Project Description
Ethical digital tools awareness and literacy training to support CoLab members and the extended permaculture movement.
Expected Outcomes
Increased ethical literacy in the movement with a resulting reduction in carbon footprint.
Aimee Fenech, Anton Oussik, Dominik Jais, Alejandra Garcia, Julius Pisch-Johannsen
Group Accountability Officer: Anton Oussik
GROW Project, Training and eLearning
Project description
To design and deliver a capacity-building permaculture e-learning program for the International Permaculture CoLab & its allied networks on an annual basis.
Expected outcomes
E-learning courses that are relevant to CoLab members and Allied Networks are developed and delivered and remain available as an on-demand resources at no cost to the learner.
Link to this project’s previous work as the MVA
Aimee Fenech, Jyo Maan
Group Accountability Officer – Jyo Maan
Training and eLearning, Grow Project
The CoLab Podcast was funded through the Emergent Festival and is hosted on the Learn website.
In these Podcast interviews, we interview people from around the world who are involved in interesting and inspiring grassroots permaculture projects.
Aims of the project
The aim is to give a platform for grassroots permaculture projects to speak about what they are doing and to gain exposure and promotion.
We also aim to create a pool of educational resources that can be accessed by anybody. This will provide value and will help to attract people to the CoLab.
Charlie Wilson, Daniel Attwell
Reporting Officer: Daniel Atwell
Training and eLearning, Emergent festival, Next Steps project
We would prepare by using the CoLab slack channel and CoLab newsletter to find 6 willing participants who want to be interviewed about their grassroots permaculture projects. This could take 1 month.
Before the interviews, we would glean some basic information about the participant’s projects so that we can then prepare questions.
The interviews themselves would be 1 hour long at a maximum. We would aim to do one interview a week, over the course of 6 weeks. We would pay the participants a fee for the interviews as an incentive.
After the interviews, there may need to be some minor editing. We would need to do a short write-up and then upload the materials to the Learn website, perhaps adding some graphics and making it look presentable.
We would then seek to promote the podcasts using the CoLab Slack channel, CoLab LinkedIn, and CoLab newsletter.
We received extra funding and finally had the capacity to record 7 podcast interviews.
All of the interviews have been completed, listened back to, and edited. We have created a “home” page for the CoLab podcasts and then created individual web pages for each interview. We have added a write-up and some simple graphics.
One episode per month was released, as this allowed for promotion using the CoLab newsletter, slack channel, and LinkedIn channel. All podcast episodes are now up and available.
The biggest problem during the project was arranging interviews with people who didn’t show up. This happened a number of times and was a considerable waste of time for the team.
The best part of the project was learning about all of the wonderful grassroots projects and hearing inspiring stories from people making an actionable difference.
Preparation: Using the CoLab slack channel and CoLab newsletter to find 6 more and new willing participants who want to be interviewed about their grassroots permaculture projects. This could take 1 month.
Before interviews: get some basic information about the participant’s projects so that we can then prepare questions.
The interviews: 1 hour long maximum. Aim to deliver one interview a week, over the course of 6 weeks. We would pay the participants a fee for the interviews as an incentive.
After interviews: possibly minor editing. Prepare short write-up and then upload the materials to the Learn website, perhaps adding some graphics and making it look presentable.
We would then seek to promote the podcasts using the CoLab Slack channel, CoLab LinkedIn, and CoLab newsletter.
The CoLab Podcast, which has now been running for two years in a row has yet again been a very successful project with all our aims and objectives having been met.
We will soon roll out, in monthly installments, each of the interviews with the 6 grassroots permaculture projects and these will be found through the Permaculture CoLab Newsletter and on the Learn website:
We are creating and testing an online course that focuses specifically on creating accessible and safe work spaces and community spaces.
Project Aims
The course seeks to Promote Diversity, Accessibility, Inclusion, Equity & Justice in work spaces and within communities.
The course will be a resource that can be accessed by anybody who wishes to learn more about permaculture. It will add value to the CoLab space.
Charlie Wilson, Daniel Attwell
Reporting Officer: Charlie Wilson
Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Emergent festival, Next Steps project
April 2023
Daniel has already undertaken much of the work, transcribing audio segments and creating a well-structured course outline. We would like to add graphics and make the course more presentable. This could be done within a week.
Once this is complete we would promote the course on social media, including the CoLab Slack and the CoLab LinkedIn page, and run a first test version. We anticipate a month of promotion would be needed to get a willing team of participants to take the course.
We would first allow people to take the course for free and gather feedback. We would have to wait for people to complete the course, this could take 2-3 weeks. We would then use this feedback to improve the course and create a final version. This could be done within a week.
October 2023
Course creation has been completed. We promoted the course and had a number of participants who offered feedback.
We used the feedback to make necessary edits. Please feel free to take the course and apply it in your work spaces and then leave feedback for us to further develop it.
We hope it will add value for Permaculture projects to apply the design tools shown in the course and help give greater diversity within these communities.
Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) is a peer-to-peer process that commences with shared, deep-listening and, given that the peers are trained to function in both counseling and clienting roles, advances to a process involving structured, non-advisory attention from counsellors and discharge for clients. Roles are always exchanged in every session. Training is an essential element of RC.
The project seeks to engage Colab members to both give and receive one-on-one sessions to a level appropriate to their training and consistent with the peer-to-peer spirit fundamental to the RC ethos.
Please note: from the start of 2024, the Re-evaluation Counselling Scholarship Fund was merged as part of the MVA Project.
Andrew Langford, Vida Ashmole
Reporting Officer: Vida Ashmole
Training and eLearning, Diversity, participation and engagement, Next Steps project
2. Set out the program in service of general CoLab needs before the end of April 2023.
3. Delivering the program by End of third quarter October 2023, with associated artifacts and recordings.
We are working on developing our capacities to run the Oppression, Movement Building and our Relationships as Activists (OMBRA) workshop as an introductory overview of RC as a free course for all comers. We are doing this through regular monthly meetings and are referenced in this process by our Area Reference Person and the originators of the OMBRA workshop.
Meanwhile we are reconfiguring existing courses to focus on navigating conflict and de-colonizing our own thinking, these course being: –
Eliminating Common sources of Conflict from Group Dynamics (I am playing with renaming the Designing Productive Meetings and Events course here and am open to suggestions)
Reclaiming discharge – developing our capacity to courageously attend to eliminating hundreds to thousands year-old patterns of separation (aka oppressions and internalized oppressions of many flavors) including racism, the class system, domination of nature, sexism, imperialism and many more …
Liberation from oppression – understanding how oppressions arise, how these are spread and maintained and how these trap us in dysfunctional, irrational societies. The primary emphasis of this training is on practicing proven processes that enable us to turn the volume down on these noxious dynamics with the intention to eliminate them as thoroughly as we can.
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