If you are considering a PDC, make sure you find the one that is a good match for you and a good value for your investment of time, money and energy.
Here are a few of the things that characterize The Resilience Hub PDC that might be of value to you.
Facilitators’ Permaculture Design Experience and Implementation Experience
The Resilience Hub and Midcoast Permaculture are active professional permaculture design organizations with several years’ of in-the-field applied experience behind them. The Resilience Hub alone provides design service to more than 50 design clients every year, and we learn new things on every job, so you can imagine what we’ve been exposed to that we can use as learning leverage in service to you! Too many design courses are taught by people who have little or no design experience so ask questions. We also have over 20 years of experience with applied, hands-on application of techniques like annual and perennial growing systems, renewable energy, building science, land management and acquisition, earthworks and contracting…just to name a few.
Facilitators’ Effective Teaching Experience
The Resilience Hub is closing in on teaching its 20th Permaculture Design Course and just completed its 5th Advanced Permaculture Design Course. We have a commitment to seeking and using feedback, improving our convening techniques, being deeply responsive to student learning needs and styles…this means you benefit from the many iterations of our PDC that have come before. Of course, just because someone has taught a course many times, doesn’t mean they do it well! That’s why we always collect student feedback and evaluations, focus on quality and learning outcomes, and make improvements with every single PDC we offer. If you are looking at other PDCs, find out about the history of the facilitators and how many times they have co-taught a PDC and if they have past student feedback to share.
Participatory Learning Environment
As described on our Learning Environments page, we are constantly evolving the “pedagogy” of our permaculture education programs so that we live into the ethics and principals of permaculture in “how” we teach, not just what we teach. Our PDC has the minimum about possible of sitting around listing to lectures and looking at slideshows (though a little bit in unavoidable). We use Art of Hosting practices and patterns to keep things interesting, dynamic and suitable to the learning style and energy of the group. If you are looking into other PDCs, find out what percent of class time is “lecture/slideshow.” Find out if the group sits in a circle or in the old-school “theater/classroom” style.
A Learning Group, Not Just a Group of Learners
As one of our students recently said, “I arrived to the PDC as an ‘I,’ and I’m leaving as part of a ‘We’ that I didn’t even know I wanted.” As discussed in the Online vs. In-Person PDC page, one of the important potential outcomes (if you want it!) is the ability to build connections, community and a supportive network for your future permaculture practice.
Access to The Resilience Hub and Northeast Regional Permaculture Network
The Resilience Hub is one of the largest and most active permaculture networks in North America, organizing more than 70 educational and community building events per year for its 2600+ members. It collaborates with professionals and organizations and businesses across Maine and the Northeast. We are nested within the broader, vibrant Northeast Permaculture Network. The Resilience Hub PDC facilitators have played active leadership roles in our regional network since 2010 and have organized two large-scale regional convergences. Joining our PDC helps you tap into all that.
Commitment to Ethics and Values
We are not in this to get rich or feed our egos (if it were, we should have chosen different professions anyway!) This work is in service to you, our entire earth community and to future generations. We strive to improve what we do only insofar as it helps us perform that service. We are committed to the evolution of our own work, and that of the permaculture community at-large, in the direction of greater social justice, anti-oppression and the intersection of permaculture and decolonization. We are also committed to modeling new economic structures within which people who do the work of earth repair and relationship repair can secure the financial and non-financial resources needed to live a healthy, just life, even while we still live amongst the problematic economic and cultural dynamics that still exist.
If these attributes of our work resonate for you, consider enrolling in one of our next courses.