Meet our Permaculture Educators!
Gavin Hardy
Gav has been involved with the Farm since 1996 and has had many roles including Management Committee coordinator, teacher and project manager, and now serves as the Farm's Adult Education Coordinator. He completed a Permaculture Design Course with Bill Mollison in the 1990s and has many years of experience in urban permaculture. He is also the Queensland coordinator of Community Gardens Australia. Gav has a passion for community agroforestry and was recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate some of the world's best community food forests and orchards. His home, EcoFlat Brisbane, is featured on the David Holmgren’s Retrosuburbia website. Gav is a serious bike-head who enjoys playing games and sharing food with friends.
Jenny Kato
Having loved gardening as a child, Jenny has maintained a lifelong passion for plants and gardens. That interest has since grown into her permaculture practice and a commitment to better care for the planet. Having completed a permaculture design certificate in 2013 with Geoff Lawton she has gone on to study with David Holmgren, Dan Palmer, Row Morrow, Morag Gamble, Darren Doherty and many more. Jenny has developed a plethora of skills and experience that are essential to permaculture, regenerative agriculture and urban farming. She has applied her growing knowledge to her 2 acre home where the poor soil has provided Jenny with both challenges and opportunities to learn more about soil ecology as a way of improving plant health and productivity. Through her design business, Living Patterns Permaculture, Jenny has applied her knowledge in projects supporting schools, community groups and home gardeners seeking to develop their own knowledge of gardening as a sustainable practice. Jenny is passionate about building resilient communities and food security in a sustainable and ethical way. She is a founding member of Millen Farm, a community farm at Samford, volunteered with Samford community garden and has opened her garden for the Samford Edible Garden Trail for three years and is an active member of the local edible exchange. Jenny loves sharing what she is learning and is always willing to help others create their own garden as a space which is as regenerative for the gardener as it is for the plants they grow.
Michael Wardle
Michael is a father of 4, and the Principle and Director of Savour Soil Permaculture. He began his permaculture journey about 25 years ago, doing his first PDC with Milkwood and having since done 13 PDCs as a student, 4 teacher trainers and 8 more ‘advanced’ permaculture courses. Michael also studied horticulture at TAFE. Through his learning, he came to find his passion for teaching. Michael is the former Adult Education Coordinator at NSCF and is the community gardens coordinator at the University of Queensland. He now applies permaculture design principles and ethics to his workplace and community, as well as in his professional and personal life. He has been fortunate to apply the design process on over 300 sites over the last 10 years and aspires to be as inspirational and practical as his teachers. Michael continues to do other courses and research to advance his knowledge and increase the value he provides in his teaching, projects and consultations.
Kerri Gill
Kerri is a trained nutritionist, food lover and PhD researcher at the University of Queensland with a passionate interest in equitable and sustainable food systems. She began her permaculture journey in 2015 while farming a 5-hectare property in the far south of Tasmania. Kerri has since completed Permaculture Design Certificates in cool temperate and warm temperate climates, Permaculture Teacher Training in a subtropical climate, and a Forest Garden Design Intensive. Kerri’s focus in the Northey Street PDC is on the water element and designing for animals in permaculture systems.
Guy Ritani
Guy (Ia/they/them) is a proud Takatāpui Māori Food systems specialist, systems designer, & Permaculture teacher based on Kombumerri Country. Their work is centred around building relationships, networks & systems to achieve climate justice, bio-regional food security & culturally appropriate & sovereign food systems. Guy has been engaged in innovating regenerative practices both ecologically & socially across the Asia-pacific region. They are currently delivering the VicHealth Future Healthy Foodhubs program as the food systems specialist and educate in food sovereignty & systems design across Australasia for the past 5 years. Having grown up spending time on the family farm & in the local fisheries Guy is deeply passionate about food system wellbeing & seeing the equitable change needed for a well-nourished world.
Toad Dell
Toad (they/them/it) is an Irish/English settler living on unceded land of the Kombumerri People. Co-founder of PermaQueer, board member of Permaculture Australia, Small Giants MBE Alumni and community organiser. They are deeply committed and passionate about using permaculture education to help break up the hegemony and reliance upon cultural systems of violence and use queer theory, trauma informed design and ecological systems thinking in pursuit of this goal. Their work exists in the intersection of community, economy and ecological health, and justice working on projects that restore health and resilience to all components, not one at the sake of the others.
Barb Ford
Barb started her Permaculture journey in 1992 with a PDC at Crystal Waters and has since done advanced courses, teacher training, and a Diploma of Horticulture. She has taught various parts of the PDC at Northey Street over a number of years and has a particular interest in appropriate technology, especially solar cooking. While her experience has been mainly urban, she has volunteered on organic and permaculture properties in rural Australia, France and Kenya.
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