I am a 76 year old community development and permaculture educator, evolving my own methodology and accompanying resource materials over my past 40 years facilitating permaculture. My focuses are social permaculture, community building, ecovillage design, environmental restoration, food resiliency and permaculture in schools. I worked for several years with village-scale food security in Southern Africa, before becoming the co-ordinator of Victory Community Gardens in Nelson and consultant-educator (post-earthquake) with Project Lyttleton’s ‘Food Resilience Project’. In 2012 I founded ‘The Localising Food Project’, producing motivational documentaries and teaching workshops on home garden design, public food forests, seed security and local food action planning, up until today.

I am also the founder, resident and trustee of Tui Land Trust & 40 year old Tui Community, and founder/trustee of the educational non-profit organisation, Institute for Earthcare Education Aotearoa. My international and national community facilitation work encompasses ‘midwifing’ new initiatives, squatter settlement re-development, long-term conflict resolution, the training of community leaders as ‘cultural change agents’, participatory planning of orphanages, mentoring of new ecovillages, social renewal of existing ecovillages, participatory permaculture design of ecovillage infrastructure, and strengthening the community culture within existing organizations. My community facilitator’s manual, ‘Grounding Vision, Empowering Culture’, published in 2000, shares many of my participatory processes for decision-making and collective action.