PAN

Permaculture Association of the Northeast

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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

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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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PINE is now PAN, Paid Staff, Save the Date, New Board Members!

Summer Greetings for 2016!  
We hope that your trees and shrubs are bursting with fruit, your permablitzes are bustling and you’re taking time to cool off in some of our refreshing bodies of water. A lot of exciting things have been going on with our Northeast regional permaculture network this year and we have a lot to share.  

PINE is Now PAN!

We are excited to announce that we have formally changed our name to PAN – the Permaculture Association of the Northeast, your permaculture association.  

As a non-profit “committed to increasing the resilience of the Northeast by strengthening ouScreen Shot 2015-10-29 at 2.54.39 PMr permaculture network and increasing access to education and resources,” it became clear in the Fall of 2015 that we have not really been an “Institute” but rather a connected network of people finding strength in our shared “Association” with one another.  The new name better represents the non-hierarchical and mutually beneficial relationships we aim to create, guided by our stated values.

For over a decade, the Northeast Permaculture Network has thrived and grown from the seeds planted by ‘P.I.N.E.’– a clever acronym that reflected the existing models of regional permaculture organizing at the time of our inception.  Over this past decade we’ve seen a robust run of regional summer convergences, exponential growth in permaculture education opportunities, countless sub-regional guilds, gatherings, working farms, businesses and demonstration sites take root.  At some level we have seen permaculture enter into more mainstream awareness.

As always, our work has been about connecting and capacitating the decentralized and autonomous nodes of permaculture activity across our region.  We will continue to honor the principles of self-organizing systems and ecological patterns across our amazing permaculture community.  PAN does its best to reflect these models and be of service to on-the-ground permaculture work across our region.  We think of ourselves as the mycelial threads that connect the various fruiting bodies located throughout our region and we wanted our name to reflect what we actually do.

PAN is excited and well-positioned to look for key leverage points, to fulfill our mission, and be of service to all peoples and beings in our region.  We’re excited by new waves of leadership and permaculture’s continued development and novel expressions … Please join and take part!

PAN’s Evolution – In Service to Our Network

Part-time Paid Staff – We have achieved quite a bit as an all-volunteer organization but we are hitting a growing edge! To better support the network we are going to transition from an all-volunteer board running the operations of PAN to having a part-time staff person help provide consistency and stability with our work for you.  We will be announcing this opportunity soon through our regional listserv, blog and social media sites.

Hands1What Does PAN Do? 4C’s!

PAN exists to grow and strengthen the network and support the effectiveness of all the local permaculture nodes (individuals, organizations, businesses, farms, etc.) across our region.

We are focused on the 4C’s of Connectivity, Communications, Convening and Capacity-Building toward that purpose.

CONNECTIVITY – Who else is doing permaculture in your area? How do you find them? What learning resources and peer-to-peer connections are available?  PAN will continue to grow connectivity tools to help you find what you need, connect to resources and people, and ultimately accelerate your ability to move along your permaculture path, whatever it may be.  Connectivity might be online, at one of our regional gatherings and convergences or by connecting you directly to the resource or professional you need.  Connectivity also means cross-pollinating with other affinity networks and movements!  More of that on the docket soon!

COMMUNICATIONS – PAN’s website now features a directory of regional courses (more than 20 this year!) and a directory of demonstration sites and job/intern opportunities coming soon.  We will be stepping up our social media presence, blog posts and newsletters in order to keep you posted on cutting-edge permaculture work in our region and around the globe.

CONVENING – Summer Convergences return in 2017 (perhaps in a more festival-style format!). This fall we are convening a professional development retreat for permaculture teachers.  In February we gather with other local organizers and activists to share ideas and updates about the year ahead.  We are available to spread the word on sub-regional gatherings and local convergences as well.  One of the most powerful assets to our regional network is that we are operating at a scale that allows us to connect face-to-face for true connectivity and relationship-building.

seed-saving-heroCAPACITY-BUILDING – Fiscal sponsorship is one of the ways PAN can help your local project build capacity.   Are you looking for grant money or tax deductible donations to fund your activities?  As members of the Permaculture Association of the Northeast, you can use our nonprofit status to acquire those funds for your project.  For more details on fiscal sponsorship click here:  http://northeastpermaculture.org/fiscal-sponsorship/  And we hope that through connectivity, communications and convenings…we also achieve a level of capacity-building and skill-sharing that is just hard to get otherwise.

