Stories to Decolonise Permaculture

Stories to Decolonise Permaculture

Creating a free resource of stories about the origins and inspirations behind permaculture to aid teachers and practitioners in decolonising permaculture

Team

Rakesh Rootsman Rak, Ewan Findley, Jemma Findley

Area

Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project 

Aims

By the end of October 2023 we will have
1. A way for people to capture electronically stories of the origins and inspirations of permaculture.
2. A process in place to verify the content
3. A way in which to share for free verified content to the public
4. Run a session for CoLab to explain how people can add content and how to use the content
5. Run a session for Permaculture Association Britain’s Educators CoP to explain how they can add content and how to use the content
6. Deliver a session on this work at the UK Permaculture convergence in September

 

Updated aims due to lack of funding through the Emergent Festival –

The amount allocated means we have budget for 24 hours of work, hence the first 3 parts of the project
8 – 8 – Look at what data we want to capture
8 – 16 – Create a structure to hold the data in a meaningful and flexible way (normalisation)
8 – 24 – Create a way for people to enter the initial sample content.

To complete the project we will apply for further funding from the CoLab Diversity pot.
For any shortfall, we will do crowdfunding to the general permaculture people worldwide.
We are confident we will achieve this, so this initial amount is a great way to get us up and running.

OUTCOMEs

resources created

contact links

Communicating Permaculture in Spanish

Communicating Permaculture in Spanish

A podcast with a series of 6 episodes that involve collaborating with CoLab members and inviting them to talk about grassroots projects they are involved in.

Team

Kathy Otto, Jorge Barbosa, Aline VaMo

Area

Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project 

Aims

  • Create a draft image of the recent state of permaculture thinking in the Spanish speaking world, identifying the countries and areas that are proclaiming to have a permaculture movement, visualizing who speaks about permaculture in which areas, what they are saying and in what direction they are developing (family projects, ecovillage, professional designers, regenerative agriculture practitioners…) → spreadsheet
  • Create and reinforce connections between different permaculture practitioners in the Spanish speaking world, with a special focus on those who approach permaculture professionally or wish to do so, by using a participatory process for the design of GG (General Goal) 3.
  • Create texts and images optimized for different social media platforms (facebook, instagram, whatsapp…) that help permaculture practitioners (and specifically professional consultants, designers and educators) in the Spanish speaking world to communicate fundamental concepts and ideas of permaculture. These resources will also help to make visible to a wider audience the value of the permaculture design approach in our current global climate and socioeconomic context.
    • Make the created material freely and easily available on perma.earth and through collaborating agents.
    • Impulse the circulation of the created material in the social media channels of the participants of the process by a hashtag campaign.

OUTCOMEs

resources created

contact links

Designing Work Spaces For All

Designing Work Spaces For All

Creating and testing an online course that focuses specifically on creating accessible and safe work spaces and community spaces.

Team

Charlie Wilson, Daniel Attwell

Area

Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project

Aims

This course seeks to Promote Diversity, Accessibility, Inclusion, Equity & Justice within Permaculture communities. This course will be a resource that can be accessed by anybody who wishes to learn more about permaculture. It will add value to the CoLab space.

OUTCOMEs

Daniel has already undertaken much of the work, transcribing audio segments and creating a well-structured course outline. We would like to add graphics and make the course more presentable. This could be done within a week. Once this is complete we would promote the course on social media, including the CoLab Slack and the CoLab LinkedIn page, and run a first test version. We anticipate a month of promotion would be needed to get a willing team of participants to take the course. We would first allow people to take the course for free and gather feedback. We would have to wait for people to complete the course, this could take 2-3 weeks. We would then use this feedback to improve the course and create a final version. This could be done within a week.

resources created

contact links

Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund

Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund

Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) is a peer-to-peer process that commences with shared, deep-listening and, given that the peers are trained to function in both counseling and clienting roles, advances to a process involving structured, non-advisory attention from counsellors and discharge for clients. Roles are always exchanged in every session. Training is an essential element of RC.

The project seeks to engage Colab members to both give and receive one-on-one sessions to a level appropriate to their training and consistent with the peer-to-peer spirit fundamental to the RC ethos.

Team

Andrew Langford, Alena Kempf, Amelie Catheline, Vida Ashmole

Area

Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Next Steps project

Aims

a 5 * 2 hour set of online, interactive classes delivered starting September 2023 explaining the simple/complex, improvisation tool set developed by the international RC Community – classes include ample practice opportunities and, given that students engage well with these, they will be able to introduce these tools to relationship partners, working groups, classes, presentations and other willing assemblies thereby enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging (DEIJB) efforts.

Requires students to negotiate permissions to introduce these tools to their groups. The simplicity of this small yet effective and flexible tool set allows that all members of an assembly of any size can learn to apply these tools and thereby develop their facilitation skills thus democratizing the process of facilitation.

OUTCOMEs

April 2023 Update

We are working on developing our capacities to run the Oppression, Movement Building and our Relationships as Activists (OMBRA) workshop as an introductory overview of RC as a free course for all comers. We are doing this through regular monthly meetings and are referenced in this process by our Area Reference Person and the originators of the OMBRA workshop.
Meanwhile we are reconfiguring existing courses to focus on navigating conflict and de-colonizing our own thinking, these course being: –
Eliminating Common sources of Conflict from Group Dynamics (I am playing with renaming the Designing Productive Meetings and Events course here and am open to suggestions)
Reclaiming discharge – developing our capacity to courageously attend to eliminating hundreds to thousands year-old patterns of separation (aka oppressions and internalized oppressions of many flavors) including racism, the class system, domination of nature, sexism, imperialism and many more …
Liberation from oppression – understanding how oppressions arise, how these are spread and maintained and how these trap us in dysfunctional, irrational societies. The primary emphasis of this training is on practicing proven processes that enable us to turn the volume down on these noxious dynamics with the intention to eliminate them as thoroughly as we can.

resources created

contact links

Skill Mapping

Skill Mapping

Maintenance of existing community database and making this accessible to the community.

Provide and enhance a database of members and their skills to enable better connection between members.

Team

Daniel Atwell, Pushpak Parmar

Area

Diversity, participation and engagement, Next Steps project 

Aims

Create/Update a Google form to gather user database focused on Skill & Language.

Keep an eye on activity in the form.

Follow-up with all members through email (Twice) as well as Slack messages (Once) per quarter.

Feed the data in skill-mapping visualization tool.

Make sure it is accessible to everyone.

OUTCOMEs

April Update

We are preparing the next round of forms to collect the database. We are planning to release it in the last week of April.

resources created

contact links