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

A big Overseas adventure is in the wind with Robin heading to the UK for IPC12, the International Permaculture Conference and Convergence, in September. Robin’s been accepted to present at the big public conference in London with her topic ‘Designing our Global Education Systems using Permaculture Principles’. Here’s the blurb – Imagine a world where children grow up respecting and learning from nature, growing food and tending animals, meeting and co-creating in a natural and easy way together, having fun, loving learning and feeling good about themselves all through their journey to adulthood and beyond. Imagine adults meeting in circle, in community, in government and boardrooms, actively listening to each other, co-creating a positive world and making decisions together in a way that everyone contributes and feels empowered.  Decision making, planning, designing and visioning happen easily and for the best good of the group or organisation. Problems transform into useful and inspiring solutions and all decisions, plans and actions respect the earth and all peoples. This happens comfortably as if it has always been so. Permaculture Principles are inherent in our society and integrated in every aspect of life and living. The time for a creative, empowering and globally adopted education system, based on Permaculture design principles and ‘Dynamic Groups’ methodology is here, now. 

Robin will run a workshop at the Convergence which follows the Conference for 5 days, launch two new card games and possibly the ‘Jumping’ process to support the completion of the gathering.

She’ll also be part of a team called Permacultures Next Big Step. They’ve been meeting monthly via internet conferencing since IPC11 in Cuba, December 2013. Their persistence and hard work will culminate in several facilitated sessions to support Permaculture globally to be able to respond to it’s people and world issues more easily and strategically.

There are many edge events before and after IPC12. Robin will be offering her ‘Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning’ course as a 5 day training with Looby MacNamara as a special guest facilitator. Looby is the author of the ‘People and Permaculture’ book and is organising the course for Robin. Here’s the FaceBook Event link 

With Looby from UK, Starhawk from US, Robina McCurdy from NZ and Peter Cow from UK/Europe Robin will be facilitating a 5 day ‘Social Permaculture’ course which promises to be very full, exciting and collaborative with many gifts and tools for everyone to take home. Here’s the FaceBook Event link 

Several of the Edge Event courses, including both of Robin’s have been included in the 2nd Planetary Permaculture Pilgrimage pioneered by Delvin Solkinson from Canada. This gives a beautiful profile to her events and support and encourages younger people wanting to learn from Permaculture Pioneers to attend.

So, Wow! Lots going on during the 5 week time away including a 4 day side trip to Spain to visit RuMi, who was Robin’s right hand support person for a year in 2012/13 which will involve offering a 1 day workshop PLUS a support role with Robina McCurdy on her 3 day Earth-Spirit Nature Connection Workshop in Wales at Lammas Community from 27th to 30th August. Yum !

Please help us let people in Europe know about all this as well as others travelling to UK for the International Permaculture Convergence. Thank you.

New PDC Course October 18 – 30

For the second year running now Crystal Waters Community Co-op has organised a PDC (Permaculture Design Course) with Max Lindegger as the key Teacher. Robin’s been a guest presenter each time. 

The sessions she presented in April addressed ‘Making an income as a Permaculture Practitioner, ‘Group work and Group Dynamics’ to prepare the group to work together in small groups for their property design activity and Prepping for the Design phase. This last topic saw Robin lead an exercise involving her ‘Patterns in Nature’ Card game where everyone got to design something inspired by nature’s patterns. She also introduced scale rulers, flexi curves, circle templates and hand drawn templates made to scale  as tools the groups could use.

To stay in touch about PDC’s at Crystal Waters
visit http://crystalwaters.org.au/permaculture-design-course/

Participants from Robin’s ‘Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning’ courses go back into the world, back to their groups and into their workplaces and communities with a huge toolbox of processes to try out, adapt and share with their groups plus the confidence and ability to create whatever they need for any group or learning situation.

Several past participants from the courses attended Robin’s session at the Permaculture Convergence in Tasmania recently and took on Robin’s challenge to jump in the deep end and lead the group of 35 people with a favourite processes they’d gleaned, modified or adapted from the Dynamic Groups course. Tamara Griffiths, Permaculture teacher from Victoria was one of them. She used a card game. Pete the Permie had some fun with puppetry and Dick Copeman from Northey Street City Farm had us cross crawling as an energiser. Here’s what Tamara wrote about the process she used.

“I’ve done three of Robin’s DG courses now. Its probably why I love teaching so much – because its so creative and my brain loves it. I think the students love it too, my classes are pretty fun – even for serious topics like earthworks! The process I showed in Tassie stemmed from my trip to Antarctica last summer. I found an Antarctic food web sheet of stamps at the only post office in Antarctica, in Pt Lockroy. I immediately thought I’m going to use this as a teaching tool for ecology in my PDC. So I blew up the stamps onto A3 and cut out individual animals. Then came the fun part – on the back of each animal I wrote up what it ate and who ate it. Down there krill is the keystone species so I made sure I had variations available on the phytoplankton populations that vary with ocean temperature. I used abut 100m of ribbon (in different colours of 10m each) and asked who has phytoplankton – they then read out the card. I handed them the ribbon. Then I asked who eats the plankton – someone said “yes” and read out their card. As it was a connection I gave them the ribbon and repeated the process until everyone had had a go and the whole group was connected as in an ecosystem. I then said that the ocean was warm that year and there were less diatoms – which is the krill’s favourite food. The person holding the krill dropped the ribbon and then it cascaded through the ecosystem showing how collapse works.”

