Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning Dynamic Courses, Books, Resources and Tours for Healthy Groups, People and Culture with Robin Clayfield

International author, workshop facilitator and Permaculture teacher Starhawk from US will visit Australia to be the special guest for the Australiasian Permaculture Convergence in Brisbane in April 2020, hosted by Northey Street City Farm.

Amongst her busy schedule she’ll join Robin Clayfeild at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village to offer a 3 1/2 day Social Permaculture in Action Workshop. Everyone will be welcome, even if they aren’t attending the Convergence. Dates are 7th to 10th May 2020.

Starhawk has a special gift in offering practical and elder wisdom in a straightforward and impassioned way with her decades of experience in social action, cultural change and Permaculture always guiding the journey.

By Erin Young

Social Permaculture is a nature-informed regenerative design framework for social systems; with particular focus on people care. Social Permaculture is regenerative social design.

​Here is a sample of the permaculture principles and how you might see them at play in social design:

Design from patterns to details

Circle structure used for meetings and classrooms. Circle rounds in a meeting use slow and small solutions to hear each person in the group, getting into the details of their input in an effective way. Circles support transparency, being the most efficient pattern for all members to see each other while connected to a common unity through the central space.

Use and value diversity

The eight forms of capital spread ‘wealth’ to eight key areas of resource availability (capital), rather than loading it with financial assets (as is most common). The eight forms of capital include natural, material, experiential, social, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and financial. Assessing a system’s level wealth through this spectrum of capital allows a broader perspective and accounts for far more enriching qualities.

Observe and interact

Cycles are within and around us constantly, providing a rhythm by which behaviours, outcomes, and interactions can be observed, and for which more appropriate systems can be designed.  Mapping the year out in a wheel form (like a pie chart with 12 slices representing each month), allows us to map what’s happening for each month for various aspects of our lives. If rings are also included to this pie chart (like in a tree trunk), various elements of a system can be mapped, month-by-month.  One ring might track of the highlight activity of the month. Another ring might track the main monthly goal. And other ring might track our emotional selves. Doing this year after year, allows an understanding of the patterns emerging in our lives; information we can use to design more specifically how we tend to self and community care.

Social Permaculture applies from the individual level to the broader community level. It’s scope includes personal growth, community, finance, business, health, art & culture, education, events, media and justice.

These types of tools, and more, will be explored in the upcoming Social Permaculture Weekend, co-hosted by Robin Clayfield and Erin Young – 18 & 19 May 2019 at Crystal Waters Ecovillage in South East Queensland.  We’d love for you to join us!

Email Robin at robin@earthcare.com.au to book now.

In our February online Q&A session, we explored the question: How do we juggle many balls, projects, & aspects of groups and businesses?

The first part of the question explored was: How many balls do you juggle, and how well do you juggle them?

Depending on how active each project is, the amount of structure needed varies.  When there’s more project activity, there tends to me more structure.  There also tends to be less time for self-care and personal relationships – these are typically quick to be reduced in attention.  Also, being on screens was noted as part of the juggle – needing balance between time, energy and eye-health. 

Trips out-of-town were noted as a tricky aspect for juggling all the pieces of life; where balls tend to get dropped easily e.g. responding to emails after times away with no internet.

We then explored planning tools that groups utilise to maintain balance in amongst all the activity.  Here is a summary of what we use – you might discover something new to adapt to your life.

Mind-mapping – To get a clear picture of all the pieces to be considered/juggled and what they each need.

Have a Monday morning business check-in on paper – creates a strong starting point for the week.

Use a diary to track appointments, to-do lists, due dates etc.

Use the Important/Urgent quadrant to prioritise next steps.

• Divide a piece of paper into quadrants: Important /Urgent, Important/Not Urgent, Not Important/Urgent, Not Important/Not Urgent.

• List everything that needs to be done on this chart in the most fitting quadrant.

• Prioritise working through all the important/urgent things first.

• Question the not important/not urgent tasks and enquire if they can be given to someone else.

Use a filter of ‘things that bring me joy’ – One person made a decision at young age to work on things that bring joy and that make a difference in the world.  They apply this to all their projects.

Saying ‘No’ is a type of technology.

Holistic Decision-Making by Dan Palmer – For each area of our life, we can create ‘quality of life’ statements e.g. I am happy and healthy and can use my body to do lots of active things, I have quality time with my children every day. These are then used to guide decision-making and priorities.

Positive affirmations e.g. I have time and space for me, family and community – Good for times of overwhelm.

Challenge self each day to do one thing for home, one thing for business and one thing for garden, as well as for self, family and community. Have a check-in at the end of the day to see what has/hasn’t happened which helps one be more conscious of how they’re spending their time.

Monthly mind-mapping of projects is used by one of the group.  They map-out by mind-map all of their active projects for the coming month, where the sub-branches are the tasks for each project.  Using check-boxes for the tasks, this becomes a month-long to-do list, allowing an overview and holding all the projects together with focus.

Asking for help and support – acknowledge when one is needing more time for a task and being humble to request for that.

Eating well, drinking water, breathing consciously, getting good sleep.

