S2 E1 / Community with Forest Greenwell

Impractical Women's Studies

Hello! IWS here with Season 2, Episode 1. This season Teagan and Forest decided for practical reasons to record solo episodes of IWS. This is mostly due to where we will both geographically be in the world, but also because it's a new experience to listen to (and record) a solo podcast! Cheers to variety! This episode Forest talks about community, her relationship with it, her foundations in it, how herHABITAT started and where we want to go with it. It's an easy to listen to yet passionate episode. Dive in! “I want to go out there and innovate the way community is utilized. I don’t think community is very convenient right now. It’s not very efficient… Everything is quite erratic and spread out… [compartmentalized]. It makes it quite difficult to commit to things.. Everyone does have a multitude of interests, and I think it’s essential that we be able to find ways to enrich these parts of ourselves to their fullest capacity or find ways to collaborate them. It’s really hard to do that right now. I wanted to build a community centre that took all of what I saw as essential components of community, what makes it, and what builds it up. What makes it effective and strong. a place to learn. A lot of things I looked at; first, financials - we don’t have the financial stability right now to afford everything we want to do. Most people in canada just can’t financially find a way… and that’s really sad. That’s even things as far as taking care of yourself. it’s really not feasible for a lot of people to be able to have a yoga membership, go to acupuncture, have a gym membership, car insurance, groceries, rent.. it’s not easy to live in the world and create a lifestyle thats healthy for you - to be able to maintain it and utilize it to it’s fullest extent. a lot of people will pay for a full month of a membership but only go twice a week because of this or that… so I think that, the first aspect of community is having it localized. Having one place where all of the things happens. and being able to utilize that place to it’s fullest capacity under one membership.”