ABSTRACT
I’d returned from running my field-based study program on regional sustainability in the Lowveld region of Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. I’d designed and run this program in 2002 as a summer field course in geography and environmental science for both graduates and upper-level undergraduates. Eleven years on, the program was running well. The local government agencies, the community-based organisations, local academics, and activists looked forward to and actively engaged with each new group that I brought on the program. The students found the study experience intensive, grounded, confronting, but also immensely rewarding and personally transformative. Everything seemed fine, except for one issue that came up a few times
during the trip in 2013: the sustainability of the course itself. In our conversations with members of some community-based organisations,
several shared their worries about motivating and recruiting the younger generation to continue the work they were doing and finding the financial resources to keep the organisations running. “We have to find ways of sustaining them to do this work, make it better,” said one of them, “otherwise all our efforts will die with us. Maybe you and your students should think of this as a project and come up with some ideas.” I agreed with them. It was an important issue, not just for them, but also
for the field-study program. The problem was that it relied solely on me to run it. If for some reason I couldn’t do so, then it probably would be taken off the list of courses offered by the university. I didn’t know how it would be sustained in the long run.
