Bio
Koreen Brennan
Koreen Brennan has worked in the fields of social justice and human rights for 20 years in the Los Angeles area. She has worked with a permaculture project at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, created food forests, ran an exotic plant nursery, and volunteered hundreds of hours planting, instructing and consulting with gardeners, business organizations and other leadership in Los Angeles to make permaculture concepts more well known. She has co-organized a sustainability and resilience project at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota in conjunction with the Oglala-Lakota Cultural and Environmental Revitilization Initiative and is managing a permaculture design project there. This project has in progress or planned a “sustainability school” with permaculture as a core subject, a demonstration site which is in process of going fully sustainable and off-grid, and an economic revitilization project. She founded Create Clearwater (createclearwater.com), a grassroots effort to bring permaculture solutions and community resilience to citizens of Clearwater, FL, which inspired the creation of several other like-minded groups in other cites. As a result of its success, hundreds of gardens have been started in the area, edible plant nurseries and garden consulting businesses are going, and hundreds of local residents have been introduced to the deeper concepts of regenerative living. She organized a permaculture disaster response project in Haiti after the earthquake which focused on composting toilet systems – thousands of people now have composting toilets and many have been trained on how to create them. She has continued to support projects in that country. As part of that she hosted two members of the Ministry of the Environment of Haiti to train as permaculture designers in the US and they are working to implement broad scale permaculture there. She is currently working on a permaculture design for the Florida House in Sarasota, a sustainable living project, which will demonstrate sustainable edible landscaping in Central Florida. She has studied permaculture with Robyn Francis, Larry Santoyo, Scott Pittman, Toby Hemenway, Darren Doherty, and Warren Brush, and has trained in aquaponics and urban food systems with Growing Power. She has taught permaculture design at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, Miami, Los Angeles, the first Florida Earthship in Manetee County, Tampa Bay, Sarasota, and Tuskegee University. Her areas of expertise and passion are food forestry and food security, community building, and financial permaculture. You may reach Koreen at cory@permacultureguild.us
Ken Benway
Ken became a permaculture designer in October of 2000 after training with Geoff Lawton and Bill Mollison in Minden, LA. He has a 30 year background in design engineering and related fields, as well as in rain catchment systems and water purification. He has studied and worked in Biodynamic Agriculture, Natural Building and Bioregional Planning for over thirteen years.
Ken’s passion for permaculture has been an inspiration to others. He has designed and implemented several permaculture projects in the Tampa Bay area, organizing the area’s largest permaculture network as well as the establishment of several other networks throughout Florida and Alabama.
In 2008, he cofounded The Permaculture Guild, an educational initiative, which sponsored its first Permaculture Design Certification Course at the site of the first “off-the-grid” Earthship in Manatee County, Florida. He has been sharing his passion for permaculture via lectures and workshops since 2000.
Ken has recently returned from a seven month consultation with Grow Alabama in Birmingham, assisting farmers in the process of shifting to more sustainable and regenerative growing methods and increasing farmer’s crop diversity, production and economic viability. This project grew from a permaculture workshop delivered by Ken and Koreen at Tuskegee University. His long term vision is to see watershed based bioregional permaculture design projects established throughout North America and beyond.
You may reach Ken by email at ken.arcadiandesign@gmail.com