October 2016 Permaculture Teacher Professional Development Retreat at OMEGA

1374348_963016073714897_4570522059429145025_nOur region is already a leader in quality permaculture education, yet we want to support a culture of improvement, quality and mutual aid in the evolution of permaculture education.  Toward that goal, PAN will convene up to forty individuals from our region (NJ/PA up through Eastern Canada) who self-identify as permaculture teachers who derive some portion of their livelihood from the design and delivery of permaculture educational events.  The OMEGA Institute is once again generously subsidizing this event in support of our network.   Content of the retreat will include 1) peer-to-peer training on the design/delivery of permaculture educational material, 2) dedicated time working social justice & anti-oppression topics relevant to our teaching work, and 3) working on the creation of voluntary, community-created standards of quality for permaculture education in our region.  More details coming soon.   Save the date:  October 16-19, 2016

PAN Board News – Welcome New Board Members!
Taylor Shuler is a NYC native.  She was getting a Masters in Cross-Cultural and Sustainable Business Management at the American University of Paris (in Paris, France) when she came across permaculture in research she was doing for a term paper. Two weeks later, she flew to nearby Portugal for a PDC that was certified by the Permaculture Association (UK). She wrote her masters thesis about applying permaculture to business management and corporate governance. Social permaculture now plays into her job everyday. She attended the Women’s Permaculture Teacher Certification held at the Omega Institute in August 2015 with Lisa DePiano.  

Steven Whitman is a professional planner and educator based in New Hampshire and his work is focused largely on community planning and ecological design. Steve is a certified permaculture teacher having completed his Permaculture Design Course at Crystal Waters , and his teacher training at Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute. Steve is also an adjunct faculty member at Plymouth State University, Colby Sawyer College, and Green Mountain College and is completing a Doctor of Education focused on local decision making and ecosystem services. Steve frequently teaches courses in the US and internationally in community and environmental planning, ecovillage design, and permaculture. Steve lives in Plymouth, NH and participates in a wide range of grassroots efforts that promote community resilience.

JOIN PAN – Grow and Strengthen our Regional Network

We need you to help keep our northeast network thriving and healthy. If you are not yet a PAN member join today. Your membership dues are directly supporting our work to grow and strengthen the permaculture network in the Northeast.  Your support makes Connectivity, Communications, Convening & Capacity-Building happen!  We give thanks for all your support!

Save the Date – Northeast Permaculture Teachers Professional Development Retreat

featured5Permaculture Friends,

Do you identify as a permaculture teacher, permaculture educator or designer of permaculture educational experiences?

This fall, the OMEGA Institute in Rhinebeck NY is once again generously offering their space in service to our regional network. PAN (Permaculture Association of the Northeast; formerly PINE), is organizing this event at OMEGA.

The overall goal of this professional development retreat is to continue to be a learning community that innovates and improves the entire field of permaculture together, collaboratively, in service to our whole region!

This is what we know so far:

  1. This will be a professional development retreat for permaculture teachers and persons who identify as earning some portion of their livelihood from permaculture education.
  2. DATES: Arrival at OMEGA will be afternoon of Sunday, October 16 (Opening Circle that night).  Departure will be Wednesday, October 19 after lunch.
  3. There will be a limited number of spaces available due to the logistics of the site, etc.
  4. There will be a sliding-scale cost to attend to cover some of the costs of lodging and food.  The balance is being donated by OMEGA.1374348_963016073714897_4570522059429145025_n
  5. There will a request for your online feedback published in the next couple of weeks to determine your top priorities for the content of our professional development retreat.
  6. We will open up registration in August.
  7. In addition to what we hear from you, the retreat will very likely include topics such as 1) social justice and anti-oppression work in permaculture education, 2) peer-to-peer cross training on best practices for designing and delivering specific permaculture modules (content and pedagogy)** and 3) furthering the work of creating voluntary community-based standards of quality for permaculture work in our region.  There will be pre-work on this last point prior to the retreat.

So please save the date and we look forward to seeing you in the fall!

** An example of this can be found in the “Permaculture Teachers’ Guide” assembled from the work of many European teachers sharing modules with one another.