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‘Life changing’ green education course open for applications
A year-long environmental sustainability course that has been called a “dynamic and unique learning experience” has opened for applications for 2025.
The Practical Sustainability Course (PSC), run by Shift Bristol, immerses students in all aspects of environmental sustainability including ecological land management, energy systems, community building, circular economy principles and field trips to land-based cooperatives across the South West.
Students take field trips to land-based communities such as Brithdir Mawr in Wales, and undertake practical land management activities
The course culminates in a ten-day roundhouse build to benefit a local project, which previously has included the St Werburgh’s City Farm Boiling Wells site, Avon Wildlife Trust’s Grow Wilder project, Leigh Woods on behalf of the National Trust and Strode Valley Organics.
Experts in organic horticulture, woodland management, group dynamics and green building techniques provide students with guidance and practical experience that reframes education to focus on hands-on learning, interaction and agency.
The course is entering its 15th year. In the time it has engaged hundreds of students and collaborated with or contributed to a vast number of community spaces and organisations.
Just a handful of these include Ambition Lawrence Weston, Ashley Community Housing, Avon Needs Trees, Bristol Energy Network, Easton community centre, Migrateful, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and many community gardens across the city.
It builds on the principles of permaculture, a holistic community-based system centred around the natural environment to create a regenerative culture.
While a significant proportion of the course involves experiential, hands-on learning, there are also ‘chalk-and-talk’ sessions that introduce students to environmental issues and their solutions, as well as personal reflection and group dynamics work
“When systems centralise Earth care, People care, Fair share, in an embodied and reverential way, it only leads to an increase of health and abundance in the system,” director Laura Corfield, who founded Shift with pioneering permaculture practitioner Sarah Pugh, said of the intention behind the course.
“Application of permaculture principles encourage connection to outer ecology, both within community and within ourselves – allowing us to lean into authenticity, meet needs, flourish uniquely, and solve problems collectively – as we complement each other as one large ecosystem.
“On the ground this looks like the caretaking of community greenspaces, allotments, composting hubs, farms and wild spaces. It looks like mutual aid networks, community centres, share boxes, volunteering, Commoning. Place and People in reciprocal and harmonious relationships. That is what Shift helps to build.”
Students have the chance to try their hand at bee keeping, herbalism, mushroom growing, soil sampling, land surveying and much more as well as learning facts about climate change and positive, alternative solutions to the ecological emergency
Shift Bristol itself was forged from the community at the heart of Bristol’s permaculture movement, led by Pugh and Mike Feingold, the green-fingered force of nature behind Glastonbury’s permaculture garden which he founded in 1989.
Shift aims to provide ‘holistic, solutions-based and hands-on education in preparation for a low-carbon, post-oil, creative, dynamic and community-centred future.’
Past PSC students have called the course “life changing”, “transformative”, “truly inspirational”, unique in its “comprehensive coverage of the issues we face”, and have said it “led to new career opportunities, further learning and greater self awareness”.
One student said: “The Practical Sustainability course is incredibly important in encouraging us to envisage a positive future, and how we can co-create it. It’s a fun, safe, creative environment to learn and build confidence in facing huge issues from the personal to the global.
“It’s been an immensely enriching experience being involved so far, and I’m looking forward to a shifted future.”
Shift are holding an open afternoon for prospective students at the Gasworks Studio in St Werburgh’s on July 5, 1-3.30pm. Find out more and sign up here.
Applications for the Practical Sustainability Course close on July 15. All details can be found at shiftbristol.org.uk/about-the-psc
All images: Shift Bristol
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