Bio

Koreen Brennan

Koreen Brennan has worked in the fields of social justice and human rights for 20 years in the Los Angeles area.  While in LA, she 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 educate people about permaculture. She 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 in 2006 and has continued to manage permaculture design projects there.  The result has been demand for and interest in food forest installation, and natural building as a housing solution. She has planted 1000 trees and bushes at Pine Ridge and returns yearly to plant more, and to install water catchment and other permaculture systems. In the Tampa Bay area, she founded Create Clearwater (recently migrated to meetup.com/createclearwater), 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 cities. As a result of its success, hundreds of gardens have been started in the area, edible plant nurseries and garden consulting businesses have been formed, and hundreds of local residents have been introduced to the concepts of regenerative living. She organized a permaculture disaster response project in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 which focused in on the two primary areas of risk – low tech water filtration and composting toilet systems.  Tens of thousands of people now have composting toilets and are familiar with how to use them safely. This has helped prevent cholera where it is being used. 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 now in Haiti. She has worked on the design team 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, Eric Toensmeier, Wayne Weisman, 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, Tampa Bay, Sarasota, Gulf Coast University, and Tuskegee University. Currently, she holds the part time position of Sustainable Urban Agriculture Coordinator for St Petersburg via a program initiated by the Chamber of Commerce and the Sustainable Urban Agriculture Coalition of St Pete. She has a small nursery focusing on permaculture perennial and native edibles,  and a design business which focuses on creating edible landscape demonstration sites, and is developing permaculture curriculum for children. Her areas of expertise and passion are food forestry and food security, community building, and financial permaculture.  She has been involved in alternative education for close to 20 years and has been teaching permaculture regularly since 2006.  She strives to bring the subject to people in the most accessible way, and uses a variety of creative techniques and approaches to address different learning styles.  She works well with others and loves to collaborate on both teaching and design work.  She is available to teach permaculture anywhere in the world.  You may reach Koreen at koreen@growpermaculture.com