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The permaculture diploma process is a pathway to help you use and develop your permaculture design and implementation skills more effectively with relatively little effort. Importantly, it is much more than something just for those that want to teach design certificate courses. It is emerging as perhaps the most effective way for anyone to continue their permaculture learning and implementation process, whether that involves teaching or not, anyone wanting to continue their learning about sustainable living, and any one wanting to achieve their goals in life more effectively..

As a Diploma holder, I feel that undertaking the diploma has been hugely beneficial and totally positive experience for me, and I can see that it helped many others to more fully engage with their own power to transform their lives in a positive way.

How we learn is a very important factor that shapes our culture - and it therefore shapes our culture’s impacts on the environment and on human beings. Because permaculture is about creating a wisely designed sustainable culture it is designing its own education process that will naturally allow a sustainable culture to grow and evolve. The 72 hour course gives us a great start. However, to hone and develop this new way of thinking, being and doing, it is essential to have a learning pathway to follow beyond that 72 hour course (variously known as the Design Certificate Course, PDC or Permaculture 1). This is what the diploma offers – a powerful and effective way to move forward in life, that does not add to the burden of what we want to achieve, but actually reduces it by helping us achieve those things more effectively.

The permaculture Diploma process is evolving in a very healthy way. It is becoming a little more formalised and being given some more structure, but without it becoming institutionalised or inflexible. Within the structure there is a huge amount of freedom. It has already become an ongoing learning process that is providing people with practical, adaptable and effective life skills. And some of its most important characteristics are:

• The Diploma Website / Handbook - produced to guide you through the process.
• A Diploma Induction event (often combined with an Accreditation event, see below) - to get you familiar from the start with the overall process, the terminology, the steps along the way, and offer inspiration and guidance from those that are completing or have completed their diploma; a chance to meet others undertaking the diploma as well as tutors.
• Action Learning Pathway - the learning pathway that you map out for yourself, with the support of an Action Learning Tutor, to take you through the two year diploma process. As an Action Learning process this will mainly involve learning from the permaculture related actions and activities you plan to undertake in your life, rather than being a burdensome extra chunk of studying.
• Design Support Tutorials – with the support of a Design Support Tutor to help you develop your understanding and skills specifically in permaculture design. How am I doing as a good and effective permaculture designer? (A minimum of once per year); minimum of four in two years.
• Action Learning Tutorials - to help you develop your understanding and skills in your action-learning process. How am I doing in my overall learning process? A minimum of four in two years
• Action Learning Guilds - a support group, with others who are also undertaking the diploma process, to provide mutual support, feedback on progress, sharing of lessons learnt, ideas and inspirations, etc. In effect, a learning ‘guild’. Quarterly is the expected minimum regularity, although they can be as regularly as you like, monthly for example.
• Accreditation: the end of the Diploma process and the start of the rest of your life … A peer review event which only takes place if you and your Action Learning Tutor feel you are ready; so it is much more a celebration of the quantity and quality of your permaculture skills, and they way you have been putting them into practice effectively in your life.

It is interesting to compare the permaculture diploma process with a conventional ‘higher’ education process. As I see it, the difference is simple: conventional education is designed to take you into greater and greater specialisation, and thereby to greater dependency on your specialist knowledge … for livelihood, sense of identity, self-worth, etc. So it has as many disempowering effects, as well as some empowering effects, because it often makes you dependent on walking a very narrow career pathway in life. It provides few life skills in the education process itself - life skills come by chance or by necessity at these times by managing one’s life during this education process. It is also relatively expensive, and often takes people into debt.

Permaculture education is quite different. It gives you specialist skills, yes, but those skills are applicable and practical in any discipline and any area of life, at any time in life. So it is a very empowering education process. At a cost of perhaps £400 to £600 pounds over two years, it is far more likely to help you improve your financial situation than put you in debt.

There are many reasons for doing the diploma, and I trust that you will have got a taste for some of these already. One major reason is that it is designed to meet a whole range of your needs: information, confidence in the learning, designing and implementing processes, confidence in the teaching process, inspiration, support from peers and mentors, and so on and so forth. Because the process is designed by permaculture people, it is multi-functional and it meets many needs through many elements of the process. Quite simply, it is designed to be an enjoyable and highly effective path that changes your life for the better as you walk it.

