Who Is At the Table? An Invitation.

The first day I heard the word “permaculture,” I was temping in a high-rise office building in downtown San Francisco. A coworker had asked me about my experience living and studying in Ghana, and shared with me that her best girlfriend from high school was now a camel breeder in Kenya who practiced this “new integrative thing,” and I should look into it. That day started me on a path towards my life’s work.

If your experience was like mine, it was a feeling of homecoming… so much of what I already knew—both intellectually and intuitively—was validated and put into a structure that helped me make sense of the world.  “Yes, mainstream society is screwed up! Yes, there are other ways!”

Today, I teach permaculture because I love creating a container for education that changes lives, where people can question “mainstream” ways of doing things, reconnect with what they love, and hone the skills to build a regenerative future.

As I have developed as a human being and as an educator, key transformative moments have arisen in the midst of opportunities to examine systems of power and oppression, and to explore alternative, more egalitarian approaches.  I am firmly convinced that we need multiple perspectives to discern the many paths towards a future together. We need everyone at the table.

As a permaculture teacher and designer who is a woman and proud mother of two brown-skinned daughters, I think a lot about who isn’t at the table in the permaculture movement. I also think a lot about what I can do to help make the table an inviting space for others.

One of our main goals in every FLPCI-sponsored course is to create a learning community that supports all students to achieve their desired learning outcomes.  In our courses, my “back of the napkin” calculations show that more than half of the participants are women. Over the years, I have shared with my teaching team my lived experience, feminist perspective, and my thinking about how to provide for optimal learning experiences for women.  I’ve also learned from my team.

Here are some of the “wise practices” we’ve learned along the way:

• Make sure there is at least one woman on the teaching team and that she is strong in the math/science/technical skills related to permaculture.  Support her to teach as much technical content as the men.
• When students are learning “technical” skills or using tools/building, make sure women get equal time practicing them. Provide optional small-group times to practice skills.
• Encourage all students towards mastery.
• Don’t leave the “caring work and community facilitation” up to the female teachers/organizers/staff members.
• Don’t discuss a woman’s appearance, it has nothing to do with her contribution. If you need more info to understand why, read “Here’s Why Good Looking is Wrong and Damaging”
• Establish and communicate a zero tolerance policy for harassment of any kind before the course starts.
• Acknowledge that gender is not a binary, but a fluid spectrum, and that all folks are welcome.
• Point out that sexism hurts men as well as women, just in different ways.

Here are some things we’d like to figure out in the future:

• How to provide high-quality, safe, and cost-effective childcare so that parents can attend courses—in a way that doesn’t add to the unpaid work of an organizing team and raise liability issues for site owners.
• Support teachers who have childcare needs—paying for childcare in order to teach a PDC can take up half of a teacher’s salary, especially during summers. One option that we have thought up (but didn’t quite work out) was a work trade…  a trusted friend who was interested in taking a PDC could provide childcare during a summer in exchange for free tuition for the next year’s PDC.

I offer these thoughts as an invitation to:

• Email me with your “wise practices” or ideas about how to create nourishing learning environments for women.
• Participate in our Permaculture Design Course this summer and help build an educationally rigorous and inclusive learning community.
• Apply for our scholarship, which supports community organizers, educators, and activists to share their permaculture knowledge with the communities in which they are already working. Women, people of color, and individuals from other historically marginalized groups are strongly encouraged to apply. Apply soon! The deadline is soon approaching.
• Join me on my journey of figuring this stuff out. I’m just getting started. My work with permaculture as intimately tied to women’s leadership.
• Read the article I’m writing for the August “Permaculture Activist” about Women in Permaculture. I will be exploring the topic of women’s leadership in permaculture—if you would like to be interviewed for this article before May 28^th, 2013, email me at <karrynolson@gmail.com>
• Attend the “Women in Permaculture” gathering in the Fall of 2013 at Omega Institute (details coming soon—check back here for the link).
• Think about who else needs to be “at the permaculture table.” Which constituencies do we need to hear from? How do we listen deeply and provide support so that others find their seat and their voice at the table? For example, do our local permaculture movements reflect the ethnic or economic diversity of our communities? If not, what deep listening and change needs to happen within us to make that possible?

