Why my Permaculture courses are 'pay what you want'

Permaculture is about transforming our societies

I recently wrote a comment on social media about the prices of some Permaculture design courses (PDC), saying I was angry about how costly some of these courses are. I was quite suprised by the number of reactions which were virtually all supportive of my stance. So I decided to write this article to explain why my courses are ‘pay what you want’ which from now on I’ll refer to as ‘open price’.

To all those people out there running PDC’s I’m not attacking you. I am suggesting that open price courses are the way to go. It’s been great to see how many more there are nowadays so the wind seems to be blowing us this way.

People get into Permaculture for a number of different reasons. For me and my peers it wasn’t the growing food bit it was the radical social change part that put the bread in our toasters. A number of us had been or were still active in various environmental movements and getting frustrated with the inefficiency of protesting and direct action. We were continually confronted by the ‘project rebound effect’. An eco/socio-destructive project would be halted by popular movement and then restarted months or years after when the protesters and activists had gone off to stop another project. We were getting a bit burnt out with it all and sick of the lack of tangible longterm results. I wrote about this here :

Stop shouting!!

After I got ‘qualified’ as a Designer, and because at the time there were so few people in the UK proposing courses, I decided to have a go. Me and Matt started with short intro classes. When I became part of the now legendary South-east London Permaculture group I started to teach full Design courses often hand in hand with the late Alpay who had founded Naturewise in north London.

Making these courses ‘open price’ was a no-brainer, there weren’t really any discussions except about how best to present the concept to future course participants. This is still somewhat difficult but the team here had the genius idea of proposing ‘open price with voluntary top-up’ as a system. People pay what they want towards the begining of the course and, if they feel like it, can top-up their contribution towards the end. This works just lovely and we are very delicate about how we present the idea as we don’t want people to feel any pressure whatsoever to ‘top up’.

I should point out that ‘open price’, as far as we were and are concerned, includes payment in kind. People can make a proposition such as deferred payments or even better exchanging their time and skills for a place on the course.

So why ‘open price’?

I was working in the UK at the time so I’ll use the UK as an example now.

There are two main classifications of poverty:

Absolute poverty – is a condition where household income is below a necessary level to maintain basic living standards (food, shelter, housing). This condition makes it possible to compare between different countries and also over time.

Relative poverty – A condition where household income is a certain percentage below median incomes. For example, the threshold for relative poverty could be set at 50% of median incomes (or 60%) economicshelp.org

The number of people living in absolute poverty for the period 2022-2023 rose to 12 million people. This means the rate of absolute poverty in the UK now stands at 18%. Food insecurity rose from 8% of individuals to 11% and the proportion unable to heat their home more than doubled from 4% to 11%.

This means that, at the very least, 12 million people in the UK would struggle to pay for a Permaculture course and these are the people who could benefit the most. In many ways Permaculture was designed for these people, to help them change their situation and revitalise their local communities. Yet they are excluded by a paywall unless the courses are ‘open price’.

"The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves." ~ Bill Mollison

Copying a model means copying the results of that model.

I could have decided to become a Permaculture ‘star’ and get wealthy off the whole thing, I didn’t as my personal ethics coincide with Permaculture ethics. "To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state." ~ Bill Mollison

Have a look at the different courses available, the ones which promote wellness, social change, spiritual something or other. They all tend to fit the status quo pattern, follow a course and then go and set up your own (preferably with another name that you invented). Charge a lot of money for the courses because ‘expensive means good’ and teach people who’ll go off and repeat the cycle. Bollocks.

I didn’t, and don’t, want any part of this type of thing. I want to include everyone. I don’t want to be part of creating a sort of eco-elite who live in eco-villages, ecodistricts or intentional communities or whatever name people give to their thing. I refuse to call my current project, or any other that I work on, any such thing, here it’s a small farm that is part of a village. Permaculture is about bringing things together in a new way it’s not about encouraging a sort of elitist separation. Creating an eco-village next to ‘normal’ village is encouraging segregation and just pisses off the people in the ‘normal’ village.

