A three day training session at Void Art Centre exploring Social Permaculture, and the learnings we can take from ecological principles and patterns.
Training dates and times: Tuesday 6 February 2024, 10am-7pm / Wednesday 7 February, 10am-7pm / Thursday 8 February, 10am-7pm
PLEASE NOTE: The training lasts the duration of three days, please only sign up if you can make all the days. By buying one ticket, you are buying a ticket for the three training days.
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable and resilient communities and environments. It offers practical tools for generating productive and efficient landscapes as well as organisations and social structures.
While the discipline originated as an ecological method for designing sustainable full-featured human settlements, more recently the design principles have been applied in urban, social and group contexts to organise, communicate and cooperate more effectively, rethinking existing social and economic structures – we call this Social Permaculture.
Social permaculture is about connection – between people, economies, and governing structures – and creating the conditions for humans to flourish on a societal level.
The ethics and principles of permaculture suggest a strong critique of current forms of social organisation and economic relationships. If we take seriously the idea of learning from natural systems, we are encouraged to reimagine economic and social systems as embedded in these, supporting the resilience of the system as a whole. Learning about ecological principles and patterns can help us to transform our human interactions and organisations to be dynamic, responsive to change and a means of flourishing for everyone involved.
During three days in February (the 6th, 7th, and 8th), and then later through videoconference, participants will examine how to apply permaculture to an organisation through:
- Introduction to Permaculture & Social Permaculture.
- Working Effectively in Groups: how to collaborate effectively and strategies for creating environments in which something more than the sum of the individual parts can happen. Avoid the typical pitfalls for all groups (power, money, sexuality, etc.). How to increase the energy of an organisation and sustain it.
- Organisational and Decision-Making Structures.
- Facilitation, Meetings & Non-violent Communication.
- Going Forward as an Organisation.
The training will be facilitated by Alfred Decker, an award-winning permaculture designer, a certified educator with the Permaculture Association of Britain, and one of Europe’s leading and innovative permaculture educators. Alfred has also facilitated on two other events connecting permaculture to cultural institutions: Under the Paving Stones, the Soil! Online course in Permaculture, Art and Social Change; and Towards Perma-Cultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking, where he first met Void Director Viviana Checchia.
Void Art Centre is a wheelchair accessible venue. You can see a full, detailed description of access here.