OFR is testing and redesigning three of Re-Alliance's open-access permaculture technologies (wicking beds, vermicomposting and ecological sanitation) with women, youth and displaced families in northern Petén, Guatemala. The manuals were written for refugee settlements in Central Africa; OFR is rebuilding them with communities on the Mexico-Belize border, where conditions differ and the existing designs break in specific, instructive ways. The builds are the method, and the knowledge they generate is the output, returned to Re-Alliance's open library so it can travel and be applied to a wide variation of locations.

Sol y Verde works at the edge of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, in a border and migration corridor where communities face insecure land tenure, limestone soils thinned by deforestation, extractive agricultural pressure, and the compounding effects of climate disruption and displacement. Many participants are agro-dependent, work with little formal infrastructure, and have low literacy. Re-Alliance holds an open-access library of permaculture self-build manuals, developed for refugee settlement contexts in Central Africa. Whether those designs hold in a context this different, and what has to change for them to work, is the question the project sets out to answer.