01101 Permaculture Projects for your Community or Campus

A permaculture structure for your campus.

First things first, as we often say, and second things second. You need an on-campus structure that can interact with other on-campus organizations and your school’s administration.

This involves reviewing the basics of all structures: shared map, shared values, leadership plan.

Research. Every school will have a procedure for approving new organizations on campus. Find that procedure, study it, and develop a written plan to start your organization that meets your school requirements.

Meet and Greet. Look for other students on campus who share your interest. Hold a meeting to discuss forming a permaculture group on your campus.

Find a faculty advisor. Most schools require a faculty advisor for student organizations. It’s always best to approach a professor already known to one or more of the members of your group. If none of you have such contacts, look for someone who perhaps teaches some kind of sustainability course at your school.

Decide on a first project. Start with something easy. Your group should spend some time observing the way campus life works at your school. Those observations, and suggestions from here and elsewhere, will help you find something that is easy and doable. You want something easy because you want your first activity to be successful. You don’t want to start with a spectacular failure.

Give yourself a name. One common organizational practice within the permaculture movement is to refer to permaculture organizations as “guilds.” So you could be the (name of your school) Permaculture Guild — or Permaculture Guild of (name of your school).

Education. Education is always in order. Hold weekend workshops, present short seminars, give presentations to groups. Sponsor speakers. Do demonstrations. Start a website and an online discussion group or bulletin board system, to facilitate communication. Form iPermie study groups.

Campus Recycling. If your campus doesn’t recycle, that’s a place to start. It’s possible that your school could even make money on the deal or at least cover its costs.

Campus Composting. This project directs campus organic waste (from cafeterias) to a compost system. Ideally, the compost would be used to grow more food to supply the cafeterias. Look for professors doing research and see if their research projects could be linked in some way to composting.

Campus Vermiculture. Extra points all around if food waste from the cafeteria feeds worms in greenhouses, where greens grow using worm tea and compost, producing food for the cafeteria. Note the beneficial connections of this particular project. This idea derives from a successful Saginaw Valley State University project. Professors use the greenhouse project and its associated vermiculture project for academic research.

Dormitory Energy Conservation. Sponsor a campus contest among the dormitories to see which dormitory could reduce its ecological footprint for energy and water the most. This is likely to be a popular idea with your university’s administration, since a successful project could significantly reduce the operating cost of the dormitories.

Campus Vision. What is the permaculture vision for your campus? Remember the example of a forest, which has no human caretaker, yet it is abundant and productive. What would your campus look like if it were like a forest, where all of its needs were met within itself with the addition of solar energy and rainfall. This could be a fun, ongoing game where you could learn design concepts while rethinking your campus.

Permaculture Career Advising. As your permaculture skills increase, you can provide career guidance to students who want to work in permaculture design or use permaculture design in their careers. You can promote worker owned cooperatives as an alternative for graduating seniors in a difficult job market. You can help students decide if they really should be in university, or if there are other options for them.

Edible Landscaping. Encourage your campus to green its landscape by planting edibles and demonstration gardens, with the food going to the campus cafeterias or local food security organizations.

Organic Campus. Every campus should be certified organic! Pesticides and herbicides are harmful for students and other living organisms. A certified organic campus is a selling point for recruiting students.

Community Permaculture Organization Projects

For non-students living in urban neighborhoods. . . everyone needs a community permaculture organization. It can help spread the word about permaculture and be a voice for the neighborhood when interacting with the government.

Start with education. One way to find kindred souls in your neighborhood is to have a series of workshops or presentations on sustainable living topics. For example, if your neighborhood is mostly rental apartments, do a program on “How to cut the energy bill for your apartment.” Or, “Growing food in urban areas.”

Starting the organization. Once you have made some contacts and found some kindred souls, the group can organize itself more formally. You can incorporate as a nonprofit, or you can simply be an unincorporated association. Incorporation carries its own issues, so unless it’s needed for a specific reason (like to apply for a grant), unincorporated association status works well. Get yourself a name and work out what your organization will do and how it will do it.

Growing food in small spaces. Given the limited areas available in urban neighborhoods, teaching folks how to maximize the use of small spaces for food growing should be popular and is an effective topic on which you can start. In Venezuela, they pioneered a program to plan 8,000 one-square-meter gardens. Their results indicate that even in such a small area, they could grow 330 lettuce plants, or about 40 pounds of potatoes or 35 pounds of squash, if planted continuously throughout the year.

Solving the specific problems of your area. Your neighborhood has specific problems, you can hold a series of meetings to talk about those problems and brainstorm solutions. As that process continues, you may want to go deeper into community organization and use the strategies and tactics described in the Community section to develop an effective neighborhood organization to support the people in your area in their efforts to solve the problems of the neighborhood.

Edible landscaping. Encourage your municipal government to plant edible landscaping in areas like parks, street medians, and other government properties.

Promote passive solar. Educate people about the advantages of passive solar heating. Hold workshops on building small window-box solar air heaters.