Autumn/Spring 2023 Golden Bay Sustainable Living Course Live and Learn the Future

Our 11-week Sustainable Living Course offers a compelling menu of hands-on, experiential learning modules covering seven core areas plus a personal research project. The course utilizes a wealth of living examples within Golden Bay and some of the world’s best local experts who will facilitate your learning with interactive tutorials, hands-on practical work and field trips. The course is taught by local and international experts, Sol Morgan, Robina McCurdy, Kerryn Easterbrook, John Massey, Rita Scholten & Zahra Lightway.

Course participants will have lots of fun, some of the best learning needed to survive and thrive in the 21st Century and support in getting your best visitor experience in beautiful magical Golden Bay. 

Course content:

Personal Well-Being
Sustainable living begins with self-care through self-awareness and healthful habits. We offer a toolkit of practices to help you achieve a strong, happy, vibrant body, mind & soul so that you have the energy vitality & presence to achieve your dreams.
The well-being module begins with coming to awareness of each of these aspects by slowing down, breathing more deeply, and dropping into the present moment with mindfulness practices. Beginning March 2021, we have introduced a new incredibly transformative element to our well-being module called Possibility Management. It gives us a framework and tools for personal inner transformation and transformation of our relationships. This type of work is essential for personal sustainability in this world.

Permaculture Design Certificate Training
Internationally renowned tutor, Robina McCurdy teaches the Permaculture Design module of the Golden Bay Sustainable Living Course. You will learn how to design and live in a sustainable and regenerative way.

This module asks of us to fully engage our head, our heart, and our hands. It deepens and extends the standard 2-week international Permaculture Design Certificate curriculum over an extended period.  This additional time enables us to offer a broader experience including more community building, hands-on skill-building activities, mini-design exercises, and visits to inspirational properties which demonstrate permaculture in practice.  More…

Organic Food Growing

Organic growing follows the motto of Soil & Health Association, the world’s oldest organic organisation:

“Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people, healthy planet.”

Long-time gardener and co-founder of the Golden Bay Sustainable Living Course, Sol Morgan, will teach the organic growing module. Under his expert tutelage, you will deepen your awareness of how to work with natural ecosystems to create healthy soil, healthy food and healthy environments.

You will gain understanding of how to achieve diverse productive healthy ecosystems that support your lifestyle, local resilience and help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the atmosphere into the soil, and learning how to grow more healthy plants and trees.

With practical hands-on experience, you’ll gain skills needed to create…more

Sustainable Eating

Sustainable Eating tutor, Kerryn Easterbrook, guides you to learn about food from garden to table by teaching you to harvest, prepare & preserve your food.

You will plan a menu using only local, organic in-season ingredients, debate the merits of various diets, go on field trips to local cafés and businesses. All in a day’s work really.  More…

Natural Building
“Natural building” refers to construction methods that differ from mainstream modern architecture. They often use natural building materials, with a strong emphasis on sustainable design and local sourcing.

Rita Scholten, local entrepreneur, leads you on an experiential journey of building using wattle & daub, mud-brick, and straw bale. Learn the practical theory behind:

• • Sick vs healthy homes
  • Grey water systems
  • Waste systems
  • Use of local, non-toxic materials
  • Alternative power systems
  • House design practicum and more.

You will help biild a beautiful new structure at Rita’s home just up the road from the Centre.

Community Resilience
Explore Golden Bay as a unique bioregion and determine the real meaning of resilience and how we can become more so from a permaculture design perspective. We will examine what is working already and what needs to change.  You will experience our Community Board, local sustainable businesses including a local organic grocery, the community housing trust, study our crisis management plan, and use tools from GEN to explore multiple themes with Robina McCurdy.

Project Management & Sustainable Business
Sustainable business is the business of economic and ecological sustainability for personal projects and planetary change.  It is vital that our work and life passions are aligned in such a way as to benefit ourselves, our clients, and our planet.

This module will delve deeply into conscious business ethics, principles and outcomes by working on a real life project more…

Taught by tutor and course co-ordinator, Zahra Lightway.

Personal Project
Supported by our tutors, engage in researching and developing a project area of your choice that will increase sustainability in your life, your region, your world, just one or all three.