PermaCultural Mentoring and Design, A Seven-Weekend Course:

Located at Fair Winds Farm

How would it feel to have a tightly woven cultural basket to carry us as we travel through the wild, unpredictable changes many of us foresee in our future?

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This question provides the inspiration and focus for a new program drawing together leaders from the permaculture and cultural mentoring movements. In 2008, we will offer a nine-weekend experiential course where we will explore the weaving of cultural baskets of greater integrity, beauty, utility, and wholeness than either permaculture or cultural mentoring can create alone.

Email This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it for registration, or see below for more details.

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

For years, we in the permaculture and cultural mentoring movements have followed each other’s work and sensed strong synergy in our potential collaboration. Both permaculture and cultural mentoring seek to create cultures embodying “humanatural” consciousness and ecological principles, structures, and functions. Not only do both streams flow to the same river—better yet—each offers gifts that can benefit the other.

Cultural mentoring offers a powerful system for generating functional social relationships that sustain us in a supportive context, and the permaculture movement can benefit greatly from such an infusion. Permaculture provides practical tools, principles, processes, and techniques to embody transformative change, coevolving integrated systems for human sustenance and natural regeneration on all scales, in all environments. Cultural mentors can use permaculture design practices to bridge nature-awareness skills to the everyday concerns of food, shelter, energy, transportation, social and economic systems, and community, village, and urban design. Permaculture provides a holistic approach to the practical effort of creating a graceful and ethical descent from the energy peak upon which we now live. Meanwhile, cultural mentoring offers a systematic approach to generating a social system that embraces the coming changes as opportunities to recover indigenous connection to nature, place, and community. Isn’t it time we got ourselves together?

How about a dance?

The Course

In Ecological Culture Design & Mentoring we’ll practice indigenous cultural traditions and skills like the eight shields, tracking, and mentoring as guides and patterns for building functional societies while simultaneously studying and practicing permaculture design principles, processes, and techniques. While we want a seamless merging of our two streams, we acknowledge that this is an evolutionary or successional process. So, we’ll play with creative tensions and look for common underlying principles as we integrate any number of apparent separations we may discover: permaculture and cultural mentoring; humans and nature, form and function; art, science, and praxis; left and right brain; theory and experience; process and content.

Each weekend will involve plenty of time outside learning and practicing nature awareness, observation, and ecological design. We’ll also experience diverse approaches to learning, including storytelling, creative arts, experiential exercises, and games, along with lectures, discussions, meditation, and hands-on work, among other things. Working on real permaculture design projects will comprise a significant portion of this course. We intend the structure of this course to teach, not just the content. Each student must purchase and read a number of required books for the course, and will receive handout packets for each weekend. Fun and useful homework will be given!

Above all, we want you to come away with concrete and practical skills for ecological culture design and mentoring, the information you need to use those skills well, and having experienced a deep and lasting shift of consciousness into a paradigm of greater wholeness, empowerment, and interconnection. Participants will leave the course as part of a growing network of practitioners with whom we can enjoy weaving well rounded ecological cultures, in our own back yards and neighborhoods, right here, right now.

We Want You . . .

We seek leaders, pioneer species, people willing to take social, intellectual, and emotional risks. We seek those concerned not just with the information, tools and techniques of ecological culture, but also the regenerative aspect of mentoring and a five-course meal of paradigm shifts.

We offer two levels of participation in this course. We intend this course to serve up to 24 people who have never taken a permaculture course before or those familiar with permaculture who seek to experience a revolutionary approach to implementing permaculture through the systems of cultural mentoring.

We also have 8 apprenticeship positions available, 4 reserved for those who have taken a permaculture teacher training course and have convincing permaculture experience, and 4 for people with leadership levels of experience in the art of mentoring and nature awareness movement.

Pre-registration/Application

You may pre-register to hold a space in the course by sending a $50 refundable deposit to Charlie Laurel, 24 East West Road, E. Dummerston, VT, 05346. These deposits will hold your space in the course until detailed course costs and information are available, when we will ask for a full commitment.

Those seeking to apprentice teach on this program should notify us in writing of your interest. We will contact you with further application materials when they are available. Email This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or write to him by US Mail at the address above.

 

Course Location   

Our course will be based at Fair Winds Farm in Brattleboro, VT.  Fair Winds Farm is a 42 acre, diversified, horse-powered farm that has been operated by three generations of the Bailey family.  They offer perennials, poultry, eggs, free range pork, chevon, grass fed lamb, and draft horse training and workshops.  The Bailey family is dedicated to preserving the draft horse tradition, and farming in a way that is "environmentally, economically, and personally sustainable.  All parts of the farm compliment each other, recycling, nourishing, and even energizing the others."  Possibilities abound for us to design and integrate such diverse elements as pasture land, woodland, productive vegetable gardens, heated greenhouse, animal husbandry, low-carbon draft horse farming, natural building, community involvement and education even further on this beautiful Vermont farm.  See www.fairwindsfarm.org.

 

 

Instructors

Mark Morey is a creative artist, visionary educator, cultural engineer, and consultant who designs regenerative holistic communities with timeless native principles. He founded three transformational organizations in the last 12 years: Deep Wilds, Vermont Wilderness School, and the Institute for Natural Learning, sparking a nature and community awareness movement in the Northeast impacting 5,000 adults and children today. He has facilitated or co-facilitated wilderness survival and spiritual passages for teens and adults since 1997, including over 30 weeklong Art of Mentoring passages for adults, and 5 years of Sacred Fire rites of passage for boys. Mark feels inspired by the hero’s journey model and the oral history of his ancestors and native people around the world.

Jono Neiger has a diverse background in ecology, environmental research, conservation, restoration, land stewardship, and landscape design. A permaculture teacher and designer since 1996, he was the Land Steward and Permaculture Apprenticeship Program Director at Lost Valley Educational Center in Oregon for 5 yrs. Jono is a Conservation Biologist with 17 years experience, and currently owns Regenerative Design, a permaculture design and consultation firm in Leverett, Massachusetts. He earned a B.S. in Forest Biology from S.U.N.Y. College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 1989 and a M.A. in Landscape Design and Land-Use Planning from the Conway School of Landscape Design in 2003.

Charlie Laurel is a permaculture teacher with extensive experience in natural building and conventional construction. He lived in Arizona where his favorite projects involved working with Navajo communities making links between forest restoration and building traditional “hogan” homes and ceremonial structures. Charlie has mentored dozens of apprentices in the skills of natural building, greywater systems, passive and active solar applications, etc. in permaculture settings. Since moving to Vermont in 2006, Charlie has participated in nature awareness and cultural mentoring programs, while cultivating a vision for symbiosis between those programs and permaculture. He holds a M.A. in Sustainable Communities (MLS) from Northern Arizona University.