North America's first convergence may not have had the flash of a Renaissance Festival, but the content of the presentations and conversations eclipsed even the intermittent thunderstorms and driving rain. Brilliant minds, diplomatic discourse, and energy
by Dan Halsey
We are proud to present version 1.0 of our "General Introduction Brochure to the EPT"!
We did a SWOC analysis of different educational structures:
This information can be used for:
The "Permaculture Learning Action Network" (PLAN) is a lean startup approach to building a sustainable network for sharing knowledge, working from available resources, developing them and growing from there.
Navigation, our group that focuses on strategy and how we relate to the outside world, hosted a couple of sessions exploring the future direction for the EPT. Throughout the Learning Partnership we discussed the possibility of a network of European Permaculture Associations and teachers, and at the meeting in Denmark a conversation cafe was held to look at what a network could do and what the next steps would be to progress it.
All subject to successful completion of the 72 hour Permaculture Design Course; qualifying period can be prior to the course provided it is permaculture-related.
Site design
10 designs recorded on paper (or justification of larger projects).
Site development
At least 3 years involvement, but can be just one site. Process of attaining sustainability for the site should have started. Documentation preferred.
Founded: 1995
Members: ca. 300
Aims and Objectives:
To spread permaculture.
To support permaculture projects in Sweden.
To collaborate with other Nordic pc organisations.
To connect permaculture practitioners.
Target Groups:
Not specified.
How stay in touch - and how to spread the word? Two questions that kept us busy.
In such a large Partnership, whose actors are spread out across Europe, how to organise communication in between personal meetings is a crucial question.
Being part of a global sustainability movement, there were some ethical concerns whether to use (and thus support) free services from big global corporations (like Google). We did test some other options but decided to stay with:
The Process-team both ensured a good flow of the meetings, using a number of techniques, and enabled newcomers to facilitation to learn, practice and improve their skills.
Initially at the kick off meeting of the EPT in Germany (August 2012) the group found great difficulty in deciding how it would work and move forward with delivering the stated outcomes of the Learning Partnership. Davie Philip from Cultivate Ireland suggested using the Viable Systems Model (VSM), as a way to structure the work of the partnership.