WOW. LocallyGrown.net ROCKS.

Seriously. This is one of the most awesome presentations I've seen yet at the Financial Permaculture Course.

In a Nutshell: Eric Waldrop of www.locallygrown.net has solved the major challenges of Traditional Farmer's Market's, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), & Buying Clubs with an easy-to-use piece of internet software. (No nerds required! - Did I saw "wow?")

The virtual farmer's market he runs in Athens, Georgia has 60 growers, 1500 customers, and does over $10,000 of sales every week. By Eric's reckoning, that makes it the largest Farmer's Market in Georgia and the One of the largest in the Southeast USA. (Did I say "wow?")

I almost can't believe the ease and grace with which Eric has used the permaculture principle "the problem is the solution" to transform the challenges of small-scale ecological farming into stunningly simple solutions.

The Food & Agriculture business design group is in complete awe. I'm not even sure if we need investment capital to get this business started! Eric has made this so easy that half the participants (myself included!) are running home to start up their own local virtual farmers markets.

Watch a video explaining locallygrown.net: Click Here

One word descriptions of Eric's presentation by Financial Permaculture Course participants:
Awesome, fantastic, connective, wow, congratulations, nouveau, hopeful, excited, hunky dory, impatient to do, inspired, valuable, do it, possibilities, resourceful, cool, great, brilliant, cutting edge!!!

WOW.

Chaordic Permaculture Institute picks up Financial Permaculture discussion

The Financial Permaculture Course is stirring up some discussion in the international permaculture community!

Stella of the Chaordic Permaculture Institute writes on the international permaculture list: (edited for relevance)

It's great that the term [Financial Permaculture] seems to have gotten all sexy, perhaps also thanks to this initiative, http://www.financialpermaculture.org (crashed servers with the traffic etc.)...

I've attempted to get my head round all the links (is anyone else confused?) and tried to 'map' some sort of wider scenario this might fit into ... and need help! please let me know how you would edit this brief panorama here:

http://permacultureinstitute.pbwiki.com/FinancialPermaculture

which you can edit yourself (as any of the rest of the site). just ask
me or any of the design team for the password. ...

thanks
Stella

"The Number One Cause of Environmental Damage"

"The number one cause of environmental damage on the planet is Fiat Currency." - Catherine Fitts

What? Huh? What is Fiat Currency? I don't know, but I'm about to find out.

Catherine Fitts just introduced the Finance Team - a humble and experienced team of attorneys, financial advisors, precious metal dealers, and more. Here's a very quick and incomplete overview of some of the team and some of their resources:


Franklin Sanders - precious metals
• http://the-moneychanger.com/


Phil Cubeta
• http://www.gifthub.org: how can we get our society and economy working for us?
(also look for the slightly more colorful Wealth Bondage archives...)


Anais Star
Operations Manager at Solari


Jason Eaton
Financial Advisor and calculated risk taker

"We can make a very substantial difference very fast."

Lunchtime at the Financial Permaculture Course. Catherine Fitts of Solari explains,

"I've been waiting for 57 years for this... I moved to a small town in TN, because it is small towns like this that will be able to decentralize and sustain themselves. This is the first time in my life that all the right people in all the right positions of influence are in the same room -- we don't know all the answers, but we're here, and we're going to figure them out together.

Andy Langford, Co-founder of Gaia University and Long-standing permaculture designer, sums up the potential power of this event:

"We're about to come to something. The people who have been doing sustainability projects for the last 40 years are now going to be able to go to the finance folks with their projects and all the sudden we see that we can make a very substantial difference very fast."

"God's Got to Be Proud of Y'all"

"God's got to be proud of y'all working to save the planet,"

Says Hohenwald City Mayor Don Jones to the gathered group of citizens and green business designers as the Financial Permaculture Course gets underway at the Blondy Church of God.

With 34 States represented, the next 5 days are bound to be full of creative collaborative design for local economic resilience. Stay tuned!

Financial Permaculture Wireless IS UP

Howdy All -

We're on site at the Blondy Church of God in Hohenwald, TN, meeting with Catherine Austin Fitts, Jennifer English, and the other core design members of the Financial Permaculture Course.

Our expert Gaia U ace IT team has been working with Pastor Marcus Webb and the rest of the generous folks at Blondy Church, and our wireless is up and running -- The network is "Financial Permaculture", no password required.

LET THE BLOGGING BEGIN.

Blogging Directives for Regenerative Learning Events

Patrick, Greg, and I sat down earlier this week to talk about how we
could best make information-rich blogs that are accessible to a wide
range of people. This meeting comes on the cusp of the financial
permaculture course, which we will be real-time blogging in order to
tell the story of a small-town gathering to explore solutions for a
resilient local economy.

Our Gaia University blogging team will use the following guidelines (as a
mindmap and a list) for creating quality real-time blog the
Financial Permaculture Course in Hohenwald, TN.



Blogging Directives

what...
- TELL participants' stories -- use their words and perceptions.
- HARVEST useful information and resources (ideas, people, theories, businesses, organizations, websites) for later distillation.

how...
- BLOG in the first person. Personalize the story you tell.
- ENLIVEN your posts -- use anecdotes, humor, and metaphor.
- WRITE clearly and accessibly -- short sentences
- LINK the crap out of your blog posts.
Aim for at least 3 links per post. At a minimum, link to
www.financialpermaculture.com
www.gaiauniversity.org
www.centerforaholisticecology.org

Other bloggers:
- www.permaculturedesigns.blogspot.com
- www.solari.com/blog
- www.gaiaemerging.com
- www.thinkingjamz.blogspot.com

- www.gifthub.org
- www.peaksurfer.blogspot.com

- CONNECT your posts to big IESD ideas: Permaculture, Peak Oil, Patrix-Busting, Slow Food, Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, Art of Mentoring, Collaboration
- DEMONSTRATE your content with images, live photos, and graphics.


- So, whenever any participant...
- ...echoes or resonates with the FPC meta-story, BLOG IT.
- ...tells a personal story that moves you, BLOG IT.
- ...shares a piece of juicy information that's new to you, BLOG IT.


Digiphon: This post was written with OmniOutliner Pro on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 (Leopard). The mindmap was made with VUE, an excellent, cross-platform, free concept-mapping and ontology software program.

Well done team -- crashed the website!

Thanks to Albert and Catherine for their appearance on Coast to Coast last night! They generated enough traffic to overload the financialpermaculture.com website for a few hours.

It's now up and running again -- head on over and take a look!