Provision exists to show that life-serving pathways do exist, not only in theory, but also on the ground.  We are welcoming those who strive to recognise and feed the beauty that both individual humans and humanity as a whole are capable of creating. Provision Transylvania is creating living and learning opportunities which contribute to health and wellbeing for planet and people.  Based in a small village at the foothills of the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, Romania, we offer space for meetings, workshops and other events, where the goals include reconnection with self, others, food, and nature.  We aim for the upliftment of all.

2025 has seen us maintaining the work of farming, hosting and providing support for people to work on the land, explore themselves and their relationships and to celebrate the life within and around us.  The Bioregional Festival saw its 2nd iteration, as did the Waldorf Student volunteer week.  The Soil Course (finally!) saw its follow-up to the first edition back in 2019, and we have lost count of how many times we have hosted the NVC “Tabara” (camp) with our friend and colleague in Cluj, Alexandru Moldovan.

Robyn’s NVC consultancy practice continues to bring light to people around the world who look to her for support, encouragement, grounding and companionship.  New threads are always being woven in and through this beautiful garment of work; this year she attended a live online training with Nora Bateson and became a “Warm Data Host.”  This was spun into practice within the Bioregional Festival and the NVC camp this year.

Lars’ visioning and steering of ALPA’s mission and newly expanding team continued to flourish in 2025, and this is what brought him, with Robyn and Carsten, to the “Planet Local Summit” this past September as an invited speaker.  He has also been successful in awareness-raising locally through 3 informative “Bird Panels” which were inaugurated by schoolchildren and dignitaries alike in the village of Sancraiu / Szentkirály.

The Harvest of this year feeds our bodies with stored sunlight during the dark time of the year…. Standard items include a salad of verdant green Kale and Walnuts, baked Pumpkin shining orange into the dark nights and, yes, something of the flesh of goats we have raised or the pig our neighbours have raised…. 

For the first time ever since we have arrived here way back in 2009, we do not have crates and crates of apples and pears stored in our root cellar.  Why not?  Because the late spring frosts killed almost all of the blossoms this year in every orchard.  There were a few fruits that managed to grow, most are smaller and less hearty than usual, but we are enjoying these few now while, in all the other years, we would have enough large and fleshy fruits to see us into the month of May.

While we are still an official WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, www.wwoof.ro) hosting farm we do not welcome as many volunteers as we used to in earlier years (pre-pandemic). This, mainly out of lack of capacity to spend enough quality time with the volunteers for socializing and transferring knowledge and skills. Still, a number find their way to Provision, either ‘old’ friends, new friends, or friends of friends…

Especially we want to thank Lex and Gina, long term supporters of Provision who came to visit and give a helping hand on the farm, Justin from the Carfree City Alliance in Spain, with his wife Monica and their daughter Antonia who stayed two weeks with us in July, and Tunde and Kati who stayed a week with us during haying season.

Provision continues to collaborate with the Waldorf School in Cluj.  This year, again, we invited another class of those in the 9th grade (15 year olds) for a week as volunteers at our farm.  We are happy to be able to bring youth from the city to have contact with the land and some work with their bodies to help with weeding the fields, some natural building projects and some sharing of inspiration and ideas. 

We are ever-grateful to the school, the teachers and children and parents who help this exchange to happen.

In 2019, a very specially grounded, deep-soil thinking man named Marc Siepman came to Provision to offer his ideas, research and under-standing about Soil at Provision.  We had so much fun together – learning and singing and playing, that the dream for Marc to come back was born.  Money was raised and then… came covid time. This year in June, the realisation of the dream came finally to fruition with the arrival of Marc and his wife Caroline to Provision to offer The Solutions Are In The Soil course that he/they have been chewing on since then.  

We were deeply touched by the fact that the group who gathered for this event all came from our local region and even from our own village.  We find it extraordinarily meaningful to consider a group of people living in a place who want to look more profoundly into the life of the ground that feeds and holds them.

What is also remarkable about this course is that Provision was this time not the main organizer.  Provision hosted the event, but, as is becoming a trend, the ALPA team did the bulk of the organization.  Including the write up in a lovely blog by Zsófi Gaudi.  Please click here to read more and see the photos.

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The Provision farm, the hosting, the events and courses cannot happen without continuous maintenance and improvements of our infrastructure. Year round we are planning, renovating, adding, repairing… There are many spaces, corners, needs and purposes, some obvious, others more hidden. Some of the outstanding works and improvements we have been able to realize this year are a covered storage place for farm equipment, an up-scaled equipped kitchen in the Blue House (where our dear friend and professional cook Dan Todea has prepared amazingly delicious local food during the NVC camp) and restored gates at our farm and the Blue House.

An invitation to be part of the Planet Local Summit, organized by the Local Futures movement, brought us this summer all the way to Ladakh, also known as “Little Tibet”, in the trans-Himalayan plateau of Northern India. The invitation came to us from Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder and president of Local Futures, an international non-profit organization promoting ecological and social well-being by strengthening local economies and communities, advocating for “localization” as an alternative to globalization’s negative impacts, to build a global movement for systemic change, focusing on food, culture and decentralization.
As Helena’s work and writings have been inspiring us for many years now and have been part of our decision to live within a peasant culture, we felt honored and called to travel far and be part of this unique global gathering in Ladakh.

