2025 Permaculture Design Certificate & ReVILLAGing Family Camp!
2025 ~ Permaculture Design Certificate & ReVILLAGing Family Camp! ….
Designing for Regenerative Living & Re-Villaging
At OUR Ecovillage, we believe that we are all teachers and we are all learners.
In 2025, we invite you to co-create a truly unique, transformational experience: a two-week journey of living, learning, healing, and designing — together.
Shifting patterns, exploring worldviews, and practicing tools and capacity building creates new possibilities when stepping into deep-dive ‘probiotic’ ecological knowledge building.
July 6 – 20, 2025
Vancouver Island, British Columbia Canada
OUR team is led by Hiinahcit, Brandy Gallagher, and James Richardson and continues to be partnering with Starhawk/ Earth Activist Training (E.A.T.), and now the Raffi Foundation, and Charlene Vasvuez/Deep Medicine Circle crafting a permaculture program for people of all ages and lived experiences to come together in a living village.
Through experiential learning, we embark on a journey where land-based learning and climate science meet cultural ways of knowing and wisdom traditions knowledge transfer.
How might we learn to hold each other, as we heal into the beauty of a certainly uncertain future… and listen to what calls us forward?
Rooted in relational pedagogy and an Indigenous / kinship worldview, this gathering blends the depth of a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course with the magic of a ReVillaging Family Camp, Child Honouring & Peacemaking — a model of living and learning that is both ancient and urgently needed for our times.
This is more than a course. It is a way of being.
Together, we will:
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Shift patterns of thinking, living, and designing centered in Peacemaking / Restorative Justice
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Explore worldviews that center connection, responsibility, and reverence for life.
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Build tools and capacity for ecological stewardship and regenerative community building.
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Practice hands-on, land-based skills that feed the soil, the spirit, and our collective future.
Whether you come as an individual seeking PDC certification, a parent with your children, a young adult seeking leadership skills, or an elder wishing to share and learn —
this village is for you.
Participants will learn through participation in:
- The ethics and principles of permaculture design.
- Indigenous Knowledge sharing
- Child Honouring principles
- The core values of Peacemaking / Restorative Justice
- Constructive, regenerative solutions to climate change and environmental degradation,
- How to analyze a site and plan for future management.
- How to harvest, conserve, store, filter and clean water.
- How to set up graywater systems and composting toilets.
- How to build soil, make compost, sheet mulch, compost teas and ferments, and foster healthy soil biology.
- How to start seeds, make cuttings and propagate plants.
- How to make biochar.
- How to tend a forest to reduce wildfire danger.
- How to plant, plant and tend a food forest and incorporate agroforesty.
- The role and ethics of incorporating animals into a system.
- The spectrum of alternative energy solutions available to reduce our carbon footprint.
- Legal and financial structures to help promote change (Lawful Permaculture!)
- Communication skills and conflict trainsformation tools to help groups run smoothly.
- Strategies for transforming oppression and discrimination and building bridges across our differences,
- Planning and strategy for social justice campaigns.
- Grounding, centering, and establishing a personal practice for spiritual and self-renewal.
- Creating ceremony, community rituals and celebrations.
And we’ll do all this in an exciting, new context:
Introduction to Permaculture
Permaculture in three days! The introduction of ecological design, ReVillaging, Child Honouring, Peacemaking…. and understanding of the permaculture movement for those who cannot attend a full two-week course!
Permaculture Design Certificate Program
Earth Activist Training’s Permaculture Design Certificate course (PDC) with Starhawk is a most needed and ethical choice for learning in these uncertain times of change. Learn how to design human systems that mimic natural systems, explore climate change adaptation strategies (and the IPCC Report), and use a minimum of energy and resources to create real abundance and social justice.
PDC Upgrade
(for certified permaculture graduates only)
This course is for permaculture design certification graduates who are looking to refresh their knowledge and apply their skills in an immersive on-land and in-person environment. This unique upgrade course is 59% off of regular pricing for the full Permaculture Design Certification course with all the same lessons, instructors, and hands-on learning. This is an amazing offering!
Re-Villaging Family Camp
We ask ourselves, “How can we ‘go village’ if we can’t make space for our children and families to learn regenerative practice and permaculture design thinking together?” Our answer is to offer an all-inclusive, permaculture learning experience for family groups. Come along with the youth and elders of your “family” group.
Over the two week program, “the Little Permie” and “the Adult Permie” will learn the same topics, practical principles and guiding design methods. There will be many functional, hands-on workstations suitable for various skills, interests, and ages. The daily schedule is specially designed to suit kids’ down-time and adults’ extensive design group projects as there will be optional sessions in the evenings for learners who want to deepen their discussion and research on particular topics.
O.U.R. Commitment to Truth & Reconciliation and Decolonizing Permaculture
Healing of the people MUST include healing of the land.
Why We Acknowledge Land
When we begin by honouring the land and its Original Peoples:
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We recognize the full history — not just the settler narrative.
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We center relational accountability — acknowledging that land is not property, but a living relative.
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We commit to active processes of decolonization, reparation, and truth-telling.
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We orient our regenerative efforts — permaculture, restoration, re-villaging — toward justice, not just sustainability.
Healing is not just ecological. It is cultural. It is spiritual.
And it must include honouring Indigenous knowledge systems, governance models, foodways, and land stewardship practices as central — not optional — to designing a truly regenerative future.
Learn more about Indigenous Peoples of the land you occupy here.
