Cheap PDC for interns

PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSE: Particularly for interns seeking future Permaculture placements
October 10th – October 31st
At Old Mill Permaculture Center
Bainbridge Island, WA

Our (PDC) course itself will use principles of learning systems to create a productive and fun learning environment, with hands-on projects and organically generated learning experiences.  It’s intended to train interns to bring their Permaculture design talents into their internships for guerilla Permaculture infusion into conventional organic farms, and for readying participants for placements in Permaculture farmsites. 

The course will cost interns $300 for food,utilities and materials.  It will require 7 days of work-trade, which will be integrated with the other 14 days of instructional curriculum. The projects will include a solar greenhouse built with many natural building methods (20X40), designing and planting out a food forest from our Permaculture nursery (finally we’re planting into our own place!), and many hands-on projects. The design challenge will be a novel guerilla Permaculture design intended to educate the local region in aspects of PC..

Contact: Chuck@BiosDesign.us 

this makes me cry cause its close and cheep and looks like it matches my ideals well
but I solemnly promised my professor in environmental studies that I would under no condition take weeks off this term.

If you need interns next summer or during quarter system school breaks I may be willing though

Bummer..  We have a full house now, and we decided we want to have the course even though it's late for marketing it.  Since we have had so many responses (over 50 in the past couple months), we thought it would be a great opportunity to pull together a community of interns for a 3-week intensive.. 

My longterm goal is to create more of a clearing-house for bringing interns and farm placements together. I'd love to infiltrate "non-perm" farms with interns that would go through a pre-training PDC , and would share their PC approaches with the farmers they work with.

A further idea I'm trying to create, would be to develop a cadre of "permie coaches" who would be able to help people who own and are trying to develop their acreage, by coming with a pair of interns. The permie coach would  supervise the interns and get them going with the farm to the point that the coach could leave and work with other interns at a new developing farmsite..

To that end, I have a couple of young "upper level" permies who are acting in the role of permie coaches by helping to design and co-facilitate the course we're doing..  The entire process is collaborative, since all of our interns living at Old Mill are participating in designing their own PDC.  That's basically the way I mentor interns: by involving them in my design projects, to help train them so that they can begin to take the lead on future design/installations (edible landscape design/install is our main cash business at Old Mill)...

The interns who participate in the course will obviously have developed relationships with me and be most likely to take openings that I have, or that I find with the network of permaculture farms that I'm developing in the Cascadia region..

All part of a "learning system" model that I believe is a way to "accelerate succession" in the permaculture world.

I don't know how you feel about holiday time but I'd be exited if a PDC was offered to fit into common college coarse breaks,
in fact and I'm rambling here now but how do you think a "four seasons" PDC course would work out that is to say offering a course made up of four immersive weeks spaced out through the year to fit my college schedule this year it would looks something like dec12-18; march20-26; june 12-18; and sep 4-10, I bet other colleges in the PNW have similar break times though I'd have to verify that.
that would give four weeks for the course allow immersion and still give busy working/students a chance at the experience because its a lot easier to take one week off at a time it would also slow the pace for folks who get daunted by too much info in too short a time, but it would require a year of commitment to get the PDC certificate

That's a great idea! 

The real cost (and barrier) to filling up PDC courses is lost work time.  For students who aren't working, the cost is time away from school.  So if a course were to be affordable to students, then offering it during their vacation times would make a lot of sense.  Thanx for the thought as a way to move on with an approach for promoting PC at the young people (student) level..

If you need someone to check college schedules poll students for interest and the like down here around Portland let me know