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 promoting the creation of Mother Gardens. Join us!
Fees
This course could be FREE to you. Take a look at our fees page here
Level
Level 2
Dates
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:
- May to July 2025
- September to November 2025
- May to July 2026.
Weekend residential dates for this course:
Friday 30th May – Sunday 1st June
Friday 27th June – Sunday 29th June
Friday 25th July – Sunday 27th July
Plus:
Optional fortnightly Friday gardening sessions.
There will be two community visits to projects around Birmingham for each of the three parts of the course. Dates TBC.
Cross Pollinators are not necessarily tied to a single site or project, but are able to connect to different groups across a network. They may also help start up new growing projects, community gardens, Mother Gardens, local networks, and social eco-systems.
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.
Topics covered on 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:
Confidence building
Leadership skills
Training / workshop delivery skills
Conflict management and Non-Violent Communication
Video production and media promotion
Project management
Managing finances
Marketing
Regenerative land-management:
Permaculture design
Food production
Agro-forestry (forest gardening and orcharding)
Mother gardening
Collaborative Community garden design
Plant propagation
Exploring the bigger picture:
Systems theory / complexity science / regenerative cultures
Exploring new regenerative models and systems for the future
Changemaker skills
Mother Garden matrix planning
Sociocracy
New world lab – planning, sketching and designing new initiatives for a new world
Legacy project: collecting and recording skills and wisdom from elders
Own-project surgery supporting students develop their own initiatives
Self-directed learning support sessions
Creative problem solving around social /global crises scenarios
Project design sketching using mother garden blueprints
Self-ecology – nurturing the self through eco-therapeutic practices:
Tree of Life
Mindfulness in nature
Nature connection and self-reflection
Group reflection
Entry Requirements
The course is suited for people with an interest in permaculture, community building and regenerative food growing, and with some knowledge of any of these.
It is ideal for those who have completed part 1 and 2 of the Mother Gardens Bootcamp.
You must be working at Literacy Level 1, or above.
You must also have:
- experience in food growing
- involvement and interest in community work
- awareness or some knowledge of permaculture
