With everything that’s going on in the world, sometimes it’s tempting to curl up in a corner and wait for things to get better. But if we do that, we lose out big time. We miss the chance to help make things better and, in the end, we would end up living with someone else’s vision of “better”. So why not take inventory of what is most important to you, what your skills and talents are, and where your sphere of influence reaches? Then you can start working on whatever comes up at the intersection of these three.

Since you’re reading this, it’s pretty likely that you’re interested in living sustainably. One of the things that everyone can (and dare I say “should”) do that is an immense help in getting involved in changing the world, is to study Permaculture. As you know, we recommend the online Permaculture Design Certificate course (PDC) offered by the Integral Permaculture Academy. We endorse this course because of its focus on the principles and ethics of permaculture and its people care aspect. It’s not about techniques for gardening or natural building, although of course those can be part of a permaculture design & it certainly provides lots of information about both topics and many others. This PDC is about taking a holistic, systems approach to thinking and to designing. And since permaculture is a design science for sustainability, you can use what you learn to design anything.

Getting back to finding the intersection between what’s important to you, your skills and talents, and your sphere of influence, you can use permaculture principles to help you take a holistic approach to this, in what we call a Life Design. The Academy’s PDC is the kind of course where you take responsibility for your own learning. You also have to see past some not-so-great quality audio and video. They’re planning the re-make; these original videos are with the founder of the academy who passed away 2 years ago. The recorded classes are full of information and there’s an online e-book (a website) that’s chock-full of complementary material.

It’s funny, I didn’t really set out to talk about the benefits of taking a PDC, but about getting involved and not letting 2020 get us down. I planned to then list a few ways to get involved with our Project from wherever you are. But as I started to write, I didn’t want to just talk about our needs and wants, even if they could be awesome ways for you to get involved. I wanted to give you something and that ‘something’ turned out to be a heartfelt recommendation to study permaculture. I hope you’ll think about it. If we get a group of 6 people, I’ll set up a cohort of sorts and hold weekly live sessions.

And at the risk of this being an overly long blog and people not reading this far, here are a few things we could use help with that can be done from anywhere in the world.

Outreach & marketing

• Share, like, comment and cross post our social media posts to increase our reach
• Help us to create a specific & easily implementable plan for reaching prospective members
• Maintain/update list of prospects (sites, groups, networks, organizations, etc,) for outreach activities
• Implement specific aspects of outreach & marketing with these prospects as defined in the plan

Tech Support

• Website maintenance & tech support for a WordPress site using a CSS Igniter theme.
• Recommend, install & configure a plugin that will send blog posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter

Video editing & creation

• We have raw footage that can be edited and used in different ways
• We have a doodle subscription to create whiteboard animations that could be combined with existing footage in creative way

If any of the above resonates with you, can you help us make a better world from wherever you are in the world by volunteering a bit of your time?