By Lisa DePiano

(Written in response to questions on an email listserve about PDC’s being expensive, and not accessible to some people.)

When I took my first design course I also was wary of the price. When you start to teach and organize PDC’s you get to “peak behind the curtain”. Often times the true costs of the courses go unseen. In this article I’ve broken it down logistics up front and yields at the end. I am writing mostly about the Permaculture FEAST course as an example because its the one I have had the most influence/experience with.

• Scholarships & Worktrades: In 2013 we had one full scholarship, 4 folks doing worktrade and 1 person doing a barter. We are morally committed to offering these although it does require us to find more full paying students to meet our course budget. We are always looking for donors. If people want to contribute $, time or ideas to making more funds available for scholarships we would love it!

• What it takes to run a course: Most of the people who are running courses are doing it on their own with little institutional support. This is a grassroots effort. If you compare the prices of a PDC to the prices of taking for example a semester long college course (this would be 42 contact hours vs the 87 we do in our PDC) you’ll find that it is almost double. Having a lower overhead means that we can keep the costs down but we are doing A LOT behind the scenes. The price breakdown for students per hour (87 hours) comes to just over $10 an hour.  This is just course time and does not include the many hours of planning and logistics. We run the best course we can and the kind we would like to take. This means we are out there getting our hands dirty, hearing from lots of different people, visiting the best sites, constantly revising and improving the course, making sure we are up to date with the latest thinking and techniques. All of this takes time to organize. Our  team starts meeting bi-weekly in April (5 months before the course start date). Like most of the work of organizers (and teachers) this goes unseen.  This also does not take into account the last 12 years of training we have done to be able to teach these courses, have mature sites to learn from (and even have a list-serve to have this discussion on). We (in part) use these lists as a way to get the word out. We have in the past used mainstream marketing but cannot afford it ($350 for a small ad for one day in the paper).

• Length and Format of the course: One of the first things we wanted to design in our course was a weekend format. We noticed that the length of courses (at least 2 weeks and in some cases 3) often kept full time workers, people with children and others out. By doing it on the weekends it allows for more participation from those groups ANDcontinues to strengthen the capacity of our local network since we attract students from a 2 hour radius.

• Students: Like D Acres most of our students are NOT coming to learn how to become professional designers. Churning out professional permaculture designers is not a goal of our course. We do teach and go through each stage of a rigorous design process. Come up with some incredible designs and get to “permablitz” install pieces of a previous designs. Our students are farmers, budding homesteaders, teachers, architects, entrepreneurs, engineers, parents….. who are looking to apply permaculture in their own lives, meet people, learn hands on skills, and resources. Yes, some students are looking to become designers and after they have taken a PDC we refer them onto the Conway School, Umass, Yestermorrow or to work for free for friends and family so that they can continue to refine their skills.  To this day we have trained hundreds and hundreds of students who in their own ways are using permaculture as a framework and practice to create healthy, water, soil, plants, homes and invisible landscapes!

• Yield is unlimited:  When I think about it this really astounds me (and we are scratching the surface here) Our current course is providing for a living wage for 4 “full time” course teachers and organizers, 6 guest teachers and design supporters, subsidizes rent for a local green workers coop, installing (2013) a design for a retired single mom, creates a vision for the reuse of a mill complex and hydro powered canal in holyoke, shares that vision with the public, provides space for up in coming practitioners to teach and get feedback, highlights local nurseries and permaculture education sites, creates visibility of permaculture solutions in the wider community….

• Development:  Another yield that I want to pull out is Research and Development. Permaculture is a young design science, vision and movement. The more we bring people together to share and explore the more that contributes to the living, evolving body of work we call permaculture. It also helps to create more options for folks.

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