Below, a selection of the convergence workshops are detailed. This is to give a flavour of what's on offer.
A document of all workshop descriptions can be downloaded as a PDF.
Bob has developed a permaculture design process and tools for polyincome based on the OBREDIMET design framework. It focusses on the relationship between income, outgoings and how people choose to spend their time, evaluating the trade-offs between them in a visual, interactive way.
This workshop is for people who want to gain skills in representing their design on paper with professional drawings. Sophie will go through initial sketching techniques, before showing participants drawing techniques specific to three phases of permaculture design; site analysis, conceptual design and detailed drawings.
Come along to learn how, when and why to make & apply biochar; develop cascading yields of probiotic feed supplements, water cleaning, restoration of degraded soils, blackwater to energy systems, invasives to energy systems, carbon-negative ecovillage, hotel and business design, simple kiln design & microenterprise potentials.
A presentation on how to create an oasis in the high desert by honoring, conserving and reusing water in multiple ways.
Participants will come away with real world examples of regenerative water relationships and drought proofing your designs in a changing climate.
A Q&A on composting toilets. Many still have doubts about the compost toilet: which system to choose, safety, how to use the compost. Marc can answer all those questions from his own experience and scientific research on the subject. After a short intro on compost toilets and Marc's favorite design, Jenkins' loveable loo, participants can fire away.
Goats can be a useful provider of milk, meat and weed control (amongst other things), but they can also be very destructive and capricious. This workshop will discuss how to design a goat into a permaculture system, their yields and needs, the time commitments involved, and other aspects of goat keeping.
Learn the process of felting from a raw fleece, and understand how it works.
By the end of the session we will have created a rug from raw wool!
Come along to discover the magic of elderberries. This will be a demonstration, knowledge sharing and tasting session of making elderberry syrups including:
* Picking, preparing, cooking and bottling
* Why bother to make this and other herbal medicines? - Ideas and Inspiration
* Inviting participants to share their knowledge and recipes
This workshop will explain what no dig gardening is, the benefits, and how to go about it, including setting up and maintaining your garden. Aljaz will present a number of pictures which demonstrate the rseults of no-dig, as well as exploring soil life basics and no-dig techniques. Participants should come away with the courage and knowledge to try no-dig gardening for themselves.
A simple, powerful, practical knowledge transfer, introducing the tool that will change the way you look at pallets!
Exploring creative ways of using a junk covered site to become a productive veg plot.
This workshop aims to provide inspiration for creating growing containers and growing beds from recycled materials, including how to:
Using results from the workshop 'Graduate Studies in Permaculture Design at University - how will we do it ?' this discussion will explore the practicalities of delivering high quality programs around the world, bearing in mind existing permaculture organisations, education protocols and government regulations.
This proposal opens the door to another way of seeing how we can prepare educational spaces where kids, youth, and adults can learn what they want to learn in the moment they want to learn it, using a practical methodology, with a teacher who observes from the back of the “New Classroom”
Permaculture Children's House Academy is a developing academy and education centre which blends Permaculture, Montessori education, Arts, Cooking and Language learning, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The academy has the potential to be a model or example - possibly a global model - that can be used in other communities and countries.
In this engaging session we will play and share some systems games suitable for use with adults and children. Join in for an experiential grounding in systems and complexity science, and to fulfil your human need for play!
This workshop will be a platform for sharing a holistic tool for helping schools to implement permaculture in an inclusive and participatory process.
Ideal for anyone looking to gain the skills to confidently facilitate integrated land design workshops in schools.
This workshop offers an introduction to citizen science and to the exciting Permaculture International Research Network (PIRN) project, run by the Permaculture Association.
Workshop about making various skincare products, particularly creams and ointments, both cosmetic and medicinal, using simple natural components such as oils, waxes and plant materials. We will discuss how people can make products tailored to their needs, so they can stop using commercial products.
Many modern societies have lost the skills of fermentation. This workshop will highlight how we can connect to our own well being, build community, connect to our heritage and ensure the future health of our children by reconnecting the life in our soils to the life in our guts through nutritious food, adventure and creativity!
A permaculture approach to achieving personal productivity while staying sane, inspired by David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' method.
Come to this workshop if you want to learn about a systematic approach to personal organisation, and gain an understanding of how this personal organisation system can be shaped to suit you.
An exploration into how permaculture can be used to nurture our inner landscape. Participants will have the chance to examine some of their own personal patterns of thinking and behaving and open up to possibilities of incorporating more permaculture thinking into their everyday lives and well-being.
All of your permaculture practices will involve the element of YOU. The more aware you are of your needs, wants, behaviours, characteristics, patterns, etc., the more conscious of your landscape you will become. Knowing self also supports you understanding "other" (clients, project partners, etc.), which enables us to be more effective practitioners.
Robyn will tell the story of how she started up Pip Magazine and how crowd funding was such an integral part of the process, before explaining the process of running a successful crowd funding campaign.
CASA - Council of Sustainable Settlement of Latin America- is a network of world changers at a continental level.
This session will walk through the process of permaculture design as applied to a healing retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon, the Temple of the Way of Light. The presentation explains the reasoning behind our design decisions specific to this climate and mission, as well as describing useful design products.
Val Grainger, Wilf Richards, Hannah Thorogood and Ben Margolis
Four inspiring UK LAND centres will co-present at this 2-hour workshop. You will meet:
Permaculture in Ukraine and GREAN Palestine will explore the contexts facing the communities that we work with, explain the methodologies we are employing, and lead a discussion on how permaculture design can help create a measure of security for people suffering from military conflicts.
In a selection of inspiring pictures, Murad presents the history of Permaculture in Palestine, and in particular Marda Permaculture Farm. Describing the aims and activities of the project and successes they have enjoyed, as well as the challenges faced by occupation.
The urgency to act on climate change has never been greater, and the broad permaculture movement offers many solutions and vitally important approaches. But how do we get them widely adopted, and how do we counter the blocking forces of big oil, big money, and big ignorance? Where are the pressure points, and how do we use our resources most effectively?
Aranya
Nature suggests that our ancestors made one significant choice that changed everything and led us to the vulnerable place we're now in. Without this key understanding we're missing an important piece of the puzzle. This workshop explores the many ways we're now out of sync with our environment and how permaculture thinking can offer us solutions.