Cross Pollinator Course at Fircroft College

Cross-pollinators are active community food growers, eco-practitioners and community green activists who support and visit different spaces, sharing resources, skills and ideas across projects, as well as promotion the creation of Mother Gardens.

The Cross-Pollinator training at Fircroft College aims to equip keen and aspiring community and eco-practitioners in the different skills to make positive and sustained impacts for the planet and their communities. It will build on and deepen the skills learnt on the first Mother Gardens Bootcamp course, practically applying the Mother Gardens model and other tools to real world issues. You will learn and deepen key skills in regenerative gardening, as well as a much wider set of skills and ideas required for building a sustainable future, relating in community organising, and creative problem solving and regenerative design

Using permaculture design methods and the mother gardens model, you will develop tools to engage in creative problem solving, to respond to emerging social and ecological problems and to help imagine and design sustainable alternatives to current unsustainable systems.

Students will be encouraged to develop their own interest and niche broadly relevant to the ethos of the course, through their own self-directed learning. This will be done both in their own time, and at allocated slots on certain weekends, where they will be supported by tutors within the ‘New world lab’ strand of the course.

The course is comprised of a broad set of topics covered by our different tutors. It will bring together different elements of the Mother Garden Bootcamp course, Green Changemaker course, and Green Skills course.

There will be five core strands to the course within which topics will sit:

Core community building skills
Regenerative land-management
Exploring the bigger picture
New world lab – planning, sketching and designing new initiatives for a new world
Self-ecology – nurturing the self through eco-therapeutic practices

The core part of the course will be delivered one weekend per month (Friday afternoon to Sunday midday). There will be three parts to the course. You will apply separately for each of these: