Christopher Shein is a urban Permaculture designer, Permaculture activist and educator.  With over 15 years of experience in the Bay Area Christopher now leads Wildheart Gardens, an edible & native Permaculture nursery, design and landscaping business in Oakland. He teaches at Merritt College, and helped start, organize and operate numerous urban agriculture projects including Spiral Gardens, SPACE and Ploughshares Nursery, Bay Worms and Bay Area Seed Interchange Library. Christopher will speak on his latest and future urban permaculture educational projects.  This evening is a fundraiser for the Urban Permaculture Guild and Merritt Community College Permaculture Programs. Find out more and how you can get involved.

Ma'ikwe has worked with non-profits, social change organizations and intentional communities for 19 years as an organizer, director, teacher and consultant. She is a co-founder of the Zialua Ecovillage in Albuquerque, and has recently worked on the Administrative staff for a publicly funded Charter School. Ma'ikwe's organizational work is supplemented by 13 years of personal growth work (including teaching) with the Avatar materials. Her commitment to personal growth and service flavors her teaching and consulting with a solid understanding of human development, a sensitivity to undercurrents, and a healthy dose of playfulness and appreciation. She is a graduate of the Dynamic Facilitation training, teaches facilitation with Laird Schaub, and has been working with consensus (as both a facilitator and participant) for 5 years. In addition to her work with groups, she is available for talks about leadership and sustainability.

Interesting factoid. Ma'ikwe once ran a weekly underground restaurant called 'Yum! Club' out of a coop house. You can still regularly spot her in the kitchen wearing a red on red tie-dyed chef's coat, and a generous portion of whatever's for dinner.

A workshop day of dialogue and design.
Hear stories and learn strategies for neighborhood organizing and the planning and design of co-creative urban permaculture projects.
Bring your ideas, questions and projects . . . for networking and workshop opportunities.
Meet and interact with Portland Visionary Architect Mark Lakeman and local Urban Permaculture Designer Kat Steele.

Visionary architect Mark Lakeman inspires and guides the grid structure of a typical American city into a vital social commons with Portland's City Repair Project (www.cityrepair.org).

City Repair was formed in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. Born out of a successful grassroots neighborhood initiative that converted a residential street intersection into a neighborhood public square, City Repair began its work with the idea that localization (of culture, of economy, of decision-making) is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.

Now a national movement, City Repair is about cities, towns, grids and the intersections where our lives can converge.  Multidisciplinary, City Repair combines architecture, urban planning, anthropology, community development, public art, permaculture and ecological design in projects that transform public space.  Formed in 1996, City Repair was conceived as an "anti-virus" to combat isolation and over-commodification of conventionally designed cities, by literally inserting villages into cities.

Trained as an architect, Mark Lakeman is a founding member of the City Repair Project, and the creative director of the ecological design firm Communitecture. Each spring he coordinates the Village Building Convergence, an annual event sponsored by the city of Portland that brings architects, planners, and artists together for ten days of concentrated work with neighborhood residents and volunteers. He has traveled extensively in southern Mexico where his inspiration for community living came from living with traditional Mayan peoples.

Kat Steele is the Founder of the Urban Permaculture Guild (www.urbanpermacultureguild.org) and member of the organizations East Bay Permaculture Guild, Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility and Bay Localize.

Diana Leafe Christian

Diana Leafe Christian is author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, and Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community. Editor of Communities magazine from 1994 through 2007, she has written about communities for publications ranging from Mother Earth News to the Encyclopedia of Community, and has been interviewed by media ranging from The New York Times and Time Magazine to NPR and the BBC. She is the keynote speaker at the Urban Ecovillage Conference in Chicago, November 9th,  (urban.ecovillage.org) and a keynote speaker at the Japanese Ecovillage Conference in Tokyo, also in November. Diana lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina. www.DianaLeafeChristian.org