Green Road of Ecovillages
= "rural locations ready to host people seeking short-term or long-term shelter" [1]
URL = https://genukraine.com.ua/en/proyekty/green-road-of-ecovillages/
" an informal map of shelter routes through ecovillages. an informal map of shelter routes through ecovillages. " [2]
Contextual Quotes
1.
"The name Green Road comes from the fact that during the first month lots of people were heading to the western border and stayed in the ecovillages only one or several nights. At one moment we had on the map several possible roads to follow from east to west."
- Anastasiya Volkova [3]
2.
"Resilience under prolonged crisis is not built through heroic acts or perfect systems. It grows from networks, from biological processes allowed to heal, from appropriate technologies, from communities that remain open rather than retreat inward.
Ecovillages, in this sense, are not alternatives to the state. They are living laboratories for what sustains life when centralized systems falter. Not through withdrawal, but through adaptation.
In Ukraine, war has stripped away many illusions. What remains are living systems — fragile, imperfect, and capable of recovery if given the chance.
That, perhaps, is what resilience really looks like."
- Maksym Zalevskyi [4]
Description
“Green Road of Ecovillages” is a project of two NGOs: the NGO “Global Ecovillage Network” and the Civil Society Organization “Permaculture in Ukraine”, which started on the second day of the full-scale invasion, on February 25, 2022.
These organizations joined forces, mobilized their networks (ecovillages and permaculture centers), and created a map of rural locations ready to host people seeking short-term or long-term shelter. In partnership with the Global Ecovillage Network Europe GEN Europe, they also created a map of European eco-communities willing to host Ukrainian refugees.”
Status
2026 Digital Survey
"We partnered with *Silvi**, who understood our reality and bypassed the deed barrier by accepting crowdsourced, geo-tagged photos of living trees instead of government stamps.
We integrated local currencies like *Sarafu pool** to keep our internal economies alive without relying on external fiat.
Most importantly, we used vibe coding to build our own infrastructure—*Regen Bank**—a local fork designed to mint eco-tokens internally based on low-tech solutions we've cataloged over decades."
2022
1.
“Within one month, the map included 70 locations in Ukraine and 300 in Western Europe. Since the beginning of the project, approximately 3,000 people have passed through these locations. Initially, many stayed only for a short period while continuing their journey toward the western border—this is how the name “Green Road” emerged.
By autumn 2022, around 600 internally displaced persons chose to remain in ecovillages for the winter. Today, there are still about 600 people—children and adults of different ages—who are supported by the organization (together with partner foundations) and continue to live in or near these locations. Many plan to stay at least until the end of the war, and some have already become new members of the communities.”
(https://genukraine.com.ua/en/proyekty/green-road-of-ecovillages/)
2.
"As for the beginning of May there are up to 80 locations in Ukraine that are hosting and are supported by the project. And up to 320 locations worldwide that are already hosting or are ready to host Ukrainians. There are more than 350,0000 views of the map.
From February 24 Ukrainian ecovillages have given shelter to more than 2500 people (up to 500 children) and now host up to 1400 persons (around 200 children) ,along with the existing members of the communities themselves. More than 60 abandoned houses have been renovated, more than 30 stoves restored, more than 30 wells cleaned – great example of sustainability.
66 000 EUR of donations and grant support were distributed to the locations. The biggest expenses are tools and building materials, household goods and food."
(https://www.arc2020.eu/ukraine-the-green-road-of-ecovillages-communities-that-protect/)
Discussion
Contextual Quotes
"On one side, there is the world of grants and crypto-economics. Money goes to code, protocols, security, infrastructure. The logic is simple: build a product that can scale, repeat, and be formalized. On the other side, there is our reality. Land without documents, closed registries, war, people leaving or being mobilized, problems with electricity, GPS, verification, old phones and laptops barely functioning. And in this reality, the main work is not writing code. It is coordinating people under stress and survival conditions, making decisions on the go, catching opportunities, constantly balancing between chaos and action.
