Ewa Romanow

In communities where environmental protection has rarely been a priority, Ewa Romanow stimulates ecological consciousness and action by bringing their immediate economic benefits to light. Working in small towns and rural areas throughout Poland, she helps people learn to increase income and social capital without sacrificing the health of their surroundings. She brings rural residents together with business leaders, scientists, and government authorities to design and implement initiatives that forge a powerful balance between sustainability and profit.

Small-scale farmers in Central Europe often face extreme economic pressures which present serious obstacles to developing environmental consciousness. Ewa overcomes such obstacles by creating concrete opportunities for farmers to earn higher profits through ecologically sound farming. Starting in northern Poland, she helps farmers build income through the use of clean, locally available resources. Working side by side with farmers, her team chose wicker as a model resource, an important source of clean energy with additional value as a raw material for crafts. Now Ewa distributes wicker seedlings to participating farmers, helps them to learn to harvest and sell the wood, and then entrusts them with the initiative’s spread. Each farmer “pays forward” the loan of the trees by persuading another farmer to participate and by helping him start a wicker plantation of his own. In this initiative and others, Ewa draws from a diverse coalition of businesspeople, farmers, scientists and citizen organizations. To spread her effort broadly, Ewa taps into the infrastructure of the Domy Kultury—Houses of Culture—more than 2,000 community centers whose potential has remained largely untapped for decades.

In the growing democracies of Poland and other Central European countries, the implementation of environmentally friendly initiatives remains a challenge. With the unemployment rate in rural areas reaching 40 percent, people can hardly purchase basic goods, so directing their attention toward environmental issues such as protecting their lands and saving energy becomes a highly difficult task. People who are jobless are not ready to think about environmental protection. Their overriding priority is to earn money in whatever way they can.

European Union standards for rural production include strict environmental regulations, but in rural areas, access to this knowledge and the ability to meet EU demands is limited. To act on these demands, people in the rural areas and small towns of Poland need experience and understanding of the relationship between environmental policies and their daily lives. Most remain unwilling to participate in education programs that are only about the environment, however, they feel an immediate need for vocational training and professional skills to survive in the competitive climate of the EU.

A number of organizations have risen to tackle critical environmental challenges in Poland and other Central European countries. Few of these, however, speak powerfully to the needs and values of rural communities. Many programs employ highly specialized professionals who use complicated language that ordinary people find difficult to understand. Worse, these professionals often focus on theory and lose sight of the immediate practical needs of rural people. Even programs that target children are plagued by problems: they are often locked within the boundaries of the schoolyard and do not engage other audiences. They often focus only on the environmental side of a project, and generally have little connection to real life. There is a need for environmental education programs that generate income and that address the daily activities and concerns of rural communities.

To engage a community fully in environmental protection, Ewa tailors her approach to the local identity of the region. Her first programs focused on the town of Kwidzyn, where she discovered how to build income-generating activities that attract local citizens, including representatives of local businesses, to address environmental issues. Taking into account the local climate and geographic location, Ewa encouraged farmers to conduct cost-and-profit analyses of wicker production, with special consideration given to its potential as a clean energy source. At the same time, she attracted unemployed young people to workshops on creating non-conventional wicker sculptures and gardens decorated with twisted willow.

Along with their economic education, participants of the training learned about the environmental benefits of wicker and other natural products, focusing on their role in the protection of rivers, in waste management, as alternatives to plastic, and in solving energy problems. Twenty-three farmers have adopted home-based wicker plantations with Ewa’s support and have joined in a new system of seed distribution with great potential for spreading sustainable methods among farmers. In this system, Ewa first loans seedlings to farmers as usual. Then, rather than paying back the loan, they must “pay it forward” by giving a new farmer some of the seeds the following year and coaching that farmer through the first years of growth.

In 2000 Ewa began testing a model for launching agricultural business ventures. Using existing networks and organizations with established social bonds, Ewa first introduces business representatives into a community. Businesses then become partners and sponsors of large local events, and donate stipends to the community’s students. Representatives of all groups get together to create and implement new business endeavors. While the participation of business ensures the economic profitability of the idea, farmers define the realistic conditions of its execution and start introducing the concept in their areas. Through these efforts, Ewa works to build trust between people of markedly different backgrounds, breaking old barriers and proving that cooperation serves all parties.

To grow and maintain strong partnerships among such diverse populations, her model identifies and trains “agents of change” to lead each venture. Based in the Houses of Culture, the agents define local environmental issues, gather local communities around the problem, and invite businesses to develop profitable ventures that benefit the whole community. Prompted by Ewa, the agents recently established a network called Eco-Initiative, which involves all participating institutions in a consistent exchange of ideas and experiences. The database of ideas will be published on the Internet and available to all who are interested in pursuing similar business-social coalitions in their communities.

Ewa has spread this model of partnership beyond wicker to address many environmental and economic needs. For example, Ewa has demonstrated that problems with overuse of paper and paper recycling can be addressed through carefully designed workshops on paper production. These workshops focus on environmental awareness of “paper problems,” but they also generate income for workshop presenters, giving them incentive to put their new environmental knowledge into practice.

As she applies her methods to new environmental issues, Ewa expands her efforts to reach new populations. She is developing educational programs for the university level, working with professors to provide hands-on experiences for students through internships with civil society organizations, municipalities, and businesses. She is also reaching out to communities of up to 40,000 citizens in the neediest and most impoverished areas in the region. Tapping into the networks of other socially active organizations, she wins communities to her cause through trainings that produce concrete results. The program operates now in 11 communities and in the next year it will be expanded to another 25 locations.

Ewa also plans to develop and implement trainings to leverage the successes of her pilot program in Kwidzyn. She is building a team of trainers to spread the concept into other areas. Each trainer will cooperate with at least three business partners and provide hands-on experience to a core group of students. In her work with universities, Ewa predicts that elements of the rural-urban, business-social partnerships she developed will be introduced into many courses, reaching 500 students in next five years. By then her team will include at least 20 people who will work with more than 100 local leaders and reach more than 500 farmers. She hopes to spread her programs to neighboring countries, reaching needy areas in Ukraine and Belarus within the next few years.

Ewa showed an impressive talent for spreading interest in environmental issues from the days of her early childhood. When she was nine, she designed a system for collecting, preserving, and selling several types of herbs. Not content to use this system for herself, she recruited friends and family, forming a successful environmental business venture in her spare time from primary school. As she moved on to high school and university, she became fascinated by biology and ecology. When she graduated from university she immediately began work as a biology teacher, pioneering methods of active, hands-on environmental education.

As she moved to spread her successful methods through the school, Ewa met stubborn resistance from her fellow teachers. From conversations with them she began to understand that before teachers could embrace the possibilities of cross-disciplinary environmental work, they need to be educated. To meet this need, she established the Center for Environmental Education in the town of Kwidzyn, where she developed and promoted activities combining social and environmental issues. At the same time, she began to build cooperation among civil society organizations working on various facets of environmental protection.

Even with these achievements under her belt, Ewa wasn’t yet satisfied. She realized that merely gathering people to engage them in various educational programs did not effectively persuade them to protect the environment in their daily lives. To affect the environment in positive ways, people needed to rally around ideas that would not only make them feel better, but would result in real benefits to their quality of life. Her efforts since this realization have adapted environmental consciousness to the needs and the values of the people they serve, helping communities that once resisted ecological protection to find its importance in their lives.