In solidarity,

Karryn

Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute (FLPCI)

Jonathan Bates, contributing author of “Paradise Lot: Two plant geeks, one-tenth of an acre, and the making of an edible garden oasis in the city,” speaks about his 10-year-old edible forest garden in Holyoke, MA.

Signed books will be available for purchase. (In the meantime, Home Green Home has copies if you’d like to read “Paradise Lot” before Jonathan’s talk.)

This event is free.

Hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County (www.ccetompkins.org)
Ithaca Children’s Garden (www.ithacachildrensgarden.org)
Cornell Garden-based Learning (www.gardening.cornell.edu)
Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute (www.FingerLakesPermaculture.org)
Home Green Home (www.homegreenhome.com)
Groundswell (www.groundswellcenter.org)

###

During several days of our Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course, Samantha Mason came to record the scene our our students working and studying. She interviewed many and the following video captures the excitement and words of our students as they reflect back on two weeks of immersion into a hands-on, intensive permaculture course. Samantha Mason is a film student at Ithaca College who has been helping the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute document its work over the past year (2012). Last year she also put much time into working at Cayuta Sun (the site of our annual PDC) while helping us collect photographs and video of our work teaching permaculture.

Please enjoy and share this video freely among your friends, family and colleagues.

As long as Steve Gabriel has been learning, practicing, and teaching permaculture, he has been in the woods. His search for sustainable agricultural practices kept bringing him back to the temperate forests that cover the Finger Lakes and much of northeastern North America. Exemplifying the “Get a Yield” permaculture principle, he soon began applying permaculture design to small lot forest management, maple syrup production, growing shiitake mushrooms, and managing livestock in woods and hedgerows.

Recently, Steve has been working with the Cooperative Extension Garden-Based Learning program at Cornell University and has taught workshops with Professor Ken Mudge of the Horticulture Department at the university’s student run organic farm and MacDaniels Nut Grove, a hickory forest planted in the 1930s that is being revived into a demonstration site for forest farming. Steve is also organized the first Permaculture Design Certificate course at Cornell.

Together, Ken and Steve have decided to write a research-based book on forest farming for a broad audiences. With the working title: “Farming The Woods,” they are assembling a volume of practical permaculture and agroforestry strategies, case studies, and a pattern language for people who want to practice this emerging form of agriculture. It will be published next summer by Chelsea Green Publishing.

They have an online survey, seeking feedback from those who are already practicing or experimenting with forest farming. We encourage you to take the survey or to pass it on to others you know who are working their woods for non-timber products. This online survey will shape how they will research and write case studies this summer for the book. It will also begin the core of an online community to facilitate sharing among practitioners, students and enthusiasts.

Most importantly, they are seeking your support to extend the work of their research. This summer Ken and Steve will go on the road visiting farmers who have demonstrated successful farming within the woods. Their stories will be valuable for every reader who is considering or already engaged in forest farming.  This will be the first significant collection of recent case studies of the art and science of temperate forest farming.

The rest of the board of FLPCI, encourages you to visit the FarmingtheWoods.com website, to go to their fundraising campaign at Indiegogo, and make your donation. Gifts of over $50 receive a free copy of the book upon publishing as a thank you.

Watch this video to learn more:

From the beginning, the founding members of the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute articulated that a goal for the organization was to improve access to our programming, and in particular to our Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) course held each summer.

Eight years and eleven PDCs later, we are proud to announce two initiatives to increase the affordability of this intensive and life-changing course.

The course is an investment in one’s future, and we believe a worthwhile one. But running a PDC is not cheap. Camp infrastructure, support staff, teachers, and cooks, plus providing three mostly local and organic meals a day to learning community of up to 30 people for 16 days adds up quickly.

We are proud as an organization that we’ve been able to remain persistent and offer the PDC each year to a wide range of students, despite challenges. Yet we recognize that not all people can afford $1400 for a course, so have developed options for reduced tuition. The following discounts are an abundant yield from years of successful courses and generous alumni.

