A Journey into permaculture
A full PDC - over 24 weeks = 3-hour session each week
Join the S39 Academy of Permaculture at Treflach farm Shropshire and on-line for this ground-breaking PDC.
Improve your food and livelihood security and make new friends and connections, whilst building your vision for the future.
Be part of global movement creating change
Jan – July, with taster days/ intro in Sept – Nov
Completing a PDC is a life-changing and life-affirming experience. The course covers a set curriculum based on Bill Mollison’s gound breaking book, Permaculture Designers Manual and knits together a world view and understanding that harmonises with the natural world and places you in the centre of your own universe, your personal Zone 0!
Permaculture design is a methodolgy based on meeting needs, utilising local and natural resources and by strategically building mutually beneficial relationships. Rather than resource extraction permaculture focusses on environmental and community regeneration.
Permaculture is global
The image is of graduates from a PDC completed in March 2022 in Gisagara, Rwanda.
Participants had spent two years developing a forest garden system around their local high school, whilst adapting and applying what they had learned to their own homes and communites.
They completed with 5 days of intensive training at the school to enable them to teach and support new learners.
In this way a PDC can be a powerful tool for community transformation.
We aim to align the PDC here at the farm with others happening globally, linking people and projects across the world.
More than a course, this is a support group for transformation!
We find ourselves in turbulent times with many our long-held norms changing. A changing climate is challenging our habits, providing new and complex challenges whilst having a significant impact on our economic systems. The changes are touching every area of our lives and it seems essential that we look for ways to support each other to find new ways forward. Permaculture teaches us that change always creates new opportunities and we will of course have to adapt to new conditions.
In deliberately spreading this course out over a longer period of time we are creating more time for interactions between the participants. We can work on and implement our own designs, throughout the course and support each other with feedback, observations and encouragement.
Permaculture teaches us that everything we need to thrive is a subset of a healthy natural world. The natural world is not a set of resources to be extracted, we must see it as something we should build a two-way relationship with. We must ensure that while meeting our own needs we are also respecting those of the natural systems on which we depend.
Tuesday
24 sessions, 1 per week, themed around the cycle of the 12 Holmgren principles. This will guide us through a sequence and is gaurenteed to lead to some powerful outcomes.
- Theory, bigger picture and basic concepts behind each principle
- Slideshows, examples and video clips of examples drawn from real life
- Invitation to relate and apply that to your own circumstance and chance to discuss with other participants
- Visits and demonstrations on the farm and environs to experience first hand
Thursday
Volunteer day at Treflach farm
Practicals & networking
- We are based on a farm, we have the opportunty to plan, plant and harvest a crop, or build something. Working along side each other, as well aas local practitioiners and visitors is the best way to meet new people and work with and internalise permaculture ideas at the same time
- Site visits — It is always good to seeamples of work in progress. Every permaculture site is unique, there is always something to learn
- Global connections –We will be working in real time with parallel courses with AfricanAcademy members.
Sector39 have delivered over 50 PDC’s in UK and increasingly in Africa, but this will be our first as the Academy. We have become a co-operative of members who are pioneering in their own communities and sharing that experience as a means of mutual support
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