The Permaculture Design Course with the Northern School covers key aspects of sustainability, including enterprise and business. We support those who wish to take a design approach to business itself, focussing throughout the course on the relevant skills of systems thinking, managing complexity and social change. Students are encouraged to find practical solutions to real-life problems, finding ways to either save or earn money for their organisations in the process.
The course content is particularly suitable for those thinking about starting or growing a business, and those wishing to reconcile an ethical approach with sound business practices. It is not possible to cover all the more specialist aspects of business design in any great depth, but it is possible to review the important aspects of business and sustainability and lay down a firm foundation, which we do in the final module of the course.
We also introduce and signpost useful developments and resources in the field and allow participants to discuss them, formally and informally. A short list of these references would include:
RoundView is an open framework that helps to imagine and create a sustainable future. The RoundView Guidelines provide a positive vision to work towards and clearly show the problems of our current direction.
The Blue Economy is about the changeover to the use of bio-resources to give zero fossil-fuel emissions by 2050.
Enterprise facilitation : founded by Dr. Ernesto Sirolli, the Sirolli Institute is the global authority on bottom up economic development with Enterprise Facilitation® and the Trinity of Management
Industrial ecology and the circular economy, particularly with the work of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Permaculture design is close to other design approaches such as Bio-mimicry.