Permaculture Design Collaborations
Do you have a site that would be a perfect match for a permaculture design class, implementation, workshop, or jam? Read on to learn how you can collaborate with us on our permaculture education mission.
Students from a Custom International Development Training, learning how to build a Rocket Mass Heater, the most efficient, economical and renewable source of heating yet developed. This class was geared towards their 6 month long Mennonite Sustainable Development Mission in Rural Morocco.
Some of our Best Courses Come from....
...You! We are always looking for new projects and courses to teach and some of best courses have come about through collaboration with organizations and individuals like you. Whether it is our custom International Development Courses, community trainings as we have done for Lincoln Heights CDC or Xavier University or collaborative project courses as we have done with Gorman Heritage Farm, the Enright Green Group or Private Homeowners, you make some of our most exciting and unique courses happen. Despite our wide bioregional reach, we can't keep track of all the good projects going on or being planned in our community and beyond, so please contact us with any of your plans and we'll see what fresh ideas we can come up with to help expand the reach and impact of permaculture in our community and beyond.
OPPORTUNITIES could include but are not limited to:
Permaculture Implementation Days: Choose a day or two to have a group of PDC students and graduates come to your site and implement a hands-on project, while learning or practicing skills to make them better designers and practitioners. This is a great way to get a big project done fast, such as clearing space for a food forest, planting on swales, installing new garden beds, building small structures, and laying irrigation. This is right for you if you already have a plan for a project and are ready to schedule.
Permaculture Design Jams: A design jam is a creative exercise in which a group of designers come together and brainstorm a rapid-fire early draft of a design for the host site. They’re given just a few hours and some basic information to come up with design ideas, and at the end, present those ideas to the client. With enough designers, jams can even break into teams to produce more than one design. This is right for you if you have a “blank slate” and are looking for ideas to develop into future implementations.
Mock Client for our PDC Students: One of the key features of our yearlong PDC curriculum is student design projects. Students work in groups over the course of about six months to visit a site and consult with the owner and apply the methodologies they’re learning in class to create a complete design for that site. While sites are often suggested by the students, we would be delighted to have members of the community submit their properties for consideration.
Tour Site for our PDC Students: Our yearlong PDC travels around the region from month to month, visiting established permaculture sites to give students visible, tangible examples of permaculture design in action, and to learn from the owners’ experiences. This is a good opportunity for you if you have a site with some well established permaculture features, where you could host 20-30 people comfortably and speak on your experiences.
Skill Share Workshop: We collaborate often on workshops catered to specific skills or areas of knowledge that are relevant to permaculture, such as food preparation and preservation, making biochar, foraging, and more. Have a skill or craft to share that you think other permaculturists would be interested in benefiting from? Let’s talk about co-hosting and promoting it through our community.
Specialized Trainings: Have a mission trip or general NGO Development trip planned, or a community development project to lead? Let our experts help train and prepare your team to maximize your impact whether locally or abroad. Too many development initiatives miss their maximum potential in leaving a lasting, sustainable impact due to poor planning and training. We can help cater a permaculture development training to your locality for maximum benefit. It is always geared towards the appropriate climate, level of development and the next steps the community you are assisting can take to improve their lives and that of the earth.
ready to collaborate? use the form below to get started.
(Trouble using the form? You can also view it here.)