Owen Allen, Australia, met Marius through the Foundation for Climate Restoration in September 2021. Through providing Marius leadership and organisational support for seminar for farmers for relevant UN International Days, and consulting to create a vision for refugee community development, Marius proposal to the Ugandan Office of the Prime Minister and UNHCR, lead to encouragement to register a CBO.

Several seminars were held over 2022 to an increasing number of interested refugees including youth and disabled persons. The seminars highlighted the farming challenges in Nakivale including denuded soils, damaged ecosystems, inadequate access to irrigation water, poor seed retention and quality, poor water quality and health and hygiene problems, and lack of access to youth occupational training and career. International participants to the seminars included eco-agricultural consultants such as Tyeni; ecosystem restoration developers such as EcoRestoration Communities (Camps), Bio4Climate; and consultants - Robert Gardiner (Australia), John Liu(USA), Jon Schull(USA), Michael Pilaski (Friends of Trees), Jackson Buzingo(Tanzania), Tania Rao, Maya Dutta, Mauricio Umman(Portugal), Paula Phipps, Ananda Fitzsimmons (Regen Canada), Muralidhar G (RYSS India), Ronald Kaboye(Uganda); Alfred Brownell(Liberia-USA); Bill Omondi(Kenya). Recording of the seminar speakers can be seen here.

The importance of solving the farming challenges in Nakivale goes to food security, nutrition, income, employment, education, environmental and water conservation, and general community resilience as refugees and in the face of increasing climatic disruptions. 

The conversations of the 2022 seminars established a vision for sustainable eco-agriculture and a strategic expansion approach by developing a seed bank that can offer increasing numbers of refugee farmers, bean and maize and perhaps other seeds to increase the crop production across Nakivale.   The seminars were also attended by the local officer for the Dept of the Environment who assisted in reducing the high rent on land to make it more viable for refugees to participate in cropping. They also sought, through the local government, land for UCF to building a skills training and cultural centre that is currently being used to train children in gardening techniques, and manufacturing biochar.