Scholarships for North American Leadership Summit

Feb 27, 2020

We’re inviting youth, indigenous leaders, and knowledgeable practitioners from low-income regions of the Caribbean and Meso-America to join a North American permaculture leadership summit in August of 2020, and we need your help! 


Environmental and community repair is urgently needed almost everywhere, but effective action toward these ends requires knowledge, skill, and consultation between activists, researchers, and community leaders. Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA.in) is organizing a North American Leadership Summit for August 2020 in Colorado, that will bring together practitioners, designers, teachers, scientists, farmers, and others whose work is solution-driven to find and widen a path forward for the next decade, when critical decisions will be made that determine the fate of humanity and many of Earth’s ecosystems. Together, we can use our design skills to increase the capacity, yield, and effectiveness of our collective work. 


To ensure that this effort has the greatest chance of success across a broad front of work, and for as many regions as possible, we need your help to include youth, indigenous leaders, and knowledgeable practitioners from tropical and other low-income countries of the Caribbean and Meso-America. To subsidize participation and to provide translation, we are seeking $40,000. Any monies that we raise beyond this threshold will be used to increase the effectiveness of ongoing collaborative work, fund demonstration projects that harvest water, repair soils, capture carbon, cool cities and catchments, and put communities to work in their own defense against climate chaos and injustice. 


An example of the work that PINA has done with small money to make big change can be viewed here. The kinds of skills we can bring to bear are illustrated by entries in our 2018 Design Contest, but keep in mind that these design projects are only the tip of the iceberg, as they come from relatively new practitioners and have not been improved by critical feedback, while the Summit will bring together veteran designers, teachers, and promising youth from even wider fields of endeavor to collaborate with researchers, thought leaders, and community elders from across North America. Laying groundwork for the event will be months of deliberation and focused research in working groups. These will include

• Mutual Aid, Regional Hubs, and Resilient Economies

• Water Harvesting and Climate Cooling

• Energy Transitions: a Permaculture Green New Deal

• The Million Tree Challenge: a Learning Experiment to Reforest Earth

• Regenerative Agriculture and Local Food Sovereignty

• Mainstream Action, Funding, and Outreach to Institutions

• Trauma Response, Community Health, and Deep Adaptation


Help us make this an exceptional opportunity to advance the work of a grassroots community of practice based in care for earth, people, and the future, one whose enormous gifts have so far gone almost untapped. Our 40 years of empirical findings and passionate practice remain at the cutting edge of earth repair and community empowerment. Our fifty thousand North American designers could transform the conversation about climate and energy transition. A Permaculture New Deal would be the real thing. Your contribution can move us from the back of the bus to the forefront of action at a time when our knowledge, experience, and design skills could not be more relevant to humanity’s challenges.


Give generously as you are able, tell your friends, family, colleagues, and community about this campaign, and if you know of innovative and powerful work being done in land and community regeneration, refer it to us for investigation and inclusion. These face to face in-depth meetings create a lot of energy and yield - it is an excellent investment that will reverberate for many years and across bounderies. 


PINA will post regular updates here to report who is coming for the Summit as a result of your giving.