Imagine a world where children grow up respecting and learning from nature, growing food and tending animals, meeting and co-creating in a natural and easy way together, having fun, loving learning and feeling good about themselves all through their journey to adulthood and beyond.

Robina will share her methodology for establishing SEED (Schools Environmental Education & Development) - a progressive unique blend of permaculture, traditional culture and PRA (Participatory Rural/Rapid Appraisal). 

She will focus on the hands-on ‘technology transfer’ and ‘multiplication strategies’ used to evolve SEED from a squatter settlement pilot, into a nationwide leading-edge programme, honoured by the Sth African Dept of Education as a model for the future. 

While permaculture practitioners anecdotally understand the value permaculture can have in children’s lives, this field has yet to formalize and quantify its potential impact on a larger societal scale. This presentation seeks to demonstrate how this can be done. We will be discussing the Future City Competition, which engages over 40,000 students from the United States, and is currently going global. In this competition, students engage in designing cities of the future, and 2015’s competition specifically focused on urban agriculture.