Leading ‘open price’ courses is part of this philosophy, integrate rather than separate. Being inclusive not elitist, being fair and equitable not acquisitive.

"If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself." ~ Bill Mollison

Do the course teachers earn any money?

This is a question that pops up regularly often with a comment like ‘I’ve got children and a mortgage to pay, I can’t afford to offer open price courses'.

The answer is yes we all get paid and fairly too. We all get paid the same, I don’t insist on being paid more than the others because I’m much more experienced. That’s the old model and I don’t want to be part of it. We’ve got kids and costs like anyone else and years of running these courses in this way has demonstrated that the ‘open price’ system is fair for the teachers and the students.

By the way the courses include 3 meals a day and free camping.

Paradigm shift

It’s got to be 100% or we’re wasting our time. Permaculture is about transforming our societies and their various systems, social, economic, industrial whatever .. Not in a small bits and pieces way but through conscious, ethical and integrative design.

"Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers" ~ Bill Mollison

If the shift is going to be 100% then we need to include everyone regardless of their incomes. With ‘open price’ courses financially wealthy people directly help subsidise places for the low income people with whom they share the course. All the revenue goes into a pot which pays for the food and other costs and what is left is shared out with the course teachers. We’ve had wealthier people come who have paid a top-up at the end of the course to help fund the next course. We’ve also had the situation, and more than once, when the surplus left to pay the course teachers was so ample that we pushed some of it on to help fund the next course. Our personal ethics and the Permaculture ones help us decide what is enough and fair and what’s more than we need and could be better invested.

I have taught on set fee courses and each time I insisted that the set price be as low as possible. When I looked at the prices for similar courses around the world I was always quite proud that mine were the cheapest on the planet. I didn’t set a fee for my services, I accepted a share of any surplus left after the various costs had been paid. I used a part of my income from both open price and set fee courses to travel to other countries and teach courses there. Countries where people’s incomes were so low that paying for a course was absolutely impossible.

We either work to change the paradigm or we don’t. If we do then we have to re-evaluate how we work, how we run things and figure out how we can be equitable and compassionate.

It’s not just a course but an opening to a new career.

I often feel that this is understated and not valued enough. I don’t lead courses to teach people to become teachers, my first objective is help people start a new career as a Permaculture designer. Doing designs for people, local authorities or whatever means you can charge for your services. Being a good designer also requires sorting your own stuff out, reducing your needs and thus your living costs. By the way this doesn’t mean living miserably it means living abundantly, take the time to insulate the house, set up a community gardens or whatever it takes to reduce your expenditures and live better.

Brought together this means that a Permaculture designer can charge for their services but at the same time can charge less because their living costs are low. If the opposite is the case then one has to wonder about said person’s qualities as a designer.

Whilst globally more than 3 million people have trained up in Permaculture design we urgently need more. Designers who are out there working to bring about radical change. The opportunities are endless: food production, urban renewal, rural renewal, water, energy, architecture, governance and on and on. All sectors crying out for rational ethical design work.

My second objective is to teach people how to go back home and get on with their personal project. That said the course helps these understand how their personal project must be connected into the local community.

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”― Bill Mollison

Re-reading this article in a probably vain attempt to correct spelling mistakes makes me wonder if I’m being a bit ‘holier than thou’ or whatever the quote is. This isn’t my intention, over the years I have been verbally attacked by people for running open price or really cheap courses, I got pretty fed up with it, comments like ‘it’s unfair competition’ got right up my nose. I mean what do these people want? That I change my personal ethics and my interpretation of Permaculture ethics and start charging as much as they do? Sod that for a stale biscuit.

Other comments like ‘you don’t declare your income from the courses so that’s cheating’ were simply false.

I’ll finish by quoting Bill, again!

"There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience." ~ Bill Mollison