonstration—proof that cooperative governance, ecological design, and land stewardship rooted in relationship with Indigenous history can hold together as a durable, replicable way of life.