High School Level Permaculture Design Course

“ Permaculture is ecological design aimed at creating systems that meet human needs while regenerating and healing the environment around us.” – Starhawk

Life is by nature a design, and humans are the creators of our own reality. Do regenerative ecology, social systems, and leaving the world a better place pique your curiosity? Seeking to build your skills and earn a career-launching design certification? If you’re interested in working with nature’s rhythms, cultivating intelligent, abundant systems that are scalable and benefit your surroundings and community, then this high school Permaculture Design Course is for you! Read on to learn about topics covered, scheduling, and how to register.

There is a $200 discount for attending an info session!

The Dates

This through-the-seasons course is designed to give students a taste of the full growing season, so it is important to be committed to the entire season up front.

Students can miss up to two days of programming without make-up work; make up work can be provided for additional missed days depending on the circumstances. Thereafter, students are welcome to continue in the course, but a certification cannot be granted.

School Season Dates (Saturday Afternoons, 1-5 pm)

These sessions will be activity based. There will be no out-of-session work during this time.

March 27th, April 10th, April 24th, May 8th, May 22nd, Sept 11, Sept 25, Oct 9

Summer Dates (Tuesdays, 9 am -4 pm)

The bulk of formal instruction, mixed with hands-on activities and field trips, will take place during the summer months. It is during this time that students will complete their own design projects.

June 1-August 10, No Session on July 6 (Midsummer Break)

Part of the design course will involve students creating their own permaculture designs. Students should plan on 1-2 hours of work per week outside of class, during summer.

Locations

This course will be based at two sites:

- The Homestead (Niwot)
- Elk Run Farm (just south of Lyons)

There will be several field trips to other locations in Boulder and Longmont. Students should be able to arrange their own transportation to each day’s starting location.

covid-19 continues to evolve…

Which means that now more than ever, it is important for us to be conscious designers of a new and better future. And to be mindful of keeping everybody healthy in this turbulent time:

- We are limiting the class size to 12 students.
- This class will be entirely outdoors – we will learn to prep for the weather!
- We will ask all students to bring masks to wear whenever they are within 6 feet of one another.
- We will provide make-up opportunities for students who are sick or needing to quarantine

Registration

Course Cost: $1500

$200 discount for attending a Zoom Intro Session!

The course will be capped at 12 students on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Scholarships are available! Please don’t let the cost be the reason you don’t sign up. If you are interested in applying for a scholarship, please fill out a regular application form and a scholarship request by February 14th. Scholarship decisions will be made by March 1st.

Apply for Scholarship

Questions? Give us a call (720-289-2569) or email ascaneswolfe@gmail.com

Meet the Instructors

Amy Scanes-Wolfe

Amy graduated from Niwot High School in 2009. After majoring in cultural anthropology at Middlebury College, Amy plunged whole-heartedly into the world of sustainable agriculture. She co-managed two organic farms over five years, helped found an urban eco-village, and worked in educational programming at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. After returning to Colorado, Amy deepened her understanding of propagation and local ecology by working at Harlequin’s Gardens and with Boulder County Parks and Open Space. Amy now homesteads in Niwot and runs a permaculture-based landscaping business called Left Hand Landscaping. She has both a permaculture design and permaculture teacher certification through Boulder Permaculture.

Rachael Scala

Rachael is a permaculture practitioner, up-cycling artist, mountain athlete, homesteader, and locavore chef, originally from Reno, NV. Through movement in nature, upcycled art, and community building, she seeks to fortify the symbiotic connection between humans, nature, and each other. She earned her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2018 with Boulder Permaculture and has continued to cultivate earthworking skills on a small scale on residential and commercial properties. She has also spent substantial time as a WWOOFer (farm volunteer) upon graduating college at various organic farms in different bioregions. She has dabbled in many people trades, including snowboard instruction, mountaineering travel planning, catering, ultrarunning, organic food industry sales, and dozens of community-reaching art pursuits. A lifelong activist within the arts, she re-purposes discarded materials into functional pieces.

Ash Priest

Ash’s passion for nature started while growing up in Perth, Australia where her mother grew beautiful perennial and annual gardens. She went on to explore organic farming by WWOOFing in Turkey and Georgia, which is where she first learnt about Permaculture and Biodynamics. After landing a job with SunCat Gardening, a female-owned and run gardening business in Boulder, Colorado in 2018, everything else in her life started to align with this passion. She took her PDC in 2019, completed the Permaculture Teacher Training course in 2020, and is now ready to dive in and embrace her calling to teach the next generation about the wonders of Permaculture!

Alexa Hapgood

Alexa lives in Longmont where she recently started her own company, Roaming Roots Ecological Gardening, working to help homeowners tend to, appreciate, and make use of the abundance that comes from their gardens in ecologically-minded ways. Before starting her own company, she worked in sales and was an active volunteer for several seasons at the Denver Botanic Gardens. When Alexa took her PDC in 2018 she was thrilled to learn that Permaculture was not just an elaborate method of smarter gardening, but rather a rich blueprint that could be used to guide the more equitable design of our society at large, enriching and healing our relationships to one another, as well as to our environment. She took an advanced Social Permaculture Course in 2019 and loves engaging in practices and games that build authentic and healing connection with others.