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Permaculture Association of the Northeast

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Unconferencing – We Did!

PAN hosted its annual board, teachers and organizer’s retreat at the Omega Institute from October 8-11, 2017. This year those in attendance were the PAN board and a small, intimate group of committed network organizers from New York City to Boston. For this year’s retreat we chose to place some stronger focus on “unconferencing” which felt like a tremendous success. We’ve been hosting these retreats at Omega for about five years, and usually we have a full agenda, and between the facilitation and hosting, it doesn’t always feel like a retreat for some of us. This year we planned on plenty of unstructured time to hang out, network and play.

The work time that we put in was productive and we unveiled the standards pledge for feedback, planned for greater collaboration with PINA, reviewed and brainstormed the work that PAN does, came up with a work plan and a list of deliverables for 2018 and asked for feedback from members about benefits we could provide to the network. Your membership dues goes to support the work of PAN so that we can make our work freely available to the network and the world. The voluntary teaching pledge of standards will be an important document that will help aspiring new teachers in their workshop and course organizing efforts.

While the scheduled work times were productive, the “unconferencing” also proved to be very beneficial. We spontaneously decided to do a “show and tell” and give each other a profile of the work that we do in the world. We heard about landscape design and planning, a year-round K-12 grassroots educational program in New York City, and graduate level work defining a rubric for environmental services that can be incorporated into any design discipline.

The mealtimes at Omega were awesome as usual, with a fantastic buffet of local organic food, orange juice on tap and lots of tea. We were able to enjoy many of the amenities of Omega this year in a more laid back manner as well. Those included yoga, tai chi and meditation; an evening camp fire, hiking and boating; and of course the sauna and nap times. Jesse, an avid mixed martial arts fan, even fulfilled a dream of his by introducing a group of very progressive and open-minded permies to the sport on the big screen display we had in our meeting room.

For 2018 PAN is looking forward to organizing less conventions of our own, and we are looking forward to piggy-backing on existing events similar in focus. We are planning on developing a series of webinars that are focused on topics that will benefit our members in the work they do in the world. We are considering hosting the regional Northeast Permaculture Convergence (NEPC) in Maine in the summer of 2018, and we are looking forward to hosting you there! Once again, thanks for all the work you do in the world and thank you for your support of PAN!

Registration opens…2017 Northeast Permaculture Educators’ and Organizers’ Retreat

PAN Educators Retreat Attendees 2016

Basics for the 2017 Northeast Permaculture Educators’ and Organizers’ Retreat
What:  Networking, Co-Creation, and Fun
Date/Time:  Sunday, October 8 after 2 pm to Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Where:  Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY
Fees:  $150 to Omega for dormitory style lodging, meals, and accommodations* plus
sliding scale registration fee to PAN ($40-$90 PAN Members/$50-100 for nonmembers)
Registration – (Note: There will be two steps):  I want to register!
Registration deadline is Monday, October 2nd!
Note:  This year, Omega’s child care is not available during this time.  Babies in arms are welcome to attend with parent(s).

PAN at the Common Ground Fair!

Greetings PAN members and supporters!

We hope your summer has been fruitful, productive and nourishing.  PAN has been active this summer with helping to facilitate a distributed model of the summer convergence.  We helped raise awareness for local convergence events in Maine, New Hampshire and New York.  We staffed a table at New Hampshire permaculture day to talk with supporters, listen to their projects and share with people what PAN does.

We will continue with our outreach efforts, this time at the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity Maine coming up next week Sept 22-24.  We will be staffing a table for the duration of the fair, and we will talk about PAN’s mission, values, and the work that we do to support the regional network.  We will be talking about the 4 C’s of Connectivity, Communications, Convening and Capacity-Building.

This will be a great opportunity to interact with a large volume of people (something like 10k people/day) to talk about the value in the work that PAN does and the value in becoming a member of this organization to support our mission and work.

We need your help!  Many of you are likely already coming to the Common Ground Fair, and we need help staffing our table during this massive event.  We have a limited number of vendor passes we can give to those of you willing to help us table for a 2-3 hour shift.  That gets you into the fair for free!

Please contact us to schedule your volunteer shift and help us build capacity for our regional network!  And thank you!

2017 PAN Winter Retreat Registration – Conversation on Standards

Educational-Ecosystem-Graphic-Final-V2

Permaculture is at a tipping point. Now that it has reached a critical mass of practitioners and has entered into many mainstream venues, conversations around standards, who is qualified to teach and certify, and what the process is to become a teacher are coming to a head. PAN has been convening teachers and organizers around this topic for the last three years.  We have been documenting the ecology of permaculture education, asking important questions and listening. Growing out of these conversations and other national and regional conversations we’d like to establish a set of voluntary, bottom up,  standards and run a pilot program for permaculture teachers and courses in 2017.  This topic will be our main focus at the Winter 2017 Retreat. We will come together to pro-actively create pilot standards from and that are informed by our network.  Your continued input and feedback are important in this process. We would love to have you in this conversation  – please join us at the Winter Retreat, February 25th at D Acres in Dorchester,  New Hampshire

Here are some documents to help establish a common understanding:
Mapping the Permaculture Education Ecosystem
By Jono Neiger from our conversations during the 2014 PAN Omega retreat

Rough answers from our standards brainstorm 
During the 2016 Omega Teachers Retreat

Permaculture Institute of North America

REGISTER HERE

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PAN 2016 October Teachers Gathering: Report Back

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This past October the Permaculture Association of the Northeast (PAN) organized a deep and vibrant gathering of 27 teachers from the up and down the Northeast United States and Canada at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.  We gathered over many meals, fires and facilitated spaces to support permaculture teachers to continue improving the quality and outcomes of educational offerings and experiences, and to continue building a culture of mutual aid and reciprocity. Below you will find an brief report back from the gathering. Click here for a full version of the notes from the first day of the training including a resource list and detailed notes on retelling the permaculture origin story.

