Writing

On the Cost of Permaculture Design Courses

When I took my first design course I also was wary of the price. When you start to teach them and organize them you get to “peak behind the curtain”. Often times the true costs of the courses go unseen. Let me break it down. I am mostly using our current feast course as a example b/c its the one I have had the most influence/experience with.

  • Scholarships & Worktrades: For our current course we have one full scholarship,  5 folks doing worktrade and 1 person doing a barter.   We are morally committed to offering these although it does take us having to have more full paying students to meet our course budget. We are always looking for more support on this. If people want to contribute $, time or ideas to making more funds available for scholarships we would love it!
  • What it takes to run a course: Most of the people who are running courses are doing it on their own with little institutional support. This is a grassroots effort. If you compare the prices of a PDC to the  prices of taking for example a semester long college course (this would be 42 contact hours vs the 87 we do in our PDC) you’ll find that it is almost double. Having a lower overhead means that we can keep the costs down but we are doing A LOT behind the scenes. The price breakdown for students per hour (87 hours)  comes to just over $10 an hour.  This is just course time and does not include the many hours of planning and logistics. We run the best course we can and the kind we would like to take. This means we are out there getting our hands dirty, hearing from lots of different people, visiting the best sites, constantly revising and improving the course, making sure we are up to date with the latest thinking and techniques.  All of this takes time to organize.  Our  team starts meeting bi-weekly in April (5 months before the course start date). Like most of the work of organizers (and teachers) this goes unseen.  This also does not take into account the last 12 years of training we have done to be able to teach these courses, have mature sites to learn from  (and even have this list-serve to have this discussion on). We (in part) use these lists as a way to get the word out. We have in the past used mainstream marketing but cannot afford it ( $350 for a small ad for one day in the paper).
  • Length and Format of the course: One of the first things we wanted to design in our feast course was a weekend format. We noticed that the length of courses (at least 2 weeks and in some cases 3) often kept full time workers, people with children and others out. By doing it on the weekends it allows for more participation from those groups AND continues to strengthen the capacity of our local network since we attract students from a 2 hour radius.
  • Students: Like D acres most of our students are NOT coming to learn how to become professional designers. Churning out professional permaculture designers is not a goal of our course. We do teach and go through each stage of a rigorous design process. come up with some incredible  designs and get to “permablitz” instal pieces of a previous design. Our students are farmers, budding homesteaders, teachers, architects, entrepreneurs, engineers, parents….. who are looking to apply permaculture in their own lives, meet people, learn hands on skills, and resources. Yes, some students are looking to become designers and after they have taken a PDC we refer them onto the Conway School, Umass, Yestermorrow or to work for free for friends and family so that they can continue to refine their skills.  To this day we have trained hundreds and hundreds of students who in their own ways are using permaculture as a framework and practice to create healthy, water, soil, plants, homes and invisible landscapes!
  • Yield is unlimited:  When I think about it this really astounds me (and we are scratching the surface here) Our current course is providing for a living wage for 4 “full time” course teachers and organizers, 6 guest teachers and design supporters, subsidizes rent for a local green workers coop, instals a design for a  retired single mom, creates a vision for the reuse of a mill complex and hydro powered canal in holyoke, shares that vision with the public, provides space for up in coming practitioners to teach and get feedback,  highlights local nurseries and permaculture education sites, creates visibility of permaculture solutions in the wider community….
  • Development:  another yield that I want to pull out is Research and Development. Permaculture is a young design science, vision and movement. The more we bring people together to share and explore the more that contributes to the living, evolving body of work we call permaculture. It also helps to create more options for folks.

After just coming back from teaching a 5-day advanced forest gardening course. I can tell and appreciate when someone has taken a PDC. We can go so much deeper into the material/ techniques details when we don’t have to explain the basic concepts of zones and sectors, solar gain, the ethics, whole system design, swales….

