Community Abundance growing in Powell River

I’ve just returned to Vancouver after another inspiring session at our Creating Community Abundance project in Powell River/Sliammon Territory, and I’m so excited about this new model of permaculture education and what it means for my personal practise, and for the communities that I’m honoured to be involved in.

It’s always been important to me to really focus on the Fair Shares aspect of the three ethics that underlie Permaculture as a design system, and look at ways that sharing the benefits of our work out into our community can be a front-and-centre part of all of our work.  In this project, we’re not just creating the course for the sake of the course, but rather are convening the learning process as just one of many functions embedded into a multi-year project to create a Permaculture demonstration garden in the centre of the Powell River townsite.  It feels so good to be focussing our learning around a real, tangible project whose benefits will spiral out into the community for years to come.

This is important to me because I really believe that individual actions by themselves will not get us through the multiple social, economic, and ecological crises that we are facing.  Only as a collectivity are we going to survive – there’s only one planet Earth, and either we all step up to repairing the damage that we’ve done, or we all go down together.  There are so many barriers between us that are the historical detritus of the systems of exploitation and destruction that dominate our world right now, and I have seen the magic that happens toward undoing those barriers when people are able to build something together, something real that they can pick up and touch (and eat!) that makes their whole community stronger, more abundant, and more beautiful.  So huge thanks to everyone who participated this weekend, and especially to my fantastic co-teacher Ron Berezan, for such a great and inspiring weekend.  I can’t wait to see what unfolds next!