35 Permaculture students, pay what you want.

another success

People keep telling me that it’s important to celebrate success. They say that, when installing a design, there should be a party each time there is a successful step.

I agree but, yes there’s a but, I have trouble doing it! So I said to myself write it up, so here we go.

We just completed a Permaculture design course, open price, 35 students and 5 teachers. What is pushing me to celebrate? The feedback we got from the students.

Let’s start with what happened for the students during their 11 days with us.

Practical workshops

People have 2 days doing 1 workshop and then they change to do another. This means everyone gets to do them all.

Olivier, our specialist on energy use and production, was very busy as he alternated a bread-making workshop with one where people learnt to build a type 2 rocket stove (the ones with a chimney). Cutting metal, welding and fabrication.

Florence and Sarah led the kitchen team where they worked to produce each day’s lunch and dinner. Most people know how to cook, at least a bit, but doing it for 40 people is a great experience. As is working as a team.

Anne ran the stone wall rebuilding workshop, there are about 25 terraces on the land. When they lean too much they need taking down and rebuilding, before they collapse. If they do fall then there is a lot more work to do. By the way I’m talking about walls that are around 2 metres high and sometimes more.

Julien and I ran the gardening sessions. These involved opening new gardens, maintaining the existing ones, seed sowing, planting out the potted plants and tree planting.

The courses

To all extent and purposes we follow the programme that Mollison put into place in the 1980’s. We have updated it but the core remains the same, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! The classes are run both in the theater and outside for the hands-on stuff.

The students received tuition on ALL aspects of Permaculture. The core part, Permaculture design followed by its application to regenerative farming and gardening, map work, ecological theory, regenerative water, holistic landscape design, building design, urban Permaculture, bio-regionalism, regenerative and circular economies and a bunch of other stuff.

We leave time during the day when participants can propose workshops and these are very popular. We love these as we get to learn a load of stuff too. We also recruit participants who have a lot of experience in a particular field to help present the relevant subject.

Student feedback

Yes! We do ask and we get it in two ways. During the course we all meet up in a big circle in the morning and people give feedback on what’s going well and what could be improved. At the end of the course people give us written reports. When everyone has gone we head to a local restaurant and go through the feedback. This could be risky as negative reports could lead to poor digestion, luckily for us people love what we do!

Why do people flood to our courses? Well it’s not because of sponsored links on Facebook, we don’t do that. In fact we don’t pay for advertising at all. We’ve simply got a reputation for giving high quality professional courses. People who couldn’t otherwise afford a Pmc design course come along because, well, they can pay what they can. Permaculture is for everyone, cost shouldn’t be a barrier, with us it isn’t.

The word has also gotten around that we’re not there just to try and make loads of money from the courses (we earn our living with our professional work, we get paid for teaching the courses for sure but that’s not why we do it), we’ve also got a strategy. We need help rebuilding our socio-economic and agricultural systems, we need people trained and equipped to do this. Students head off with not only design experience but also a vision of how things could be, they leave smiling with a mission and know how to get on with it.

11 days, 5 teachers, 3 meals a day, free camping and all at ‘pay what you want’. What could be better than that, for us as teachers and for the participants?

You can read more about why our courses are ‘open price’ here