Overview

The Vine Communities 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 required for building sustainable and resilient communities. Those four domains are the following:

• Personal Resilience
• Family Self-Sufficiency
• Essential Life Skills
• Communal Resilience

Why the UAE?

We are a locally based center concerned with creating resilience within our local communities. The UAE has a desert climate that makes it a challenging place to create food security. The country primarily depends on imports to feed its population. The 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 will work on strengthing 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.

Our Approach

We believe that learning is social, experiential, and contextual. Therefore, our programs are a balanced mix of theory and practice. Our children are provided every opportunity to try and experiment; consequently, we created Lab Hours dedicated for children to have access to the workshop or farm to apply their learning and try things out while further supporting their innovation and creativity.

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 classes that suit their needs and fill their skill gaps to progress on their journey towards self-sufficiency and personal resilience.

We are a community-led project. Therefore, our instructors are local community members with experience. We also welcome adults who have specialized expertise and want to use our facility to give a one-off how-to or a DIY session to share their knowledge about related topics. All registered instructors have earned the Vine Communities Instructor Badge. For more information about the instructor registration process, please go to the Instructors Registration Page.

Licencing

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 Farm 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. The Vine Communities Center classrooms are located inside Abu Dhabi and host the Growth Hub, the Lab, and our main offices.