Portumna has been shortlisted as a finalist in Digital Changemakers category for the  .IE Digital Town for the work of the Wild Geese. Winners will be announced on 10 June 2021 at a virtual awards ceremony. 

The .IE Digital Town Awards 2021 are the first pillar of activity under .IE Digital Town which has been developed to address digital enhancement and adoption in Ireland and the Awards promote awareness, knowledge, use and understanding of digital in Ireland by its citizens, businesses and communities. 

They also highlight the benefits and possibilities of digital and celebrate the digital achievements of local towns, big and small. 

The Wild Geese is a community group, conceived, nurtured and headquartered in Portumna, actively trying to solve the challenges faced by the rural towns, villages, and communities in East Galway, on their knees long before the pandemic. 

The group is made up of a strong team of community activists with a diverse and impactful skill set in communications, networking, business, arts and culture and social enterprise with a passionate interest in the renewal of the main towns and villages of East Galway.

They have a healthy collaborative relationship with Irish Rural Link, Galway County Council, Waterways Ireland, Failte Ireland and Discover Lough Derg collaborating on strategic programs for rural repair, restoration and rejuvenation.

Remote working, co-working spaces, digital threads are emerging connecting our towns and villages like never before.

New ways of working are now opening up to local communities, people are actively searching for sustainable towns to live, work and participate locally. 

The team work closely with digital agency Ourside for the past three years – our mission to onboard the towns of East Galway to their unique digital infrastructure Xplore local. Together we provide training and facilitation sessions with students and volunteers onboarding business, services, sports clubs and community societies onto the platform. 

Xplore was designed with community sustainability in mind and aims to support the tenets of a circular economy.  Xplore believe that our towns have so much to offer, from their rich, buried histories to the shops that line their streets. They are committed to shining a light on the things that make these places so unique, and are devoted to making the path to their discovery that bit shorter.

The Wild Geese hope to be appointed Climate Change Ambassadors with the European Union partnering on Climate Crisis stewardship, education and awareness campaigns.  This will mean they will be supported with digital assets to promote climate action in more practical ways within the community responding to the crisis from the ground up. 

Elina Visnar Malinovska (European Commission) speaks about the ‘climate dispairers’ who say ‘I admit it happens, but I can’t do much about it“. She is emphatic, we need to go to the local level, talking the language of the local, we need to empower the local patriots, as Elena likes to call them.  In every community you will find true friends of the earth.  We are no different here  in Portumna, with the groundbreaking work of An Gairdin Ecology.

In 1994, a small group of came together awakened to the vision of Earth as a living organism, a great web of interconnectedness and interdependent life. They shared the desire to rediscover together who we humans are as a strand of this magnificent web. You could say we shared the desire to ‘come home’ to Earth after a long absence. And so An Gáirdín came into being!

At that time the site of the Rural Domestic School here in Portumna, which had taught agriculture and traditional crafts and skills for a hundred years, became available to us. “To make again a garden of this place” (Elisabeth Roberts) became their motto as they set out to learn to live in communion with one another and with the great diversity of life around us.

The garden needed some rest and healing following its years of generous production. It had time to lie fallow and renew itself before they began to do some organic growing. Over time they welcomed back the hens and ducks. Their house was built on the site of the old dairy and they carefully sourced natural, renewable and recycled material, installing the geo-thermal ground source heating system, a very new technology at the time. 

A small group of those who share An Gáirdín’s vision meet regularly for support, study and reflection. Our most recent undertaking has been the provision of a building, adequate to meet the needs of our expanding range of courses and events. This has been a work of collaboration and every aspect of the building is a demonstration of sustainable practice.