You’ve heard that these times are dire and urgent, right? So isn’t it time we had some fun? Back due to popular demand, this hands- hearts- and bodies-on workshop returns for the second year to explore play and sacred clowning as tools for social permaculture. Endless urgency and intellectual seriousness are symptoms of a mechanistic, burn-out activist culture. Social sustainability requires different skills than those practiced within the Western capitalist paradigm. Forget those creepy clowns from childhood nightmares – come learn how to use the craft of clowning and play to bring life and joy into our movements. Play facilitates honest cultural critique and creates space for creative alternatives. And, it’s very fun. Notes: No experience necessary. Come especially if you have no experience.

Presented By: Annie-Rose London

Certified permaculture caretakers is a program that offers training in permaculture and access to land with a focus on single mothers and women of color. It is designed to be nested into a larger comprehensive back to the land movement and create a network of continued skill building and opportunities with in the emergent culture.

Presented By: Alexa Bernard

Brandi Mack, AKA, Mama B, will share her 5 steps to Resilient design that support people and the planet, with and infuses on highlighting melanated women and children.

FRIDAY Keynote Presented By: Brandi Mack

For this workshop, Ridhi D-Cruz and I will start by giving an overview of The City Repair Project. We will explain what the organization represents, how the Village Building Convergence (VBC) works, and why this event is part of the permaculture movement. Then, we will specifically describe how the VBC has helped marginalized communities stand up for social justice and equality. We will give examples of how we are building bridges of diversity and what communities can do to share power through co-collaborative placemaking.

Presented By: Ridhi & Ashley Bonn

The Internet has radically transformed our world. We are now more connected and exposed to more information than we’ve ever been before. This reality has rendered many of the world’s traditional institutions of power ripe for disruption. The Internet itself, however, is built upon and accessed through centralized infrastructure susceptible to government and institutional oversight and manipulation. In order to maximally leverage the disruptive and regenerative potential that technology affords us, decentralized technologies and infrastructure must be built and properly implemented.

Presented By: Rye N Flint

City Repair has over 20 years of experience with grassroots, community-initiated placemaking in Portland, Oregon. Our model for building place-based empowerment is inspiring communities across the nation and even globally from countries like Canada, the UK and even Australia. Here in Oregon, however, our biggest learning edge is integrating a social justice lens to ensure that the people and the places that we are working with provide benefit to some of the most vulnerable groups in our community. For us it has meant working with People of Color in one of the most ethnically Caucasian cities and also with folks experiencing houselessness. We will share stories of placemaking with these communities and how they contribute to what we are calling Place Justice.

Presented By: Ridhi DCruz

Cross cultural communication can be enhanced by understanding how Systems of Oppression function. We will explore our social identities as they relate to these systems and see where our privileges and lack of privileges intersect. Cultivating empathy for differing perspectives and tending to trauma release is key to healing longstanding social divisions. When we understand how historical and present day oppressions influence our sense of identity and underlying habits we create the awarenesses needed to re-wild and re-indiginze our selves in connection with our tribal ancestors as steward of the earth.

Presented By:Sahar-Muhsin & Anna Hope

This is an open a discussion and council on what it means to be an “Ally” in today’s day and age. This is more than race or color, sex, gender, orientation, faith, nationalism, ability, classs, beliefs… this is about all of that AND a deep desire to dissolve that which separates us by being heard, seen, and empathized with. When we come together in the shared space of council we see the experiences that unite us, we connect through differences, we empathize with challenges, and we support and resource one another in ways we couldn’t do on our own, because we’re not alone in our efforts to create change. This intensive will offer tangible dos and don’ts, tools and wisdom to walk away and step into the inner and outer actions needed to be a ally, which is really just doing the right thing.

Presented By: Luna Love

Envisioning a Decolonized Feminist Movement.
Where we decolonize knowledge and build an anti-capitalist society.
For all of us to have Equity in order to be FREE.

Presented By: Pilar Mejia

In this session, we’ll collectively explore the possibility of how we can redesign the economy to create regenerative outcomes of security, prosperity and a stable climate rather than outcomes of exploitation and inequity. By gaining an understanding of the design constraints of the business as usual economy we will chart a pathway of transformation, using permaculture design principles, methods and ethics, to an economy that works or the benefit of all life. Through small exercises, group discussion and case studies we will explore how to design enterprises and organizations that provide needed goods and services in ways that enhance and restore environmental and social prosperity.

Presented By: Erin Axelrod

In this workshop, Forrest Hurd and Douglas Reil will explore the history of compassion programs, the impacts of legalization, the work with the Bureau of Cannabis Control and legislators to address the needs of vulnerable communities, and possible future models for approaches to bring effective cannabis therapies to all.

Forrest Hurd and Douglas Reil, founding members of the California Compassion Coalition, have been on the front lines working to restore compassionate use and establish compliant pathways for programs serving the most vulnerable communities in California. In this workshop, they will explore the history of compassion programs, the impacts of legalization, the work with the Bureau of Cannabis Control and legislators to address the needs of vulnerable communities, and possible future models for approaches to bring effective cannabis therapies to all.