 

Social Permaculture Principles in Action

Permaculture as a movement has most of the knowledge, tools and resources that we need to create a regenerative society in the physical sense. Just Google ‘passive solar design’ or ‘aquaculture’ and you will find hundreds of books, articles and how-tos. Certainly we can fine tune and experiment but the harder task lies in transforming our social and invisible systems. This becomes even more crucial when we are taking permaculture out of the private realm (backyards, homes) and into the public (community gardens, business and governance).

How do you practice ‘fair share’ living in an economic system that is based on accumulation and inequality? How do you change laws to make permaculture systems legal? How do you learn to collaborate?

 

These are important questions that we need to talk about and can use the permaculture ethics and principles to guide us. I came to permaculture via community organizing in the global justice movement and drew many connections between what I had learned about being a good organizer and the permaculture principles. The following is a list of 10 permaculture principles with an example of social permaculture in action. This was developed in 2003 in collaboration with Benneth Phelps of Mosaic Farm and has been updated for use as a card game to teach permaculture principles.

Relinquish Control

  • The role of a successful design is to create a self-managed system.

Social Permaculture Example: A good organizer will organize themselves out of a job. You match people with the activities they like to do. For an event someone makes a flyer, restaurants donate extra food, musicians play music, children play in a child care area…. On the day of the event everyone is doing their activities and you get to relax in the corner.

The Problem is the Solution

  • Think creatively and turn constraints into resources!

Social Permaculture Example: There is lack of living wage, meaningful employment in your town. You band together with other people that have complimentary skill sets and work with your Community Development Corporation, or a mentor company, to start your own business that improves your community.

Multiple Functions

  • Each element in a system is chosen and placed so that it supports as many activities as possible.

Social Permaculture Example: Your neighborhood has a block party. At the party people help paint a mural on the side of the building that has been abandoned, neighbors put out items on their lawn (that have been gathering dust in their attic) for people to take, people bring their favorite recipes, neighbors meet other neighbors. There are conversations about how to make the neighborhood better. Several needs are met by this gathering.

Work within Nature

  • Functioning along with natural cycles results in higher yield and less work.

Social Permaculture Example: You are interested in organizing a conference around issues of hunger in your town. Instead of covering each aspect with members of your group, you investigate and involve groups that are already working on hunger. You know that linking these groups will have the greatest impact and that means less work for you.

Least Change, Greatest Effect

  • The less change that is created, the less embedded energy is used to create a system.

Social Permaculture Example: You move to a new town and want to get involved in community organizing there. Before you jump right in and assert your own ideas, you spend a year listening and getting to know the people and issues in this place. Once you understand the natural system of that community, its needs, assets and organizing principles, you decide to lend your ideas and skills to the labor organizers in town, where you are very effective.

Edge Effect

  • Also known as ecotones, the principle governing where two ecosystems come together to form a third, which has greater fertility, productivity and diversity than either of the other two.

Social Permaculture Example: A group of water activists form a coalition with the clean air activists in their state. The political coalition allows for greater diversity of ideas and new collaborations on projects that did not previously exist within their separate groups.

Diversity

  • Use and value diversity

Social Permaculture Example: You take leadership from and are accountable to people that have been oppressed by our current system. You know that in order to have a culture that values people care we all must be free and we need to learn from those who have experienced first hand how this system is not working.

On-Site Resources

  • Determine what resources are available and entering the system on their own, then maximize their use.

Social Permaculture Example: Community needs are not being met within a certain neighborhood. A few neighbors start a community-mapping project to assess needs and assets from within the community. This saves community members’ time, money and resources they would spend meeting their needs elsewhere.

Functional Interconnection

  • The principle in play when the (waste) products of one system function meet the needs of another system element, reducing work, waste and pollution as the system meets its own needs.

Social Permaculture Example: You collect food scraps from local restaurants; you turn these food scraps into compost and sell the compost to local gardeners.

Redundancy

  • Every critical need should be met in more than one way.

Social Permaculture Example: In your group or club you promote the idea of leadership sharing. You take turns facilitating meetings, planning agendas and work to train new people to gain those skills. If one leader gets busy or moves away the organization doesn’t fall apart.

 

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