Through the diploma process:

• You will observe how you and others are using permaculture design, what is working web and what might need doing differently.
• You will identify what boundaries you have chosen in using permaculture in your life and whether those can be extended, or made more effective or more productive in some way.
• You will record useful information more effectively to help you implement better designs.
• You will learn more effectively how to evaluate the resources that are available to help you achieve your objectives in life - both internal and external resources.
• It will help you improve your design skills, including the selection and use of appropriate design tools and techniques.
• It will help you implement design and projects more effectively in your life, as you walk the diploma pathway.
• It will also help you to maintain, monitor and manage the development, evolution and implementation of permaculture in your life, tweaking and fine tuning it as you go.

Through the diploma process you are guided, with the help of your tutor, by the need to address both the Essential Criteria and the Supplementary Criteria that have been selected to judge whether someone has gained the skills and experience necessary to be awarded the diploma. This is where the diploma process can be seen as a quality control process; rather like ancient story tellers learning the skills of passing on the mythology and wisdom that is so useful in guiding young women and men through life. So the diploma is not a hierarchical controlling structure, it is a flexible framework that has been established to enable the permaculture ‘story’ to be passed on well, for the greater benefit of all.

The Essential Criteria are the main concern - they are:

• Design Skills: both in quantity and quality - this usually means showing through 10 ten designs, not all of which have to be gardens, or ‘physical’ designs - for example, mine included the design of my overall lifestyle and diet, as well as my work on local sustainable construction strategies with local government. This also needs to demonstrate use of different design tools and techniques, appropriate to the situation.
• Theory into action - showing that your design work is making a difference to your and / or others lives.

The Supplementary Criteria support the essential criteria - the are:

• Dissemination - through articles, leaflets, books, networks, internet, teaching and talks, etc.
• Support / mentoring - working with and supporting others in the movement, in relevant projects, etc.
• Community Building - involvement in local projects, networks, communities, etc.
• Costings and evaluation - ways of assessing the costs (in work, resources, emotional costs, etc. as well as money) and assessing how effective the design has been in achieving its objectives.

Personally, I feel that the permaculture diploma process is set to become one of the most important and effective community building and skills development processes in the permaculture movement and the ‘eco-social/green’ movement as a whole. It carries this potential - which all of us can play a part in manifesting - because it naturally, automatically involves skills raising, confidence building and the connecting of people, their ideas and their energy. It is a process of changing oneself positively, and therefore the world of which we are a part, with others doing so not just on parallel paths, but on meandering, criss-crossing, and sometimes very direct and parallel paths.

It is a effective because it works with the nature of the human learning process, and recognises the needs and characteristics of different people. What you get out of the diploma process is theoretically unlimited because you can design it to meet any number of your needs. You can make it work with you, by designing it to fit the characteristics of your own situation and what motivates you. It also creates a great harvest of positivity, creativity and skills. It helps you refine and improve your design and implementation skills throughout the process, allowing you to shape your life and environment to fit you better.

The problem in permaculture is sometimes that there is so much detail available in so many areas, and it feels like the global-to-local challenges we aim to address can be so great … The solution that the diploma process provides is that it gives you a pathway to walk that will automatically instil more skills, knowledge and confidence in yourself and in the positive power of permaculture to change your life and the world we live in. And as a solution it is also great fun and hugely enjoyable.

The Diploma process has certainly reconnected me with the permaculture movement, bringing me back into ‘zones 1 and 2’ of the UK Pc world, from a period of wandering in the permaculture wilderness. This is something I am very grateful for. So thanks to Andy and Carolyn of the Academy for all their work, and also to those that over the years have called for a more effective and better quality assured Diploma process. Also thanks to Simon Shakespeare, my support tutor through the process.

The Diploma process is co-ordinated by the Permaculture Academy UK but is not just for British permaculture people - it is a diploma process open to the whole world. It is emerging as possibly the most developed and effective on-going permaculture education process in the world. So the next step is to sign up to it if you have already done a design certificate course, or to do a design certificate course with a view to then continuing your permaculture learning process by undertaking the diploma.

Now is an excellent time to enrol I the diploma process. The practical first step is:

• Contact the Permaculture Academy (Carolyn Hall) and get a copy of the Diploma handbook - you can do this through the Permaculture Academy (UK) website via www.permaculture.org.uk

Seize the moment and do it now.