If you hold a Permaculture Design Course certificate you are eligible to be a PINA member.
The Permaculture Institute of North America is a professional trade guild representing all graduates of the PDC. PINA’s mission is to elevate the status and influence of Permaculture, and support professional practice and opportunities in the field. Your PINA membership helps us to expand much more rapidly and to provide you with better professional opportunities, support and services. Even if you do not intend to become a professional designer or educator, supporting PINA can help the movement to expand and scale up. Please consider joining us today! Together, we are stronger!
PINA is conducting a membership campaign, reaching out to PDC graduates, teachers, designers and practitioners to build our network. As part of our current membership campaign, we are offering a complimentary one-year subscription to Permaculture Designmagazine when you join. You are also eligible to enter the 2018/2019 Naturewise Permaculture Design Contest.
PINA is now welcoming allied organizational members as well. You can read about our new offering to organization members in the following newsletter article or on our website.
Why PINA?
Several years in discussion, the PINA idea took corporate form in 2012 among a small number of senior teachers. The initial vision was to help all those who had completed the PDC live up to the transformational potential of the course. We understood that this would require honing a professional edge for our movement. To lift our game, we published an authoritative edition of the PDC curriculum and began offering diplomas in site design and education to new graduates and recognized veterans. Diploma support in particular provides a long-overdue bookend to the PDC. In place of an empty promise made long ago by Bill Mollison, graduates of the course now have a professional pathway to complete their education in permaculture. Six years on, PINA has passed some important milestones, but we need your help to fulfill the promise of a continental organization providing services to PDC graduates from coast to coast. We want to ensure that the rich harvest of wisdom from the pioneering generation of teachers and designers buoys and empowers the many new practitioners stepping up to transform society in the 21st century.
The more than 50,000 PDC graduates in North America have much to learn from each other and strong interests in common which we don’t often get to share. You are among the thought leaders of this continental-wide city of change agents, so we ask for your help. Our ideas, values and skills could dramatically improve the quality of life in many communities if we could influence public policy and private development. Leading practitioners such as yourself have already shown this is possible. We now need to help many others step into similar leadership in their own communities.
The questions that motivated the PINA founders are still relevant: Could our permaculture graduates, organized for mutual support and improvement, and acting as a group
• Impact the whole of society more effectively?
• Address the profound interlocking crises of climate change, social injustice, and ecological degradation?
• Improve professional practice and so gain access to the levers of change?
• Make it easier for PDC graduates to earn income working for permaculture ethics rather than against them?
• Enable people who want to teach permaculture or design systems to do it as well as possible, and provide standards so that there would be a way to judge success?
• Make it easier for PDC graduates to find further quality training nearby?
• Share ideas, knowledge, and resources?
• Make the public persona of permaculture more visible and accurate.
This is an ambitious agenda, but one we think is achievable.
Why join PINA?
All of this can only happen with lots of people working on it. So we are asking you to join the effort now. The first and easiest way to connect is to become a PINA member at the $30/year basic level. To do this, please go to our Membership Page or if you wish to seek a PINA diploma, go to our Diploma Page. In addition to members and diplomates, PINA is seeking volunteers to support the function of its committees, to work on establishing regional hubs, and to shape the development of this multi-generational project. We also welcome donations of any amount. Can we count on you?
PINA is committed to reciprocity and solidarity within our community, for the betterment of society as a whole. Whether you practice permaculture professionally or simply appreciate the impact it has had on your own life, we ask you to help us create opportunities for many more to advance our common aims and values