Learn more about the PDC (videos.)

Work Trade

We need hard workers who will raise and revive the infrastructure of a summer learning community devoted to permaculture education. We seek mature, patient and communicative people who will be living together in labor, study, eating, and camping. Social skills, as well as a demonstrated ability to work hard, are a plus.

This will be an intense and fun two weeks of community living, with time off for the Grassroots Festival of Music. It is followed by your participation in the PDC course and a few days of clean up. Applicants should be willing to camp in the woods of Cayuta Sun, a small woodland farm where the annual summer permaculture course is held.

Your PDC tuition is reduced to $700 in exchange for your contribution.

Your full commitment is needed from July 15 through August 14, 2013.

Apply to the work trade program.

Scholarships

With fiscal sponsorship from the Permaculture Institute of the North East (PINE), FLPCI is offering four scholarships for the 2013 Permaculture Design Certification (PDC).

These scholarships are both need and merit-based. It aims to support community organizers, educators, and activists to share their permaculture knowledge with their communities.

Each scholarship award is $700. Funds will be disbursed by PINE upon completion of the course. Each recipient will be expected to successfully complete FLPCI’s 2013 PDC, and to submit a 2-3 minute video describing how they will utilize their permaculture skills to serve their community.

Women, people of color, and individuals from other historically marginalized groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

Apply and learn more.

Pre-May Discount

Sign-up early!

Do you want to take a

Permaculture Design Certification course?

Please shop around.

Not all of the 72-hour courses offered around the world are alike. Potential students must consider location, cost, venue, teachers, and other learning conditions.

With just a month before our early sign-up discount deadline, please examine the qualities that have kept our Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course going strong the past eight years.

The Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute’s (FLPCI) summer course offers a curriculum, experienced teaching crew, and hands-on immersion that feels like more than just a class to our many graduates. They talk of a “life-changing” and “paradigm-shifting” event. We agree. It has been for us also!

Experience

Our course is long standing. Since 2005, we’ve educated over a thousand students in ecological design at schools and venues including the Cayuga Nature Center, Cayuta Sun Farmstead, Ithaca College and Cornell University.

Our teachers (Michael Burns, Karryn Olson-Ramanujan, Rafter Sass, and Steve Gabriel) are experienced both in the classroom and the field. We are professional educators, researchers, and farmers, all with experience working on non-profit projects, demonstration gardens, and design businesses. With ten PDCs taught together, each year has built and improved upon the next. All year  long, meetings between instructors create a high standard for accurate content, up-to-date research, and improved instruction for the diversity of students we teach. Each PDC integrates learning into doing, and we make sure students get a lot of time digging, sketching, inoculating, planting, and observing the gardens, fields and forests of our living demonstration site.

Integrity

All of our students are part of a learning community, where the life experience of each of us contributes to our learning as a whole. Recognizing the worldwide need and potential of permaculture design we teach a curriculum with integrity. FLPCI teachers are heavily involved with academic institutions and consider research-based information to be an important criteria for the stories and lessons we teach. We want to make sure that the techniques we teach students don’t only sound good, but are tried and true, whether in research, or in reliable field experience.

Our graduates speak

Across the internet and in their communities, FLPCI graduates share what they learned and why they loved the course.  Recently, a student of the Cornell PDC finished his course with a video. The very popular course includes FLPCI instructor Steve Gabriel with Professor Ken Mudge. The video shows some of the field trips we take during the summer course including the Delaware Ave Project, Edible Acres, and The Good Life Farm.

Last year, documentary filmmaker Samantha Mason visited while previous graduates returned to the PDC site to volunteer. Relaxing at a BBQ after just setting up the infrastructure for an upcoming Food Forestry workshop, they describe what they enjoyed about the course. She also interviews instructors.

So, as you shop for your PDC experience, consider ours. It is running in 2013 from July 26 though August 11 in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York.

Learn More…

Please share this information with anybody who might be interested. Thank you.