More than a year has passed since Robin began in earnest writing the first in a series of books documenting over 20 years of training teachers, group leaders and facilitators.

Book I, outlining the methodology and giving examples, activities and some processes to use, is almost half written. It has attracted a dedicated team of proofreaders, assistants and an editor over the months, namely Ange Jackson, Erin Young, Tracy Adams and Eve Witney. Robin’s partner Rob Clark is working on the artwork for the cover and for two card games that will be ready for launching before the book is completed. Prof Stuart Hill is reading the book with a view to writing the forward. It’s still early days, though Robin aims to have it in print in the first half of 2016.

Here’s a sample activity from the ‘Empowerment’ chapter in Book 1 under the section of ‘Working from the Heart’. 

ACTIVITY: Have a conversation with your heart. Begin a journalling exercise starting with the question “Heart, one who really knows what’s best for me, what work brings me the most satisfaction? What brings me joy? What am I most passionate about?” 

State writing down spontaneously any answers that come to you. Do your best not to ‘think’. Don’t stop. Just keep writing even if it’s not all making sense or fluent. Stop only to read the question over again and begin writing once more.

Take time to reflect at the end.As a result of what you’ve written, now consider if there are any things you may feel to add more of into your life or allow to drop away.

Contact Robin if you’d like to register interest in the books or to support with funding the initial print run of Book I. Email – robin@earthcare.com.au

Woodford Folk Festival, held in December for 6 days each year, is the biggest and most acclaimed festival of it’s kind in Australia. For the last two years Robin and her troupe of installation artists, ceremony weavers and musicians have made her design of ‘The Sacred Union Labyrinth’ as a 10 x 10 meter meditative walk that patrons can experience any time during the festival. A magical pathway leads through a bamboo construction heart entranceway and via a series of pennants that give instructions about how to walk the labyrinth. Four times during the festival she and Mark Healy, who was the spark behind Robin designing the labyrinth, with support from Christine Clegg, Rob Clark and Stephane Cazard, lead sacred community ceremonies accompanied by a merry band of four musicians to the delight of everyone involved. The whole installation was embellished with Rob Clark’s amazing sign art and this last year by Glen Christie’s beautiful sculptural art pieces. Facilitating community ceremony is one of Robin’s big passions and it is no doubt hoped, by the thousands who walked the Labyrinth, that it becomes a permanent feature of the festival for years to come. Fingers crossed! There’s now a special FaceBook page for the Labyrinth. Click here to like the page. 

What a surprise! The opening evening saw Robin and 13 others acknowledged and honoured as Elders of the Permaculture Community. It was explained that you had to be over 55, contributed substantially over many years to Permaculture and be present at the Convergence. Robin accepted the plaque with tears in her eyes and a joyous heart. 

Robin was one of four key note presenters at the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in March. She presented directly after David Holmgren on the first day and led the 200 attendees in an interactive greeting, icebreaking, networking and theme building session entitled ‘Social design and the culturing of Permaculture.’ It was obviously enjoyed and appreciated by all with everyone feeding back their theme groups suggestions with enthusiasm and team support. A lot was achieved in the one hour session and the energy of it carried out into the rest of the convergence.

Robin’s workshop the next day ‘Expanding the Edge of Teaching Permaculture Creatively’ drew a full to bursting room. In the midst of the workshop several of the people attending, having previously been to one of Robin’s ‘Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning’ courses, were invited to jump in to present a snippet of one or two of the processes that they’d gleaned or evolved from doing the course. They were on the spot, facilitating the group and showing how they were using and expanding ‘Dynamic Groups’ tools and processes. Lots of fun, activity and colour kept everyone awake in the after lunch session.

 The closing afternoon saw Robin lead all the completion activities, including the now traditional ‘Jumping’. Many of the attendees stood up on stage, spoke a strong intention they were taking on to action over the next period of time, handed Robin the microphone and jumped off the stage. Some jumped in pairs, teams or regional groups to the applause and joy of the audience. Robin also led a healing ceremony in honour of the co-originator of Permaculture Bill Mollison with everyone feeling love and care in their hearts and sending that out to him via a specially made plaque. The final closing ceremony was a beautiful spiral dance which Robin lead to the wonderful funky music track by Deva Presence entitled ‘Source of Life: Permaculture’. Here’s a link to check out his album ‘in Abundance’.