Permaculture Design Course Become a certified permaculture designer, the ecovillage way

Get your Permaculture Design Certificate with the Global Ecovillage Network!

This special Permaculture Design Course explores Ecovillages as examples and sources of expertise for permaculture design in action.

Registration to the current cohort (November 2021 – January 2022) is now closed.

We are already welcoming pre-registration for the next cohort – expected early 2022. *When the details are finalised, you will be the first to know and invited to officially register.*

Learn Permaculture and Ecovillage Design online with experts and founders of the Permaculture and Ecovillage movements with this unique Permaculture Design Course.

From how to create a permaculture food garden to using the principles of permaculture in community design and beyond, this permaculture design course is designed to give you the tools, connections and capacity to skillfully bring permaculture into your life.

As a student, you get access to:

1. Live classes and workshops with amazing teachers, including Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren
2. A vibrant online learning community with changemakers from around the world, where you can interact, plan, collaborate and share your progress, insights and inspirations
3. Recordings of all live classes to watch or repeat at your leisure
4. Live Q&As and support to design your own permaculture project with lead facilitator André Soares, founder of Ecocentro IPEC and Planet Schooling
5. Handouts, exercises and course texts that are yours for life
6. Access to our short intro course to GEN and Ecovillages included in the price

Earn your Permaculture Design Certificate online

The course is certified by Ecocentro Ipec, Brazil and Ecoversity Academy, Australia as well as GEN, meaning you will be a certified Permaculture designer at the end.

To gain your certificate, you will need to complete 72 hours of coursework, which is standard for a PDC.

Permaculture, or permanent-culture as it was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Australia in the 1970s, is an applied systems thinking method using nature and conscious ecological design as a framework for building resilient systems. Permaculture teaches us to observe nature’s patterns to design regenerative systems that work with one another to create solutions.

This online course draws on expertise from around the world, and features some of the leading educators, innovators and practitioners in the field.

Your Committment

This course involves the 72 hours of active learning required for you to gain your Permaculture Design Certificate. Expect to spend a total of approximately 7 hours per week, divided into 3 hours of interactive live video classes, 1 hour live Q&A, and 3 – 4 hours of self-paced study to integrate and apply what you learn.

All live classes will be recorded and available for you to watch for the full duration of the course. To qualify for the certificate, we ask you to attend at least 80% of live sessions, complete online lessons, and delivery of a workbook and final project design.

Times

You will be studying with passionate people from around the world – a deeply enriching experience that also makes scheduling challenging. To support as many people as possible to participate fully, we will create a diversity of opportunities to take part in live sessions as well as ways to catch up or work asynchronously.

There will be live classes, and live Q&As at different times so that you can find a combination that works for you – attend the live class, or watch a recording and come to the live Q&A – the Q&A is open to everyone, whether you attended the live class or watched the recording.

Scheduling for a truly global audience is difficult, and we hope this setup will make it possible for many people to attend. There will also be ample opportunity to discuss with participants and facilitators in the online community and throughout developing your project design.

Costs and Scholarships

The cost of this course is £1,245.

You can check the approximate value in your currency here. You can pay by card, or via paypal or direct bank transfer – either the full price upfront, or in installments.

We offer scholarships for people from the Global South, from a non-majority background and/or from crisis areas. These will be allocated according to country of residence/origin, gender balance, diversity of ethnic background and cultural heritage, how you plan to apply what you learn, and meaningful role and service in your community. To make our scholarships possible we work with individuals and companies interested in supporting the regenerative movement. We also offer a ‘sponsor another student’ payment option during course registration, for those who want to give more in order to make it possible for someone else to attend.

If you are interested to apply for a scholarship, you are welcome to fill out this form, and we’ll get back to you!

Facilitators and Guest Teachers

A world-class team of pioneering Permaculture educators, practitioners and researchers will accompany you on your course, and answer your questions along the way.

André Soares – Lead Facilitator

Permaculture Design & Natural Building Expert

Since co-founding Ecocentro IPEC in Brazil in 1999, André Soares has understood the need for permaculture design to be both functional, culturally relevant and artistic. This has resulted in the Ecocentro IPEC demonstrating various natural building techniques/models that are low cost, energy efficient, use local materials and are beautiful.

André has been responsible for more than 8500 sqm of natural buildings and many replicable technologies developed with the interaction of communities that represent solutions for social transformation. He has taught permaculture education in Australia, USA, Portugal, SpainHaiti, Argentina, and Brazil. His work with composting toilets has been seen at Boom Festival, Global Eclipse Gathering, Burning Man Festival and Strawberry Fields Festival.

David Holmgren – Guest Teacher

Permaculture Co-originator, Author and Design Expert

David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator of permaculture. In 1978, he and Bill Mollison published Permaculture One, starting the global permaculture movement.

Since then, David has developed three properties, consulted and supervised on urban and rural projects, written eight more books, and presented lectures, workshops and courses in Australia and around the world. His writings over those three decades span a diversity of subjects and issues, whilst always illuminating aspects of permaculture thinking and living.

As well as immersion in the practical side of permaculture, David is passionate about the philosophical and conceptual foundations for sustainability, which is the focus of his Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002/2017). His Future Scenarios work has seen him recognised as a significant thinker about the ‘Energy Descent’ future. RetroSuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future (2018) is his 592-page manual showing how people can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens and selves for resilience into an uncertain future.

