Oasis Circle
Connect with your neighbors to strengthen the community and create healing spaces where families and babies can thrive.
The Oasis Learning Circle (OLC) helps us build our relationships and connections by seeing what is good in our community.
The OLC encourages people to see the beauty, wisdom, and strength that already exist in the community, thereby building upon it to create a loving community where our families and babies can thrive.
We learned about the Oasis Learning Circle from our friends at the ELOS Institute in Brazil. They call it the “Oasis Game” and use it to work with people of all ages around the world to make changes in their own neighborhoods.
There are 7 steps to the Oasis Learning Circle:
1. Gaze: Look for and record examples of beauty, love, and support for families on your block or in the Auburn Gresham community.
2. Affection: Ask people about the stories behind those examples of beauty, love, and support. What does it mean to them, and why are they taking the care to create this beauty or to live in this kind of love? What is their story? Be curious.
3. Dream: Ask people: What is your dream? – For themselves, for children on their block, for families in Auburn Gresham.
4. Care: Based on what you have heard and learned, your teams will create plans for small ways to expand this loving activity across the community.
5. Miracle: Bring your plans together and share them with the other teams and community members. Together you will select the parts of the plans that seem most doable, try them out, and take note of what works and what you are learning.
6. Celebration: Come together with the other teams and with the community to share and celebrate what you’ve learned and created and want to bring to the community.
7. Re-evolution: Based on your plans and what you have learned, you will imagine how to take the plans to the next level and take even bigger action. What’s next?! We will look for funding to help put your ideas and plans into action.
How it Works
1
TEAM of 4-5 people and join the Oasis Learning Circle together. Any combination of people (i.e., neighbors, family, friends) that work well together can be a TEAM.
2
Each TEAM will attend 12 sessions throughout the next year to create a project that expands love and support for babies and their parents in the neighborhood.