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Image Dan Schenk

The goal for this event was to increase the resilience of the Northeast region by strengthening the regional permaculture network and facilitating access to relevant education and resources.  We recalled at the 2014 North American Permaculture Convergence (NAPC) there emerged requests from the People of Color Caucus to center the topics of social justice, racial justice, anti-oppression and equity within our work.  During the first day of this capacity building and professional development gathering we responded to those requests with a day long diversity training with Relational Uprising.  Through unpacking dominant narratives, physical movement and sharing our own stories we learned that we don’t gain justice by merely increasing representation through tokenism, or shaming individuals for systemic problems. We gain justice from learning how to cultivate a culture shift in our community, deconstructing oppressive beliefs and stories and coming to embody our shared values. You can view a copy of the slides from the training here.

A delegation from this one day training is going to continue building on what we learned and network with other activists, organizers, movement builders and changemakers from diverse fields to build healthy, interdependent, relational culture in a four day training this December. Look for future report backs from this event.

We spent the second day exploring more connectivity and alignment between permaculture teachers in our region by brainstorming community-derived standards for permaculture educational quality. We did this by first getting an overview of what processes other countries and regions use to decide who can be permaculture teachers. We also heard a report back from a board member who was a part of a conversation around teacher qualifications at the recent NAPC (North American Permaculture Convergence). We then built on earlier conversations on how our region could take a bottom-up collaborative approach to defining quality standards for teachers in our region. We  broke up into small groups and brainstormed answers to four questions:  1) Why is a system of standards important or useful  2) What content considerations should be included in a quality standard?  3) What pedagogical (how we teach) or ethical considerations should be part of a standard?  4) How might PAN best implement and maintain a voluntary community-created system?

standardsDuring our February organizers retreat at D Acres in New Hampshire (February 24th and 25th) we will continue to winnow and come up with a draft round of voluntary standards that teachers will be able to pilot in 2017.  We would love your feedback and input on these questions. You can see the results of the questions and add your own feedback here.

The remaining part of the gathering was reserved for creating space for professional level peer-to-peer sharing and cross-training on quality educational and organizational practices for the permaculture community.

 

Topics included:

  • retelling the permaculture origin narrative from a social justice perspective
  • tips on how the Resilience Hub organizes successful events
  • playing the new-to-print social permaculture principles card game
  • how to tie in social permaculture by co-creating a problems mind map
  • …and many others.

We closed our gathering with several announcements including that PAN is hiring a part time virtual assistant and is looking for new board members. Information and a job description is available on our website.

We thank everyone who was able to devote their time and resources to this event.  For PAN members who could not attend, we invite feedback on community standards for quality permaculture education in our region.

If you are not yet a member, please join PAN today to keep supporting our network with events like these and our upcoming winter retreat at D Acres.

We hope to see you in February,

PAN Board,

Jesse Watson, Lisa DePiano, Steve Whitman, Taylor Rae Shuler, Lisa Fernandes, Keith Morris, Jono Neiger

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Why you should come to the Omega retreat

PAN has heard for a few years now that what the northeast network needs is a training in how to make our permaculture courses and events more relevant to communities of color.  As it stands now, the demographics of our network are fairly homogeneous, and that is understandably how the permaculture movement has started.  PAN is offering this professional development opportunity in service to that larger goal of making our work more relevant to a diversity of communities.

We are very excited that Relational Uprising will be facilitating the diversity training at the beautiful Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.  Here’s a bit more about them:

“Relational Uprising is a training and coaching project that supports activists, organizers, movement builders and changemakers from diverse fields to build healthy, relational-uprisinginterdependent, relational culture. We believe it is time for a new era of social change work in which we bring an intentionally humanizing, relational culture to our lives, organizations and movements. It presents a nuanced approach to issues of identity, intersectionality, and privilege using an embodied, relational practice of narrative and somatic movement.

The Culture of Radical Engagement (CRE) framework is based on an integration of social capital research, social neuroscience, radical relational theory, community organizing, and somatic education. It presents a nuanced approach to issues of identity, intersectionality, and privilege using an embodied, relational practice of narrative and movement. Training modules include: Stories of Separation, Stories of Connection, Ecology + Diversity, Support for Conflict Resolution. Originally incubated at The Relational Center from 2012-2015, Relational Uprising is now its own training and group facilitation project for changemaking communities.”

This training, all by itself, has a degree of importance, but so do the other facets of this retreat:
Day 1: Diversity Training with Relational Uprising
Day 2: Developing Community Derived Standards of Quality in Permaculture Education
Day 3: Peer to peer module and curriculum exchanges

Our goal is to support permaculture teachers in our region to continue improving the diversity1quality and outcomes of our educational offerings and experiences in service to our region.

WHEN:  Sunday October 16th (afternoon arrival / dinner / opening greeting Sunday eve) through Wednesday October 19th (am closing session followed by lunch and departure)

WHO:  Up to 30 individuals from our region (NJ/PA up through Eastern Canada) who self-identify as permaculture teachers and organizers who derive some portion of their livelihood from the design and delivery of permaculture educational events.

COST:  $200-300 per person.  Pay according to your means.  OMEGA is graciously subsidizing the cost in solidarity with the permaculture community.  The true cost of running this event is about $250 per person to cover both Omega expenses and the cost of the facilitators.

The time to register is now!  We’re delighted you’re here.

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