Lucy Legan – Guest Teacher

Permaculture Educator & Author of Planet Schooling

Lucy Legan is co-founder of Ecocentro IPEC in Brazil, the most comprehensive reference centre of sustainability in Latin America, demonstrating scalable social technologies models. She has been teaching sustainable education for over 20 years. Lucy has played an integral role in environmental education in Brazil, a best-selling author of educational books on sustainability literacy, and seed saving. She is a public speaker and long- time ecologist.

Lucy is passionate about encouraging individuals to take environmental actions that will make a difference. Her quirky edible gardens have been tasted at Boom Festival in Portugal, Global Eclipse Gathering in the USA, Rainbow Serpent Festival and Strawberry Fields Festival in Australia. She is both an M. Ed and a Diplomat in Permaculture since 2005.

Robyn Francis 

Permaculture designer, educator, presenter, innovator and founder of Permaculture College Australia

Having worked in Permaculture since 1983 throughout Australia and overseas, Robyn was founding director Permaculture International Ltd (PIL) in 1987, designer and creator of Djanbung Gardens, Australia’s leading permaculture centre, and was member of the National Reference Group which developed the Accredited Permaculture Training™ (APT) for Permaculture International.

Robyn has dedicated the past 25 years to empowering people to be effective agents of change. Her students include some of permaculture’s leading teachers and activists.

Taisa Mattos

GEN Educator Coordinator, Ecovillage Researcher and Author, Certified Gaia Education Trainer

Taisa is an experienced Gaia Education certified trainer. She has coordinated and taught Ecovillage Design Education Programmes since 2009, having contributed to 26 programmes so far, all over Brazil also in Portugal, Argentina, and Mozambique. Currently serving as Education and Research Coordinator at the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), Taisa works as an international trainer and consultant in the fields of sustainability, social innovations, and community life.

Ecovillage researcher and Board member of the International Communal Studies Association (ICSA), Taisa is the author of the book Ecovillages: building a regenerative culture.  She holds a masters degree in Communities and Social Ecology and is also a Professor at the Post-Graduate Program on Pedagogy of Cooperation and Social Methodologies in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (UNIP/Projeto Cooperação). 

Leader author of the GEN Regenerative Urban Communities Manual and Project Coordinator of the Ecovillage Transition in Action, an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project on collaboration between community-led initiatives and local authorities for regional sustainability. Taisa has contributed to transition initiatives both in urban and rural areas, being the co-founder of Terra Una Ecovillage (Brazil, which she left in 2013) and other small urban communities in Rio. She has been actively engaged with the Ecovillage Movement since 2004.

Robina McCurdy

Permaculture Educator, Ecovillage Co-founder & Community Building Expert

Robina has been engaged in community development, organic growing, permaculture design and tutoring on a global scale for the past 25 years. She is the founder of the Institute of Earthcare Education Aotearoa, co-founder of Tui Land Trust & Community in Golden Bay, NZ and pioneer ofthe S.E.E.D (Schools Environmental Education & Development) programme in South Africa and Brazil.

She has developed a range of environmental education resources and participatory processes for collectivedecision-making and action – most notably ‘Grounding Vision, EmpoweringCulture’, a community facilitation manual, and ‘Grow It!’, a Home Garden coaching series.

Robina has taught & applied her powerful community-building methods with households, neighborhoods, schools, farms, ecovillages & bioregions, in Aotearoa/New Zealand and many countries overseas. Over the past few years she worked as the designer & co-ordinator of the Victory Community Health Gardens in Nelson and a permaculture educator with Project Lyttelton’s ‘Harbour Basin Food Resilience’ project in Christchurch. Since spring 2012, she has spent most of her time in a voluntary capacity, creating, directingand managing Earthcare’s ‘Localising Food’ project.

Roberto Perez – Guest Teacher

Environmental Education & Biodiversity Program Director, the Foundation for Nature & Humanity

Born in Havana in 1970, Roberto Perez is the Environmental Education & Biodiversity Conservation Program Director of the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity, the oldest environmental organization in Cuba. A graduate of the University of Havana with a degree in Biological Sciences, he later did post graduate specialization in Community Based Natural Resources Management at the University of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Roberto has been part of the Cuban Permaculture movement since its introduction in the country in 1993 after the so called “Special Period”, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union when Cuba lost access to oil, fertilizers, pesticides, and virtually all trading partners that the small island nation depended on to survive, facing economic collapse overnight. He is one of the primary interviewees in the extremely popular, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, produced in 2005. Roberto has traveled extensively presenting Cuba’s approach to sustainable living in the face of declining petroleum and other non-renewable resources.

Rosemary Morrow

Permaculture Educator, Author & Expert in Post-Distaster Regeneration

Rosemary Morrow trained in agricultural science at Sydney University, rural sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris, development at Reading UK and horticulture at TAFE but, after spending time in Africa, she realized there needed to be a better alternative to conventional agricultural practices. She found this in the ethics and integrated applied science of permaculture, and has been teaching permaculture ever since. She is the author of numerous publications including Permaculture Teaching Matters,  The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture, which has been translated into many languages, and The Earth User’s Guide to Teaching Permaculture.

For almost 40 years Rosemary has worked extensively with farmers and villagers in Africa, Central and South East Asia and Eastern Europe. Rosemary has especially dedicated much of her efforts to refugees the people of war-torn nations such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and East Timor, and to communities experiencing the serious effects of climate change like the Solomon Islands, and the effects of the GFC, like Spain, Greece and Portugal.