In Guatemala, a very small number of giant corporations have been aggressively promoting fast-maturing hybrid seeds. Hybrid seeds are extremely vulnerable because their genetic pool is small and poor, confined to high-production genetic traits. Traditional native seeds naturally have a wide gene pool, which makes them more robust and resilient to disease and varying climactic conditions.

Native seed sources are urgently needed. There is no government effort and very little NGO-based efforts to promote native seeds in Guatemala. Because of modern agriculture practices, traditional knowledge regarding the use of native seeds for food production is in the process of disappearing.

The Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP) (Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute) is a Mayan-run, Mayan owned non-profit organization in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, that has spent the last 12 years empowering indigenous farmers to combat poverty and malnutrition through permaculture education and by offering training to small farmers on ways to produce and conserve traditional native seeds.

FLPCI cofounder Michael Burns studied permaculture with Ronaldo Lec Ajcot in 1998 and recalls his passion for native seeds, “Rony collected seeds everywhere he traveled. Upon returning from permaculture projects across Central America, he would describe the trips around his discoveries in indigenous seeds and agriculture. His enthusiasm for small farmers saving and using their own seeds is infectious.”

You are encouraged to visit IMAP’s Indiegogo campaign page.

This two-day event in New York City will offer opportunities for the general public, food professionals, entrepreneurs, job seekers, CSA members, community organizers and farmers to come together for two days of workshops and skill- building sessions. The conference will provide attendees with opportunities to learn about national farm and food issues, CSA trends, and cooking and food preservation techniques, as well as ways to mobilize communities in order to increase access to farm-fresh, locally grown food.

Conference Dates:

Venue:

Website:

Monday, March 4, 6 p.m.

Tompkins County Public Library

Borg Warner Room West

Ithaca, NY

Utilizing his forthcoming book, Ben Falk will present an image and illustration-filled tour of the primary principles and their application used in the operation of a high diversity, nutrient-dense food, medicine, and fuel-producing homestead and small farm – the Whole Systems Research Farm. Aspects covered include rapid fuelwood production in black locust hedgerows, integrating grazing with perennial woody crops, wood-heating hot water, rice paddy construction and management, ducks and sheep in the system, earthworks for drought and flood prevention and much more.

This free event is hosted by the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute

and

& &

The Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute (FLPCI) with fiscal sponsorship from the Permaculture Institute of the North East (PINE) is delighted to offer four scholarships for the upcoming Permaculture Design Certificate course (PDC) offered this summer in upstate New York (July 26 through August 11).

This scholarship is both need and merit-based. It aims to support community organizers, educators, and activists to share their permaculture knowledge with their communities. We encourage recipients to use their scholarship as seed money for community-based permaculture education and activism.

Each award is $700. Funds will be disbursed by PINE upon completion of the course. Each will be expected to successfully complete FLPCI’s 2013 PDC, and to submit a 2-3 minute video that describes how they will utilize their permaculture skills to serve their community. You do not need to be a video artist, just comfortable speaking to the camera and able to use photographs, drawings, slides, and similar formats to to produce a simple video.  We also invite recipientss to provide short video updates about their work. All videos will be showcased online by FLPCI, thus providing a world-wide platform for fellows to publicize their work in permaculture.

Scholarship recipients are responsible for paying the course tuition in advance. We are dedicated to providing multiple ways to reduce financial barriers to attending our courses. As a result, scholarships cannot be paired with our pre-PDC work trade option.

Women, people of color, and individuals from other historically marginalized groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

In your application materials, tell us about yourself and how you are already serving your community. We are seeking applicants whose activism, organizing or teaching are grounded in ethics that promote both social equality and ecological health. How will permaculture knowledge and design skills enrich your work? With whom will you be working? How strong is your relationship already with this group, organization, or population?

Please send your cover letter and resume to <Board@FingerLakesPermaculture.org>. We will begin selecting applicants on a rolling basis after April 17, 2013.

Any discounts- -including work trade, scholarships, and earlybird discounts- -cannot be combined. All will be discounts will be applied to the full tuition of $1400.