Evergreen State College

Jenny Pell was hired to teach a full permaculture design course with the students of Evergreen State College. The college already had an Agricultural Department and the students were looking to add permaculture to the curriculum of skills offered. The class project for the students in the course was to design permaculture acreage the department had on the site.

This was a real-life project that had real expenses with a real budget that involved real people in the community and they came out of that with some real business acumen.

The challenge with that after four years most people graduate and leave. So the question was, how do you have a site that has longevity that’s going to serve different interests and needs over time?

Click below to hear the back-story from Jenny Pell or scroll down to read about this design.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Jenny Pell was the keynote speaker at a permaculture design conference in the Pacific Northwest. The Student Activities Committee at Evergreen State College happened to attend. They had a budget to bring in speakers and designers to the Evergreen campus where they were starting to really embrace permaculture and wanting to offer permaculture design courses.

This university has an organic farm education program already and they wanted to do some permaculture design on some acreage next to their organic farm. They have aquaponics, farming, and forestry and they really wanted to add permaculture to the list of skills that they were teaching.

Jenny was contracted to teach the full permaculture design course with the students and the class project for the students in the course would be to design the permaculture acreage on the site.

It was a fun class with guest lectures and a lot of time on the land. The students got very creative, their budget didn’t quite cover instruction of the course cost so Jenny had them do the research on the plants, the costs of all the infrastructure, and determine the gravel amounts needed with it’s cost.

They put together the bills of quantity, the spreadsheets, and Jenny would advise them. The students sourced the materials, priced the materials, determined the budget for materials, and they had to present everything in a way that the university would fund.

Afterwards Jenny was told that they learned more in that class than any other class they took in their four years of college. It was a real-life project that had real expenses with a real budget that involved real people in the community and they came out of that with some real business acumen.