Who we are

We are a group of permaculture growers, designers, builders, artists and educators that are inspired by the work of Permablitz in Mebourne and City Repair in Portland, Oregon.

Permablitz (noun): An informal gathering involving a day on which a group of at least two people come together to achieve the following:
  • create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
  • share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
  • build community networks
  • have fun

Core Team:

Lisa DePiano is a certified permaculture designer/teacher and faculty member for the Yestermorrow Design/Build School. She is co-founder of the Montview Neighborhood Farm, a human powered urban-farm and edible forest garden in the Connecticut River Valley, and rides with the worker-owned collective Pedal People. She received her masters degree in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts and loves working with communities to create the world they want to live in. After escaping the suburbs of her youth she headed to the hills of West Virginia and became a community organizer working on issues of Mountain Top Removal, Militarism, Fair Trade and Global Justice.  She discovered permaculture while living in Guatemala and was immediately drawn to its systems and solutions-based approach. For the last decade she has been sharing this passion with others. She has studied permaculture with Starhawk, Penny Livingston Stark, and Dave Jacke and has taught all over the United States, including the Menominee Nation,  Homer, AK, New York City, Miami, FL the University of Vermont, University of Massachusetts, and Wesleyan University.

Eli Roberts comes to Mobile Design Lab through the Allegheny Mountain School fellowship program in Highland County, Virginia, which includes a six-month residential training in sustainable ag skills, and a yearlong organizational partnership. He has raised chickens, vegetables, gourmet mushrooms, and billions of soil microbes since 2009, and is beginning to explore home-scale aquaponics. Before discovering integrated land management and design, Eli taught first- and third grade, created a year-long independent study curriculum about education policy, and organized meetings for new teachers to discuss race, class, and power in the context of education in New Orleans. He has an always-relevant B.A. in Psychology from Villanova University, but learned almost as much at the 2012 Carbon Farming Course. He has roots in New Hartford, CT and New York, NY. He’s excited about researching useful orchard understories, collaborative design processes, serious chicken fodder systems, and designing for continuous nectar availability.

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