PINA Board Member, since 2016
Brooksville, Florida
Koreen has extensive experience in both permaculture design and in education. She has taught permaculture design at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, various locations throughout the US, a number of universities, and countries in the Americas and Europe. She is the principal owner of Grow Permaculture.
She is a sought after public speaker, and has been lecturing on permaculture since 2006. Her areas of expertise and passion are food forestry, small farms and food security, designing for resilience, community building, and regenerative economics including the sharing economy.
She has been involved in alternative education over the last three decades, including immersion education, mentoring and other approaches, and has been teaching permaculture since 2006.
As a designer, her focus is on helping people create abundant edible landscapes, self-sufficient urban or rural homesteads, resilient and high yield small farms, business guilds, and intentional communities. Specialties include soil building and remediation, water catchment and use, edible landscaping, planning urban and rural integrated farming, reducing energy needs, and building more resilient finances and communities through collaborative holistic integration at village scale.
Koreen has grown hundreds of species of edibles in a variety of conditions and climates, run edible nurseries, engaged in master planning, business incubation and holistic economics using whole systems strategy and design, facilitated community development and facilitation, organized events, and has been a passionate educator, life coach, and mentor, so finds herself taking on diverse projects at times. She organized permaculture style disaster relief for thousands of Haitians living in camps after the earthquake in 2010, coordinated the formation of the Sustainable Urban Agriculture Coalition St Petersburg, organized natural building projects (straw bale, earth berm walipini) at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, and is a founding co-organizer for the North American Permaculture Convergence and the international permaculture Co-Lab effort (formerly known as The Next Big Step). She is a Diplomate and a Board Member of the Permaculture Institute of North America, or PINA (pina.in).
Koreen manages a permaculture medicinal herb and orchard demonstration farm in West Central Florida where she gets to dance with the natural world. She strives to live a balanced life, to walk her talk, and to make decisions in the interest of the next seven generations.