And this creates a strange situation. Where there is money, there is often no real-world context. And where there is real-world context, there are almost no tools that can reliably support it.
I once called our decision-making system “conflict-flow governance,” because in reality we argue, push, and move processes forward at the same time."
- Max Zalevski [5]
Long Money vs Slow Money
Max Zalevski:
"when we start talking about “long money,” it is exactly an attempt to respond to this problem. We are saying that we do not need only startup funding, but funding for processes. Funding for communities that already exist and function, but cannot fit into the logic of rapid growth and metrics.
If simplified, there are two types of money. Short-term money for results, and long-term money for stability. And in reality, we need the second type — money that does not force us to become a startup, but allows us to continue doing what we are already doing in a more stable way. Because regeneration of land cannot be accelerated, it has cycles and seasons, just like community building — it can take three, five, or ten years."
Max Zalevski on the Illusions of Web3
Max Zalevski:
"Our journey to Web3 wasn't driven by hype, but by survival. In 2022, when the full-scale invasion hit, we built a massive emergency network, providing shelter for 3,000+ refugees. Traditional Web2 humanitarian grants flooded in. We upskilled and certified dozens of brilliant specialists in community building and sociocracy.
But traditional grants came with a toxic cargo of bureaucracy. The war eventually forced those highly qualified people to migrate to Europe—meaning we trained top-tier talent for Western organizations, not for ourselves. Our core team burned out completely, caught in a brutal tension between satisfying abstract Web2 donor spreadsheets and supporting actual families on the ground.
Seeking an impact-focused alternative, we turned to Web3. We listened to inspiring speeches about "Public Goods" at @EthPrague and with our peers at @EthCluj. We hoped for agility. Instead, we hit another wall of rigid tech-bureaucracy.
Platforms like Regen Network or Open Forest Protocol (OFP) require open national land registries and European-style property deeds. But in wartime Ukraine, our national cadastral maps are locked for security reasons. Because global protocols sit in comfortable Swiss or Californian offices, they fail to understand that their "trustless" compliance models completely lock out the frontlines of ecological crises.
We didn't wait for permission. We chose to hack the system.
- We partnered with *Silvi**, who understood our reality and bypassed the deed barrier by accepting crowdsourced, geo-tagged photos of living trees instead of government stamps.
- We integrated local currencies like *Sarafu pool** to keep our internal economies alive without relying on external fiat.
- Most importantly, we used vibe coding to build our own infrastructure—*Regen Bank**—a local fork designed to mint eco-tokens internally based on low-tech solutions we've cataloged over decades.
But why must an eco-community become a software house just to be noticed?
"Nature is Too Slow": Sprints vs. Patient Capital
Samuel from Traditional Dream Factory once shared a profound truth that resonated deeply with our pain: The hardest part of ReFi isn't building the platform; it’s the work on the ground, where ecological regeneration takes significantly longer than coding a concept.
Nature is slow. It operates on cycles of seasons, decades, and centuries. As a network, we have invested 20 years of blood, sweat, and localized knowledge into our soil. Yet, the crypto funding ecosystem operates entirely on hype-cycles and hackathon sprints.
Web3 is obsessed with immediate, scalable, velocity-driven metrics. But you cannot "sprint" an oak tree into existence. You cannot patch an ecosystem with a hotfix.
While crypto rounds allocate millions of dollars to "software that tokenizes carbon," a real-world network of 50 ecovillages on the front lines of an eco-disaster is scraping together $2,000 out of our own pockets just to buy physical Arkreen smart meters and video cameras. And as I type this, my single @Arkreen hardware sensor is literally blinking red on my desk because DePIN onboarding remains too complex and poorly supported for real-world environments.
We are tired of being forced to change our masks. We do not want to be full-time developers or professional grant-hunters. We are stewards of ecosystems.
Micro-grants of $150 or $2,000 are just firefighting tools. They force us back into the loop of administrative exhaustion, burning out the few people we have left on the ground.