Key areas we will cover include:

• The Prop 215 era and the foundations of compassionate use
• Prop 64 and the impact of legalization on compassion programs
• Updates on the fight to establish a compliant pathway to serve vulnerable communities
• Future visions for cannabis healthcare that is holistic, community-oriented, and patient-focused

Presented By: Douglas Reil

Remembering how to be in relationship to all of life, human and more-than-human, is no small task in a time of distress and disconnection. In this workshop, we will explore how to come back into meaningful connection with others through dialogue, experiential practices, and small group explorations in order to create a sturdy foundation to rise from. By tapping into our bodies innate wisdom, we will re-member the power of being with one another, creating the connections that will restructure the world.

Presented By: Tayla Ealom

Chief Arvol Looking Horse Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe (Lakota) stated that

” The effort to protect Mother Earth is all of humanity’s responsibility, not just aboriginal people. Every human being has Ancestors in their lineage that understood their umbilical cord to the Earth and to always protect and thank Her. Therefore, all humanity has to re-connect to the Indigenous Roots of their lineage – to heal their connection and responsibility to Mother Earth.”

Our Ancestors reside within all of us through our DNA, and we are being influenced by this in our daily lived experience through the web of life and their consciousness. Our Ancestors had their programming, patterns, beliefs, attitudes, and this created karmic imprinting for us.

They play a huge role in our circumstances in our present lived experience, even if we are unaware of this. Their traumas affect us, through their karmic imprinting. If this imprinting is negative and it’s not resolved, it will continue to get passed down through our lineage.

We need to heal the memories from our bones & blood, where we store all our memories & hidden codes that connect us with Mother Earth.

Presented By: Pilar Mejia

While we all want to transition to a post-carbon future in a way that restores a balanced relationship with the Earth, we often forget that some groups of people have more access to the tools and resources required to get in on this next paradigm. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has been in these types of communities and spaces, and has taken a good look around at the faces in the room. When we talk about designing a more resilient future with bio-diversity in mind, we must not forget the diversity in our human societies. This includes not just race/ethnicity, but class, bodily ability and all variety of gender expression.

Following the Decolonizing Permaculture workshops at the Convergence from the past few years, please join the same presenter as we take a deeper dive into the WHY and HOW to create a more justice-based, equitable and inclusive Resiliency Movement.

POC, Queer, Trans and differently-abled folks especially invited to join in this conversation. Everyone welcomed!

Presented By: Susan Park

As people whose lives embody change and transformation, the LGBTQ+ community has necessary contributions to lend to this global struggle to protect and regenerate land, water, food, and biocultural diversity. Join us for this introductory conversation to ask questions about the different identities and experiences in the LGBTQ+ community, explore the gender and sexual diversity of the natural world, and uncover the common roots underlying the harms to the planet and the ongoing violences to the queer and trans community. Open to all, please bring questions.

Presented By: Vanessa Raditz

What is a colonial mindset? What sorts of things happen when we think from a colonial perspective? Permaculturists working in international settings come with the best of intentions. What are the blind spots that need to be addressed? What does it mean to be a white ally? Interactive dialogue facilitated by the Permaculture Design Coordinator of the site of IPC India 2017.

Presented By: Raya Cole

Dive deep into the past when Europeans lived by hunting game with bow and arrow, worshiped Oak trees, and lived in tribal harmony with nature. Hear forgotten legends and languages brought to light.

Presented By: Rye Flint

Systemic racism has disconnected white folks from our cultures, our spirituality, and therefore: systemic racism has disconnected and disconnects us from our humanity. White antiracism is a commitment to face and begin to heal ancestral trauma and violence.

In order for white people to show up, we need spiritual practices of wellness, healing and shared culture to ground us and support us. The journey of liberation is a spiritual journey.

Presented By: Jardana Peacock

Daniel has worked in the fields of solar energy, aquaponics, permaculture, farming, landscaping and construction. One thing has been the same for him the entire time, and that is that the invisible structure of the workplace has been a pyramid, rather than a circle. He aims to deliver, through his talk in the form of a dialogue with the audience, a poignant and past-due discussion on the ethics of permaculture as they pertain to these invisible structures in the workplace. After dissemination of the ‘problem’ of a pyramid capitalist workplace, Daniel will then go on to describe CA Assembly Bill 816, “Consumer Cooperative Corporation Law” in which the state of CA has recognized that, “A worker [owned] cooperative has the purpose of creating and maintaining sustainable jobs and generating wealth in order to improve the quality of life of its worker-members, dignify human work, allow workers’ democratic self-management, and promote community and local development in this state.”

This law was passed in 2015. How many Worker Owned Co-Ops do you know of? How many companies do you know of that use the word ‘permaculture’ and yet may be stuck in the past with an un-democratic invisible dynamic in the workplace? How can we best live out the ethics put forward in the Permaculture Designer’s Manual?

These questions and more will be put forward in this talk.

Presented By: Daniel Brodell-Lake

One of the main reasons our current economic system doesn’t work for everyone is because the revenue flow from the commons has been privatized. This privatization is one of the root causes of economic recessions, wealth inequality, ecological destruction, as well as social and cultural decline.

All of nature is community wealth, including—and especially—land. As communities become more attractive to live in, land becomes increasingly scarce and more expensive to live on. But since the value of land is created by the community, it therefore belongs to the community. Land has to be owned in common, and whenever people use land for themselves, they need to reimburse their local community for their exclusive use of it.

Presented By: Martin Adams