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A LOOK INSIDE THE SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY COURSE + ANNOUNCING OUR 4 PERMACULTURE LEARNING OFFERINGS 1ST PART OF THIS BLOG The first session of my SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY FOR A REGENERATIVE WORLD course happened Live Monday, October 3rd. 17 people committed to engage with all the parts of the course, dive into the content, participate in the live sessions (some missed the 1st session), perform the tasks (homework :) and interact with the course community to learn together. A few more registered in the course to have access to the content only, and they were inspired to do so since the course registration had a sliding scale donation based price starting at $20. This might have been the last time I did it this way, and that is what my partners and advisors are persuading me towards - we shall see! This course is too powerful not to make it accessible to as many people as possible. I am writing this first part of the blog for you to share some highlights from this 1st session of course, share about what you may be seeing coming out from it further and invite you to help me decide when to launch its second edition next. Here it Goes: We started with gratitude and all were invited to consider starting anything and everything with gratitude all the time! See below why.  At one point all Live participants were invited to assume and explore the assumptions of the course - the paradigm the course is teaching from - iterating that even if one does not agree with these statements entirely or partially, they are invited to explore these statements for learning purposes. By the way: Where do you stand with the paradigm presented by the statement below?  After giving gratitude, consenting to course agreements and interaction code, other housekeeping announcements and course assumptions, we dove into the first practical skills to develop in the sustainability literacy toolkit. For each of the concepts discussed the participants are invited to perform multiple simple tasks to start develop those skills between each session (in some cases, to refresh or update those skills, since many of the course participants have done some of this work in the past or are already doing it - putting sustainability literacy at work for a regenerative world). I also perform the tasks and will share with you my process and findings. Some of the participants may choose to share how they addressed the tasks publicly too! Should be very educational - I invite you to stay tuned! 2ND PART OF THIS BLOG I continue to believe in the possibility of a very different, healthy, abundant, peaceful, thriving future for all to enjoy! And then ... I have been leading earth and people centered education for 10 years now. I have interacted directly with approximately 7,000 people in this time, from presenting research findings to inform ecological approaches to governance and management, to showing people how to adopt sustainability practices at the individual, home, community and business levels, and diving deep into systematic ecosystems and community transformations with hundreds of students. I have experienced a growing interest and commitment to resilience and regenerative work, and saw a huge spike in early to mid 2020 - during that time the local government public compost and home sustainability program I was running since 2015 had a 1100% increase in participation, my permaculture design courses got full faster than usual, my college courses were overflowing and an unusual number of unknown people to me reached out for design, consulting and mentorship services. And then, something happened to all that interest this year. I am observing via personal experiences, research journals, society commentators, and even browsing main stream media and independent news from around the world, (3) main trends: 1. a lot of people experience so much uncertainty due to extreme social, economic, political and environmental events that making plans for the future is a later today and tomorrow game (not very different from what the poor of the world have been experiencing since forever); 2. other people experienced so much trauma during the "emergency" time that they are sweeping all feelings under the rug and with numbness live life like nothing happened, focusing on "normal" activities, looking at the future as they would have before, looking at the same jobs, investments, and retirement plans, and participating in the same main stream activities as before, looking up for security to the same world that just crashed not to long ago; 3. some people are prepping to survive the Armageddon, with piles of packaged food that can last for years in their basements, gold and silver dug in their gardens and lots of ammunition and toilet paper tucked away. Therefore planting trees and building relationships in the community are not activities on any of these peoples priorities lists. I will sound judgmental: watching their favorite YouTube or whatever channel with "information" to fuel their beliefs and inform their actions is definitely a priority in all 3 cases. This is all sad to me! If you really need me to expand on all of these statements in my future newsletter or podcast, let me know. And then, there is a 4th trend, a small number of people is still interested in growing food forests, eco-villages and strong place based economies with resilient communities everywhere around the world - people that keep an open mind to any world scenario happening and focusing on and earth and people centered future. These are the people that understand we ought to create a continuously learning society, one comprised of resilient small communities connected in a network of fluid sociocratic like interdependence, aiming at regenerative prosperity and advancement - and therefore learning in community is central to this the 4th way of moving forward. And to grow this trend, I am contributing my part, my vision, my contribution. See it below, and if you have not seen my presentation about it yet, I invite you to stay tuned for another public presentation event in the near future.  Monday, October 10th, we completed a very powerful session 2 of the SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY FOR A REGENERATIVE WORLD course and the students are working on tasks related to the subjects we explored. This is a very hands-on online course, it is not about knowledge only, it is about sustainability skills, attitudes, competencies, dispositions and ways of seeing the world and being in it development. In this session, among other subjects, we explored Grounded Economic Views and Marketing Awareness - I shared the slides below, I invite you to see if you align with what they are providing for learning.
I have a waiting list for the second edition of this course, and I am still deciding if I should start it in December or January. I invite you check out the description and see if you'd like to join the next round! You will find the waiting list link inside that description! Even more important than everything so far, we just rehashed the descriptions of 3 of our upcoming Permaculture courses and launched a fourth one! If you are not familiar with Permaculture: Permaculture uses a holistic-system design approach for creating and managing regenerative and sustainable human settlements and institutions. Our courses focus small and large scale permaculture systems for regenerative and sustainable development at the local and international level, such as homesteads, school campuses, communities, eco-villages, farming operations and other private & public spaces and institutions. We offer 4 ways one can develop this wisdom further and join our community of change makers: an intensive 2 weeks experience, a hybrid online and in-person deep dive, an apprenticeship on our farm, and a full online advanced immersion in this practical world changing wisdom. This is the education that gets one to participate in the 4th world future paradigm I shared about in the beginning of this email. I invite you to consider joining one of these courses and PLEASE SHARE WITH OTHERS! Because you are reading this BLOG, I am offering you an extra 20% off, on top of the already Super Early Bird price to motivate you or help you motivate others to step into this work. (Use Lucian20 at check out - the discounts combination amounts to $800 off!)  THANK YOU FOR READING THIS 2 PART BLOG!
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