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Date: 19 May
Speaker: Mali Boomkens
Topic: Weaving the Web: Practical Social Design
As the fifth session of the course, this is where the insights and inspiration from the previous four sessions begin to be turned into concrete action. In this interactive and practical session, participants will be guided by Mali in exploring Looby Macnamara’s Design Web by moving together through a short, live design process (called “quick design”).
The foundations of social permaculture have already been explored, personal gifts and contexts have been reflected upon, and impactful social permaculture examples around education, community building, and setting up a business have been examined. With the frame set by the work of Looby Macnamara and Jon Young on Cultural Emergence, and the late Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, this participatory session will build on those perspectives by helping a small design to be shaped that brings the learning into practice.
The Design Web is a people-centered design framework with twelve anchor points that invites movement, unlike other more linear design frameworks, fluidly among the points, allowing intuition, reflection, and emerging needs to shape the design, just as a spider senses vibrations and adjusts its web. It is not necessary for all the answers to be available at the start; the vision can evolve, gain detail, and deepen as different stages of the process are revisited. By the end of the session, a small, realistic social design will have been developed, ready to be taken home, grown, and harvested for future projects.
Permaculture educator & facilitator
Mali is a permaculture practitioner, facilitator, and educator whose journey began with studies in Forest and Nature Conservation and Sustainable Tropical Forestry. After graduating with a strong understanding of the socio-ecological challenges of our time, she went looking for more hopeful, solution-oriented pathways and found them in permaculture, community living, and cultural regeneration.
In 2015, Mali moved into an off-grid ecovillage on a big-squatted land in The Netherlands, where daily life became a living laboratory for regenerative food growing, natural building, and intense community processes. This led her to explore social tools for healthy forms of communication, decision-making and conflict resolution (i.e. sociocracy, process work, Dragon Dreaming and NVC). She enrolled into an applied education in biodynamic farming, and co-founded the Dutch Future Farmers association, which since then has grown into a solid, national platform for knowledge exchange and advocacy. Meanwhile, as coordinator of a small educational NGO centering on social and ecological justice, she discovered her passion for designing and facilitating learning spaces that empower people to take meaningful, grounded action. These experiences led her to dive deeper into approaches like The Work that Reconnects, Cultural Emergence and nature-based mentoring.
In 2020, Mali hit the road to Argentina to volunteer in ecological projects and communities, completing her first online Permaculture Design Course (PDC) on the way with Rakesh Rootsman Rak, and another PDC on Sicily in 2022 with Salvatore Giaccone. In the same year, she interned with the Bulgarian permaculture association, did a Permaculture Teacher Training (PTT) in Croatia, and joined permaculture teacher George Sobol as teaching apprentice in a certified PDC in Moldova soon after. She is currently midway through her permaculture diploma pathway with the British Permaculture Association, mentored by Looby Macnamara and Delvin Solkinson.
After four years of nomadic living and learning, Mali settled in the mountains of Asturias, Spain, where she and her partner are now stewarding a 0,8 ha permaculture homestead and helping to bring back life to a once-abandoned hamlet together with other likeminded families. There she also forms part of the Anima Mundi team, a local association with the aim to create a residential home for people with special needs in another abandoned village.
Her most recent work is centered around writing, coordinating and facilitating projects for young people and youth workers on regenerative living, nature connection and sustainable activism, amongst others in collaboration with the Yes to Sustainability network and NextGEN – the youth branch of the European ecovillage network.