Leading to certification, held over 5 weekends, starts this Sat, Lollard Street, SE11 6PY
Details received from Rakesh, 18/3/2011
We can confirm, as part of the workshop we will help to build an urban green roof on top of some council car garages; help design a growing space for a local GP, who wishes to prescribe gardening to his patients; design the retrofitting of an inefficient building to save on heat and lighting bills. We will also have workshops on natural bee keeping, vertical gardens, successful community gardening, creating urban back garden ponds, forest gardening, transition towns and retrofitting an urban Victorian house.
Now for the main blurb…..
Concerned about climate change, peak oil and our children’s future? Want to go green? Interested in creating Sustainable Local Communities? Fed up with the problems and want to start looking for solutions? Then this full Urban Permaculture Design Course accredited by the Permaculture Association Britain
(PAB) is for you.
Held over 5 weekends, in central London (border zone 1 and 2), it provides a broad introduction to the ethics, principles and applications of permaculture primarily from an urban perspective, and is for anyone who believes that we need to find ways to care for ourselves, for each other and for the Earth.
The course will give you a great understanding of the permaculture tools, which will allow you to start making your own sustainable designs, be it buildings, food growing, communities, economic systems, retrofitting urban house, etc. Upon completion of the course you will receive a permaculture design certification qualification accredited by PAB. You will also make connections to support you through your future projects.
The workshop will be taught by Graham Burnett from Spiralseed and Rakesh Bhambri, plus up to 5 specialist teachers. Graham is one of the most senior permaculture teachers in the London region and author of several books on sustainability, permaculture and community activism. Rakesh a diverse background, including IT, natural medicine, yoga, and of course permaculture. He spent most of the past 7 years facilitating permaculture, forest gardening and low impact living workshops in Croatia, which culminated in starting an off-grid eco village, which is still in the process of being built. He is currently in London setting up sustainable community projects.
Dates
Week 1 26+27 March
Week 2 9+10 April
Week 3 16+17 April
Week 4 14+15 May
Week 5 28+29 May
Some provisions have been made for people who cannot make all 10 days, please ask for more details
Location: Most of the workshops will take place at Lilian Baylis Old School,
Lollard Street, SE11 6PY, we will also have a few hands on practical workshops which will be walking distance from the main site.
Suggested Cost
* £550 Full payment
* £350 Low income discount
Please note, if you cannot afford the listed price, we have some reduced rate places available which can be paid in instalments. Let us know what you can afford, and we will see if we can accommodate.
How to register: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFdjeUVDVENNSHYyOXczMENHWXFaSXc6MQ
If you have trouble registering or need more info, feel free to email or call Rakesh 07575 009 322
What to expect
The course will start with an introspection of why you are on the workshop, asking you to creatively look into yourself to establish your life journey, your
ethics, your guiding principals. This helps you to establish your goals, your purpose, your reason for studying permaculture, which will help you get more
from the workshop. We will cover the history of permaculture, go through what permaculture is and debunk some preconceptions, i.e. what permaculture is not. We will cover the ethics and principles of permaculture, which are the bedrock upon which permaculture and sustainable living and design is built. We will therefore cover the ethics and principles several times throughout the 10 days, and in different ways (including some games), so they embed themselves in slowly but surely. We will cover many design and analysis techniques, so you are capable of using and adapting a design or analysis technique for almost any situation.
You will learn the beautiful art of observation.
We can cover various smallholding design and food growing concepts if people wish, but we anticipate most people on this workshop live in the city and
probably do not have access to large pieces of land. We will therefore concentrate more on how to design urban spaces. We will look at community
gardening, urban forest gardening (which make up the majority of my permaculture projects in London), especially community forest gardens.
One workshop which I have been developing over the years (and as far as I know is unique to me) is to look at your day to day energy consumption, and how you
can tweak your day to day life to become more energy and time efficient. We will cover food production, including soil fertility, water retention. We
will cover how to design efficient growing spaces. We cover building and retrofitting houses and other structures, including urban techniques of cleaning
waste water, making composting toilets, etc.
There will be several practicals, including helping to design and or make a green roof on a row of council garages; survey and mapping a site where we will
design a forest garden and food growing project; making a wormery or compost; pollarding or coppicing trees; making a self sufficient raised bed system.
We will cover transition towns (delivered by Duncan Law, a founder member of Transition Town Brixton).
We will include resilient economics and right livelihood. We will also include a module on using permaculture to design resilient, ethical, businesses.
You will be taught several surveying and mapping techniques, which you will then have plenty of opportunities to put into practice.
We will have a module on natural bee keeping, and be given a chance to help on some new local bee keeping projects.
There is potential for a lot more, and have built flexibility into the syllabus, so if someone from the course has a specialist subject and the group wants to
hear about we can give them the space.
All the workshops will be delivered using participatory and accelerated learning techniques, so it will be a mix of different styles (people learn in different
ways), so we use games, discussions, modelling, practicals, as well as a few lectures. The course is designed to remind and reinforce subjects, so the concepts embed themselves. All the learning culminates in a group design exercise, which for most people is the best part of the workshop. You are split into small teams and each is given a project to design, over the last 4 days of the workshop. You are given the tools to hold a client interview, analyse the information and create a
design. The designs are then presented back to the entire group, with feedback, followed by a celebration. There will also be scope for optional extra activities, such as film showings,
yoga classes, etc.