We finished the session by acknowledging that the juggling of projects is quite a skill.  It requires peripheral vision and sensing of what’s coming next.  And sometimes roles/hats need to be changed nimbly, requiring us to take a breath. 

These are very similar skills as required when facilitating groups, so there is a lot of transferable learning between the two.  And ultimately, physical juggling is a good practice to help wire the brain for juggling projects!

May you nimbly and gracefully juggle all the projects, people and purpose you carry in your life!

With thanks to Erin Young for writing up our input.

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There’s lots of excitement beginning to build in Canada as news is just being announced of Robin’s visit to Canada, to offer a six day ‘Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning’ creative facilitators, teachers and group leaders course near Edmonton in late June. While she’s there Kym Chi from BC, who’s trained with and supported Robin before, will organise an evening presentation on ‘Social Permaculture’ and a full weekend ‘Social Design and Community Collaboration’ workshop on the Sunshine Coast of Canada in early July. Kym Chi will do some of the facilitation with Robin.

The excitement is also building back at home as Robin’s partner Rob is going with her on the adventure and will support the workshops and give more ease and grace to the travel. They’ll also get to see and experience some of the magnificent mountains and lakes of Canada, a dream come true.

If you’ve never been to ‘The Planting’ Festival before and you live close enough to have three days away over the first weekend in May, you’ll get to experience and participate in a delightful diversity of environmental, social and creative workshops, talks, wanderings and activities along with ceremony and of course great music. It’s held at the Woodford Folk Festival site and grew out of the tree planting weekends that have supported the site be a shady and beautiful wildlife and people haven.

For the second year running Robin and her troupe of labyrinth makers, ceremony weavers, workshop facilitators and musicians will create a luscious space for patrons to experience the serenity of labyrinth walking and guided ceremonies, accompanied by divine music at The Sacred Union Labyrinth. The Labyrinth is now its own unique venue after six years at Woodford Folk festival and now, in a much smaller and simpler version for The Planting, offers a split bamboo and banana fibre making and weaving workshop to beautify the labyrinth to begin the activities in the space.

Robin is also presenting a workshop in The Grove Venue entitled ‘Growing Community’. Growing healthy community needs the same love and care as a veggie garden or a food forest. Like all of us humans, it requires a supportive group environment in which to thrive. What are the elements that grow community and assist our groups, teams, organisations, businesses and families to be at their best? We’ll garden the answers together and harvest the gifts of our collaboration.

Hope to see you there. It will be a lot of fun 🙂 Here’s the link to the website

It’s just been ‘Earth Day’ and to honour that Robin rekindled this quote she wrote back in 2015 after waking up full of passion and care for our Earth and a better world while working in the UK on a course.

“It is the time of the Great Remembering…

Remembering as humans that we are part of the Earth. Remembering our nature intelligence. Remembering we are part of a symbiotic and amazing ecosystem that bubbles and pulses with life. Yes, we have evolved beyond our hunter-gatherer roots, yet we can still purposefully gather all the tools, resources and companions to connect together for a healthy world. We are powerful, creative and co-creative beyond measure and we are a tiny speck in the web of life.

May each speck be a spark of illumination and remembering of our ancient roots and deeply intimate relationship with Earth and all beings… for a better world.” – Robin Clayfield

The wonderfully creative and clever Robina McCurdy from Aotearoa NZ will be visiting Australia in late May early June and we’re very fortunate that she’ll be up on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland so she and Robin can collaborate on a day workshop called ‘Growing Community’.

It will build on the material from Robin’s workshop at ‘The Planting’ and take participants deep into the realms of what it takes to foster healthy, vibrant, successful communities – intentional ones and also neighbourhoods, community groups, families, work cultures and any sub-cultural and cultural gathering and collectives that meet and gather over time.

Robina can also ‘do this type of workshop with her eyes closed’ and it’s been both hers and Robins life work to support and facilitate group and community well-being and success. They will both have their eyes fully open to be deeply present and achieve the best possible outcome for their group workshop.

It will be held on Sunday 2^nd June at The EcoCentre at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village.

In the evening there will also be a special night on offer which will include a Community Building game by Robin and a glorious slide show of many of Robinas great photos of the keys to Growing Community.

Here’s Robina’s Bio for your information and enjoyment.

Robina McCurdy is a professional community development facilitator, Permaculture educator, organic gardener, and pioneer-resident of 30 year-old Tui Community & Trust in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand (www.tuitrust.org.nz).  She is also the founder of The Institute of Earthcare Education Aotearoa. 

www.earthcare-education.org

For the past 30 years she has been engaged in community development of various forms. During this time, she has produced a range of environmental education resources and participatory processes for decision-making and collective action, culminating in the publication of her community facilitation manual, ‘Grounding Vision, Empowering Culture’. She also has chapters in: ‘Creating Harmony: Conflict Resolution in Community’, and ‘Living your Passion’.

Robina has facilitated community-building in 10 different countries since 1992, as well as regularly in her own country, Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Her community facilitation work encompasses ‘midwifing’ new initiatives, squatter settlement re-development, long-term conflict resolution, rebuilding community post natural disasters, the training of community leaders as ‘cultural change agents’, participatory planning of orphanages, mentoring of new ecovillages, social renewal of existing ecovillages, and strengthening the community culture within existing organizations.