In this PINA-sponsored webinar, we reviewed the heritage of mutual aid in the US and internationally, and worked through an emerging pattern language for mutual aid to see how it applies to a wide range of projects that can generate economic self-governance. A particular juicy area for exploration is how regional mutual aid initiatives might form the basis for PINA hubs. By meeting many immediate human needs in a way that generates surplus for distribution (FairShare), these economic tools can help us connect small and local work with transcendent and collective aims, resolving a conflict that often hobbles our efforts for autonomy. A goal for the course is for each participant to focus the mutual aid lens on one clear and significant new design idea which would begin economic transformation in their career and life.

The Mutual Aid webinar serves as Continuing Education credits for PINA diplomates.

Digging up Mollison’s Chapter 14 from the dusty basement of “permaculture visions that didn’t sell briskly at Whole Foods,” this webinar will focus on a major strategy for overcoming structural economic and social barriers that prevent permaculture from making the deep transformations we seek. We’re talking about the ancient economic and cultural patterns Peter Kropotkin described in 1890 as “mutual aid.” On the basis of mutual aid, and collaborating at a key level of scale—larger than village, smaller than state—groups of our ancestors (across most cultures) have found power in the presence of hostile and oppressive conditions, as they pooled resources to manage large scale territories (see Italian farming co-operative history) and set long-term positive directions for their communities.