At the summit we connected and shared with the most beautiful souls and spirits, projects and actions, ideas and dreams. We exchanged, learned, inspired and got inspired. Deeply we looked at the global poly crises together with those who make it their life mission to stand up and take positive action. In the midst of the global terror and destruction of nature and culture, we feel much hope and power coming forth from a gathering like this.

Robyn: “There are so many celebrations related to this journey that I would not know really where to begin.  But one main one is that everything that was spoken about, basically, is something that we are doing and putting into practice with partnership, communication, agriculture, local economy, local community building resilience.  Another enormous piece for me was to feel and sense into the strength of such an ancient human root system that has existed, unbroken (until very recently, but not completely…yet) for so many centuries/millenia.  It was so different than where I grew up in the US and where I live now in Transylvania.  There has been so much rupture everywhere that I feel in the ground and in my body.  And there, the ancientness was still visible in the costumes and customs and also palpable in the people and their connection to place.”

Robyn’s passion for Beautiful, Connective Communication travels far and wide, resulting in being a certified NVC trainer since 2019 and helping and serving many people, organizations and movements. This year she followed an online training offered by the Bateson Institute in a process Nora Bateson calls “Warm Data.” This process is designed to help facilitate communication that welcomes deep sharing, interconnectivity and multi-perspectival systems shift through unassuming means.

Through her Provision NonViolent Communication (NVC) consultancy practice she continues to nurture a group of clients and supporters (all of whom become friends if they were not already!) mostly by 1 hour on-line sessions, though also at different locations and within our own Provision facilities. Robyn operates on a sliding scale and all payments are made as donation to the work of Provision. Please feel free to write to Robyn using the contact page of Provision’s website to schedule a complimentary 30-minute meet and greet session to see if your needs are a fit for what Robyn is offering.

This year Robyn continues to serve the NVC association in Romania, Asociaţia pentru Comunicare Nonviolentă, (ACNV) as vice-president alongside president Monica Reu.  This continues her many years of service to the NVC “umbrella community of communities” in Romania. Integrating local and global, Robyn also attends meetings of the global NVC community (The Center for Nonviolent Communication, CNVC) whenever possible.

Robyn and Maria Stoica continue to offer monthly “Mournabration” (Celebration + Mourning) circles to the members of ACNV.  These circles are drop-in and free of charge to ACNV members. Become a supporting member or a facilitating member of ACNV to enjoy this service to the community free of charge.

Besides the Provision farm and hosting, Lars spends most of his time on ALPA, the Access to Land organization for Agroecological farming and biodiversity protection which he co-founded. ALPA has seen a spectacular increase of activity over the last few years ranging from local events and impact, European networks and projects and Global movement involvement.

Most importantly though is the securing of agricultural land for nature inclusive farming and biodiversity protection. We are very excited with the first farm that we could secure at the end of this year, which is meant to become a pilot example farm and show that small scale ecological farming, connected with nature conservation can provide a working business model for a young future regenerative farmer.

You can find lot’s of information on our website www.alpa.land and also subscribe there to our quarterly newsletter!

On the picture: The wonderful ALPA team with Attila, Zsófia, Borbála and Lars

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Of Birds and Humans

By Carsten

Birds: aren’t they just great?  Chittering, chattering, hopping, swimming and… most amazing of all, flying!  I, an avid birder, am very lucky to live here in Transylvania, in a bioregion teeming with life. From tiny protozoa which you will find squirming around in great numbers in any water or soil sample you take to look at under a microscope, to summer meadows which seem to vibrate with the chirping of crickets and grasshoppers in summer evenings as well as with the hustle-bustle of all insect life by day among the innumerable plants – fragrant and generous.  

And where there are plants, there are insects.  Helping the plants to thrive and, with that, the mammalian herbivores (and therefore also carnivores).  And where there are insects, there are birds.  In this way, we can know if there is a great diversity of bird species, this means that we are dealing with a healthy ecosystem.  

To honor the role of birds in both maintaining ecosystems and indicating whether the ecosystems are healthy or not and to raise awareness about the high bird diversity in our region, my father Lars had the idea of setting up Bird Panels in the region and I wholeheartedly agreed to help to support this as much as I could.  

So, in late 2024, my father and I sat down to make a list of species that live in our bioregion which we wanted to put on the panels.  It was challenging to choose!  We managed to choose 15 different species for each of the three panels.  And we tried also to place species in alignment with the placement of each panel – in other words, to indicate which species one might most likely see at that particular site.  Then, we selected a photo, chosen for both beauty and clarity of the image, for each species.  Next, in March 2025, my father and a designer friend created the layout of the panels with the photos (how big, how small), a short text in Romanian, Hungarian and English and also a QR code leading the reader to the website of ALPA, with more information about each species individually: how small-scale agriculture helps them and also some fun facts.  

In July, a local carpenter made some beautiful stands for the panels.  And in the beginning of August, the big moment came: the bird panels got put up!  (With the help of the local municipality who made the land available and helped to dig the holes.) This was all great fun.  Then in October we had the official opening ceremony.  

Blog post at the Local Futures Website

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