Community Permaculture Design Hybrid Course
Welcome dreamers, weavers, and changemakers! We are seeking a cohort of participants interested in participating in a collective regenerative design process over the course of three intensive months of learning together. We seek to build the practical and creative skills within our home communities of Northern Arizona. How does this land, this place, and the needs of our communities speak to us collectively? What design-based skills will allow us to (re)ignite our own intuitive abilities to see and design for pattern? How can we find re-alignment between the lives that we imagine and our day-to-day lived experiences? We are stronger together. Join us in building our community resilience, joy, and creative possibilities.
Participants are welcome at any experience level. From experienced designers to beginning growers, caretakers, creatives, mothers, builders and more—each of your hearts and skills are needed. All you need to bring is a willingness to think outside the box, and a desire to serve our community. The course fees cover all costs associated with the following offerings:
In person, Hands-On Learning:
Introduction to Permaculture & (regenerative) Design process in Flagstaff, AZ:
o Friday, September 12, 1pm-5pm Saturday, September 13, 9am-5pm
o Campout @ Hart Prairie (compost toilet, outdoor kitchen setup)
· Applied design: water, food forests & soils in Rimrock and Sedona, AZ:
o Friday, October 10 1pm-5pm, Saturday, October 11, 9am-5pm
o Campout @ Wild Heart Farm (compost toilet, outdoor kitchen setup)
· Community Design Project in Flagstaff, AZ
o Friday October 24, 1pm-5pm, Saturday October 25th, 9am-5pm
o Campout @ Museum of Northern Arizona (indoor toilets/community kitchen)
*Participants are strongly encouraged to attend the evening camp outs! This is a key aspect of building our permaculture design community of Northern Arizona. Over a meal, around a campfire, or singing is where the beautiful work of community building takes root. Every Friday evening we are together, we will be welcoming the larger grower/permaculture community to join us over a meal to strengthen our network. Our October 24-October 25 design weekend will also be open to the larger community.
We welcome you, fully and wholly.
Mothers, parents, caregivers—please don’t let your caregiving responsibilities keep you from participating. We believe that people care is the foundation of permaculture design– when we bring our whole selves, our community grows stronger. If attending with your children or those you care for makes your participation possible, they are warmly welcome too.
What’s Included in this Hybrid Course?
Virtual & Self-Paced.
o Six pre-recorded permaculture lectures
o Readings
o Creative/reflective journaling prompts & design work
Share. Collaborate. Design.
Weekly two-hour community of practice meet ups for discussion, practice, and design work. Virtual or in-person drop in times TBD.
Three University-level credits available at the undergraduate and graduate level through Northern Arizona University. For more information email Rosemary.logan@nau.edu.
Participants that attend all the in-person sessions, complete course work (readings/reflections/design project), and weekly community of practice, qualify to complete the requirements of a Permaculture Design Certificate following an additional 20 hours of in person, hands-on practical training and design in Spring 2026 (additional course fees apply). These credits apply toward a PDC with Northern Arizona University.
Cost.
Sliding scale $600-$750. (50% deposit due at registration and final payment due first day of class).
About the Instructors
Rosemary Logan and Kate Watters first met and became friends sharing a tent under a Boojum tree on a field trip with an ethnobotany class taught by Gary Nabhan in 2002. Both were pursuing their masters in sustainable communities at Northern Arizona University. They partnered again in 2004 when Kate helped start the Colton Community Garden and Rosemary enthusiastically continued to cultivate it with the help of FALA and NAU students. Now it is a treasured community learning and growing space (thanks to the garden-based passion of Fritz Fritzinger). Rosemary and Kate continue deepen their friendship and collaboration by bringing education out of the classroom and farming out of the dirt to grow permaculture principles and practices with groups and in community, always with an ambitious itinerary and wild hope for transformation.
More about Rosemary
Rosemary Logan has called Flagstaff, Arizona, home for 25 years. While plants and growing food (and community!) have long been a passion for Rosemary, it was her time living at Earlham College’s Miller Farm (‘98-’00) that first introduced her to permaculture. Bill Mollison’s Designer Manual was weekend reading, inspiring her to finally obtain her Permaculture Design Certificate (The Permaculture Project, Wayne Weissman) in 2011 while she and her husband built their passive solar home, and she completed her PhD in Education for Sustainability at Prescott College (2013). She later completed her teacher training in permaculture (Pandora Thomas, Lisa DiPiano) in 2017 and a second PDC through the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Colorado in 2019 (Adam Brock, Jerome Osentowski, Creighton Hofeditz, Avery Ellis). She started integrating permaculture into her teaching at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 2013, including study abroad programs to Scotland and Aotearoa/New Zealand; with support from Wayne Weissman and The Permaculture Project, she co-designed and co-taught her first design course for NAU in 2019, and again, sponsored by the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Project, taught the course for the larger community in 2021, and for NAU in 2023. She has been deeply inspired by her conversations and dreamings with Kate on how to deepen the community and relational practice of permaculture and regenerative design, and is both humbled and honored to work with her on this exciting offering!
More about Kate
Kate Watters has called Northern Arizona home ever since she stepped off the Amtrak train 30 years ago. Kate has been weaving the fields of permaculture, botany, restoration and farming together since her studies at NAU in 2000. At the time a seed was planted at a talk on home scale permaculture by Toby Hemenway and she began with swales and guilds in her backyard. For 15 years Kate studied plants and led groups of volunteers to protect, restore and plant communities on public lands, which too often meant slaying them with herbicide. She co-wrote a book, River and Desert Plants of the Grand Canyon (2006). She longed to care for land more intimately and intentionally, so Kate answered a mid-life call to become a farmer and apprenticed Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Farming in 2015. She started a native seed cooperative, gardened for a chef at a farm-to-table lodge, and started a farm-grown wedding floral design and herbal business. All the while she dreamed of having a place to root down and grow beauty and biological diversity—in 2020 Wild Heart Farm became that dream in material form. Kate and her sister Kelly completed a PDC with Sonoran Permaculture Guild in 2024. This course helped them reframe much of the farm design around regenerative practices and rest and experiential education. She loves teaming up with Rosemary to bring people of all ages together for hands-on learning experiences at the farm and beyond to grow more resilient gardens and communities.
Kate learns hands-on and loves teaching in this way.