Subject: [permaculture] Re: Does Permaculture have to be so expensive???

From: Toby Hemenway <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 08:34:40 -0700

The question of the expense of Permaculture design courses raises its head
very regularly. I've recently started teaching courses, and although I
understand that the US $700-1000 price tag makes them out of reach for many
alternative people, I know the economics well enough to know that they
can't easily be made much cheaper. Nobody makes money on these courses.
Compared to most residential courses, they are cheap: if you look at course
catalogs from say, Breitenbush or Esalen, they charge $350-500 just for a
weekend. In most of the PC courses I know of, the instructors get paid
$1200-2000 for one to two weeks of prep, two weeks of 14-hour days, and a
week or two to collapse and usually get sick. That's over a month of hard
work for that two grand, or $24,000 a year if they could keep it up, but no
one can (more than 3 courses a year is considered suicidal in most cases).
Some of the payment is in work-trades to accommodate those with little
money, so that's even less cash for the teachers.
    And I've seen the financial breakdowns from several venues that run the
courses: they break even, maybe lose or gain $1000 or so from the
$10-20,000 they take in on a typical course with 15-25 participants. That's
a low margin. After you buy food, hire a cook and support staff, build
latrines, showers, and shelters, pay rent on a space, and pay the
instructors, there isn't much left. That's why big courses have been
attempted, so that some seed money can go to start other projects. But I
assure you, the standard 15-person PDC doesn't make anybody rich.
  So I'm in sympathy with those who can't scrape up close to a thousand
dollars to take a course. It's a lot of money for us alternative types.
That's why most places offer work trades, or scholarships subsidized by
those who pay in full. But having walked both sides of the fence, I can
assure you that it's not viable for the instructors and venues to try to do
it for less unless the format were radically changed.

I'm very curious to hear how the Aussies and others do it so cheaply. Do
people bring their own food and pay nothing for the land they use, or
commute? How does it work?

Okay, no more questions that push my buttons now. I'm starting to feel
guilty about spending too much time on these listservs!

Toby Hemenway

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From: Kelley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 16:14:06 -0400

Toby,
I'm not sure if you're referring to my post re: "Aussies" and "cheap" courses or not,
but if you are, these are not on location, these are correspondence courses and with
that comes the typical responsibility of self-teaching that comes with a correspondence
course, especially since the course was designed for dry Australian outback and I'm
trying to adapt the info to a wetter, cooler climate.  The student does the largest
percentage of the teaching and learning.

Kelley

Toby Hemenway wrote:

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From: "Rene and Lorraine van Raders" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 23:27:51 +1000

Hi Everyone - Long time since we've talked here....

We're in the middle of teaching a course here at the moment.  We charge
A$500 + A$100 accommodation and approximately $60 for a food kitty.  We've
been teaching for six years now and do three courses a year.  We take a
maximum of 10 students on a course which allows us to use the facilities on
our own property (the accommodation money pays for Rene's parents to vacate
their home for the course, so that we can use it as the
classroom/accommodation area).  The three courses provide the main source
of income for the year (way below the government poverty threshold - though
enough for us to live comfortably and have plenty of time for additional
community work).

The students take turns cooking, and we find with free use of our abundant
garden, that $60 buys all the other necessary organic and local extras.  We
eat extremely well - they are healthy, tasty, and ethical meals  (we ate
guinea pig by request yesterday and maybe we'll try some cockroaches
tomorrow!!!!!!)  (Facing the cultural barriers to yield issues.....it's
fun!)

We used to charge less for the courses, however, we've found that since
increasing the price it's easier to fill them.  We don't think we'd get
more students if we gave our courses for free.  In agreement with Russ and
Fiona, we can see that there is a market for much more expensive courses to
cater for those people who couldn't imagine a five hundred dollar , two
week course offering them anything useful.

We've spent a great deal of time, effort, and money developing a really
good course, knowledge base, and library, and certainly feel that it is
ethical to ask for something in return for the excellent service we
provide.  For many people, this is the best two weeks of fun and learning
they've ever had.  A permaculture course can make amazing changes to
people's lives.  WHY DO PEOPLE HAVE A MENTAL BLOCK ABOUT CHARGING FOR
ETHICAL WORK???? 

We don't offer work in exchange for course costs - we offer courses without
up-front payment, trusting people to pay back in instalments afterwards. 
Occasionally they don't, but on the whole, they do.   Most of our graduates
have become friends for life - many of them are in regular contact -
nationally and internationally. 

We also offer a correspondence course for A$1600 - our course takes about
two years to complete.  It's an in depth look at permaculture that requires
students to gather a lot of local information themselves, but also takes a
considerable amount of our time in personal one-to-one feedback.  Again,
this is great value for money.  (We would offer this course for free to
unfinancial people who could convince us that they were going to make a
major contribution to their community/country - our time and energy is
finite however.) 

It's late, and time for bed before the five o'clock start (for us) and the
six o'clock swim (for the course participants) at our local beautiful Lake
Eacham.

Kind regards from beautiful Far North Queensland, Australia!!!!
Lorraine and Rene van Raders

P.S.  Larry London's talked about providing a course for free on the net. 
We are interested in helping but it's a huge project, and can see it taking
a long time to get up and running.  (We hardly have time to scratch
ourselves as it is....)

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