Robyn Marie Bors Veraart’s social-change activity can be traced in her life story, in which she continues to liberate herself from empire and to move toward “Planetary Satyagraha” particularly through “Anna Swaraj” (Food Freedom). She currently lives with her family on a food-sovereign family homestead in a peasant village in rural Transylvania close to where one strain of her ancestors came from.

With her life partner, she began Provision Transylvania, a village-based project with the mission: “Creating living and learning opportunities which contribute to health and wellbeing for planet and people.” From within this context of connection to natural cycles of life, reduced consumption, and growing and wildcrafting food as medicine, she loves to share Nonviolent Communication (NVC) with individuals and groups, both online and in person, on the grounds of Provision. Robyn’s mission for these sessions is to “Re-member and heal the past, resonate with present needs, and to orient toward a more resilient future.”

In her “former American Life,” Robyn engaged with two main loves: yoga and music. These eventually led her to a B.A. in music from Reed College and double master’s degrees from Naropa University in the disciplines of transpersonal counselling psychology and music therapy. She was also certified as a Gestalt therapist and as a yoga and meditation instructor.

Having regularly attended and been intensely impacted by several Zen Meditation retreats inside of prisons, she chose to accept employment as a counselor for a mental hospital housed within a women’s prison. Here she was privileged to have deep exchanges with many women of all ages and cultural backgrounds. She listened to their stories and could see several themes very clearly emerging around intergenerational oppression, sexual trauma, drug addiction, and abuses of all kinds. This is where her political education began in earnest regarding the domination systems that we live within. This was a great catalyst for the work that she now does to promote system change in all ways possible, beginning from the ground up in her own life and working toward “Anna Swaraj” (Food Freedom), standing up for peasants’ rights and dignity, and helping to support systems to return land from private ownership to common stewardship.

Robyn works closely with a number of NGOs as co-founder of Provision, serving as board member in ACNV, the Romanian NVC association, as well as closely with a number of local organizations including ALPA (Acces la Pamant pentru Agroecologie), an access-to-land network project designed to support sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.

With NVC, Robyn has found several practices that have helped her to ground her vast experience of connecting with people over cultural divides, especially “connecting before correcting,” noticing judgements and enemy images arising, and finding the needs behind others’ words and actions. A warm and welcoming empathy combined with compassionate awareness have become ever-more precious practices as she engages in the work of setting up organizations playing a role in midwifing Earth Democracy.

Inspired by teachers such as Vandana Shiva, Helena Norbert-Hodge, Satish Kumar, Ethan Hughes, Dominic Barter, Miki Kashtan, Sarah Peyton, Gayano Shaw, Lorna Richie, Carl Plesner, and many others, Robyn dreams of continuing to find ways to support and connect people from different lands, languages, movements, and ideologies in ways that are mutually life-enriching, and to contribute to building ever-more-inclusive human systems focused on Earth Democracy and the Planetary Satyagraha for Life.