If the ReFi movement and the Solar Punk ethos want to be more than a marketing aesthetic, they must shift from speculative sprints to Patient Capital—long-term, predictable support designed for land-based stewardship.
To systematically deploy DePIN infrastructure, maintain our biodiversity monitoring, and scale regeneration across all 50 of our locations without constantly shifting our focus to code-wrangling, we need foundational capital. We need ecosystem-scale validation—**like an @Octant or @Gitcoin Main Round allocation of 20+ ETH**—to fund the hardware infrastructure that allows us to do our actual job: healing the earth.
True regeneration happens in the dirt, not on the blockchain. It's time for Web3 to look back at the actual ground."
Max Zalevski on Autonomy vs (Grant) Dependency
Max Zalevski:
" Over the past two years, we’ve also raised more than $150,000 through climate crypto grants and ReFi rounds, working with partners from completely different geographies — from New Zealand to Singapore. At the same time, we continue to work with more than €2 million in traditional grants, but now with a different intention — trying to integrate them into our own strategy rather than just executing predefined frameworks.
Of course, Europe is still a major part of this picture. GEN Europe, Danish partners — and we are genuinely grateful for that. We are a small network with a specific context, and we understand our place. We are also just a small bubble within the much larger grant ecosystem of Ukraine.
But there is another layer that is almost invisible from the outside. The internal economy of the communities themselves. The everyday exchanges, the small contributions, the self-organized support systems. This is what actually holds life together on the ground.
And I feel a certain kind of respect when people in our network say: “I’ll cover delivery costs myself.” When only about half ask for support with logistics. These are stubborn, independent, self-reliant people. Sometimes difficult. But this is also the core of resilience.
This is where the difference with Africa of the 1970s becomes more visible.
Ukraine is too integrated into Europe to be easily isolated as a permanent zone of crisis. Geography matters. Schengen is right there. Millions of Ukrainians live and work in Europe, not as passive recipients, but as active participants in the economy. Many live between two countries. Many work remotely. These connections constantly feed back into both Ukrainian and European systems.
Another difference is technology. In the 1970s, aid moved through centralized channels that could be controlled. Today, flows are distributed. Internet, crypto, AI, fintech — there is no single pipeline anymore. Control is fragmented.
And it’s important to say that Africa itself is not a passive space in this story. Systems like M-Pesa, Sarafu, mutual credit networks — these are powerful innovations. And we are actually learning from them. This is no longer a one-directional flow of knowledge from West to the rest.
Finally, there is access to tools. Today, a small team in an ecovillage in Ukraine can build, test, fundraise, and launch projects using AI and open platforms in ways that were simply not possible before. The gap hasn’t disappeared, but it is no longer absolute.
This doesn’t mean there is no risk. The risk is real. European contractors are already entering, feasibility studies are being prepared, reconstruction flows are forming in ways that can easily reproduce old patterns of dependency.
But at the same time, another process is happening.
We are building our own economic layers. Experimenting with carbon markets, tokenization of local actions, decentralized coordination. Creating hybrid systems where traditional grants, local economies, and new technologies interact.
And slowly, this creates the possibility of shifting roles — from recipients to contributors, maybe even to mentors for others in Eastern Europe who will go through similar transformations.
Even corruption scandals look different in this light. They are not a sign that everything is collapsing. They are a sign of friction inside a living system. Problems are exposed, corrected, and the process continues.
The alternative is not purity. It’s control. Systems without NGOs, without dependency — but also without свободи. That’s not a better balance.
So for me, the conclusion is quite simple.
Ukraine has touched this “African scenario.” We have lived through donor dependency, imported frameworks, humanitarian flows, talent migration, and the breakdown of communities under models that were not fully adapted to our context.
But we are not Africa of the 1970s. We are operating in a different geography, a different technological era, and a different level of integration.
There is a risk of becoming a territory for external resource extraction.
But there is also a real possibility of becoming something else — a kind of living laboratory, where different models of resilience are tested in parallel.
Not clean. Not stable. But real."
(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ukraine-africa-1970s-max-zalevski-ue8wf/)