Permaculture Participant Program

Regenerative Community Living


Due to COVID-19, we're taking a short break from our regular class schedule to help keep everyone safe. We'll be back soon!

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VerdEnergia’s Permaculture Participant Program runs nearly year-round and has been designed to compliment our 5-month internship program. This program was created specifically for prospective interns whose schedules do not align with the start and stop dates of our internship program. Many permaculture participants are college students in a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree program seeking a custom-designed internship to fulfill a university program. Others are simply travelers on an individually-led educational path with a desire to engage in a meaningful way with the land and people of Costa RIca. 

“Intern” vs. “Participant?” Learn more here

Why Participate at VerdEnergia?

At VerdEnergia, interns and permaculture participants alike experience the decision making processes that farms, people and communities go through to create and live holistically healthy lifestyles. This means that we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, preparing farm fresh and seasonal dishes. Participants and interns learn to plan and prepare meals for groups, all prepared from diverse ingredients that they help grow and harvest themselves.

Through participating alongside our staff and interns, participants learn valuable skillsets that can be applied to any climate or place in the world. We emphasize skill building in personal accountability and teamwork. At VerdEnergia, we live “farm to table.” This means learning to cultivate, harvest, and prepare our own meals. In addition, there are opportunities to gain a range of horticultural and homesteading skills such as basic carpentry, nursery management, and fermentation. Our staff manages three local agroforestry projects in conjunction with Blacksheep, with a focus on the production of crops such as turmeric, cacao, sacha-inchi and tropical hardwoods. Having access to these producing agricultural projects and the experienced staff implementing them is a huge advantage for our interns, students and participants.

Additionally, being immersed in rural Latin America provides valuable context for participants as global citizens, professionals and consumers for the rest of their lives. Our programs are geared to attract tomorrow’s leaders in fields such as policy, economics, non-governmental development work, environmental science, agriculture, natural resource management, and green business. We hope to foster the development of more realistic, effective, and holistic practitioners in those fields through our programs.

Program Initiatives

  • Leadership and management skills that can be useful in a diverse range of situations
  • Self-accountability practices
  • Life skills (i.e. cooking, cleaning, gardening, food processing, building)
  • Experience in nonviolent communication, group facilitation and community dynamics
  • Feel supported to explore your interests, gain experience and put your ideas into practice
  • Learn about ecology and regenerative farming practices
  • Experience living and working in a community setting.

Farm Life

Community living is integral to our daily operations. Participants should be comfortable living and working together as well as contributing to farm upkeep. As a community, we generally eat meals together, take turns cooking and cleaning up, and share in the responsibilities of keeping daily operations running smoothly. Each member of farm staff has a different job and responsibilities, but we all do our best to work together as a cohesive group. 

Experience Opportunities

Sustainable Living

  • Farm to Table: vegetable gardening, perennial polycultures, forest gardening, syntropic agriculture, soil building, compost systems, teas, and biofermentation, harvesting, pruning, nursery management and plant propagation, and local food preparation and preservation for groups, chickens or other small animal management.
  • Skill Building for Design and Maintenance of Ecological Home and Community Scale Systems: cooking, fermentation, carpentry, building maintenance, firewood processing, hand tool use and maintenance, compost toilet management, renewable energy, water management, waste and compost management, energy efficiency, and green building
  • Personal and Professional Development: practice focusing your energy, improve your daily habits, break old routines, and effective time management.  
  • Teamwork and Leadership: work in groups, conflict resolution, rotating leadership responsibilities, presenting your ideas
  • Holistic Lifestyle: health, yoga, mindfulness, arts, music, and engaging in community development

Agroforestry

  • Work on three projects totaling 178 acres.
  • Learn innovative regenerative agricultural techniques and principles for production of hardwood timber, turmeric, cacao, and sacha inchi. These are adaptable to both temperate and tropical bioregions.
  • Apply agroecological, syntropic, and permaculture principles to intensive gardens, large scale production and land regeneration.

Larger Scale Solutions

  • Facilitated sessions covering economic, political, and cultural constraints and opportunities for the widespread adoption of regenerative practices
  • Community engagement around important issues, such as access to clean drinking water, waste management, land protection, rural economic development
  • Fostering entrepreneurship and/or small business development for a triple bottom line approach of social, ecological, and economic importance.

Schedule

Daily Schedule

For a participant, daily life at VerdEnergia is dynamic and dependent on the season. Available opportunities depend on seasonal needs.

  • Breakfast: 7am
  • Work: 8 – 10:30am
  • Break: 10:30 – 11am
  • Work: 11am – 12:30pm
  • Lunch: at 12:30pm
  • After lunch break
  • Work: 4 – 5:30pm
  • Dinner: 6pm
  • Evenings: Free

We rotate cooking shifts, so participants will share in that responsibility. Weekends are free. There are cooking shifts on weekends, but usually these can be traded if someone wants to leave during the weekend.

During time off you can go for a swim in our river, waterfall or pool; walk jungle trails; enjoy the views from one of our beautiful vistas; do yoga or dance in our studio; make art; play music; check out a local soccer game; or simply relax in a hammock with a good book from our farm library. 

Scheduled Breaks

  • Feb 13 – Feb 25
  • March 27 – April 1
  • Aug 13 – Aug 23
  • Oct 3 – Oct 10

A scheduled break is a time in which permaculture participants are asked to leave the project site. Occasional breaks are healthy and necessary for farm staff and allow us to keep VerdEnergia in tip-top shape. Please plan your visit with respect to our schedule.

Instructors

Esteban Jiménez

Esteban is the Farm and Operations Coordinator at Blacksheep, where he works as a technician in organic productions on multiple Blacksheep projects in the Puriscal region. He has worked with VerdEnergia since 2017, where he serves as an assistant for Verde’s Permaculture Courses, Internship and Worktrade Apprentice programs.

Accommodations

We reserve our dormitories for interns and participants. Our dormitories are comfortable, bright, and open-air, with mosquito nets, ceiling fans, dry storage boxes, and bunk beds. 

Farm to Table Meals

Participants enjoy 3 square meals a day. We are proud to highlight traditional Costa Rican cuisine with a few twists. We rotate cooking responsibilities in teams, using food that we grow on site as well as purchased locally, with a preference for high quality organic.

All of our animal products come from locally-raised, pastured animals. Reasonable accommodation for vegetarians, vegans and those with food allergies can be made. Please indicate your needs in your application and upon your arrival.

Pricing

Permaculture participants pay $900/month or $30/day for their time at the farm. This covers housing and meals, facilitator supervision, and other support staff that make this opportunity possible. 

We offer partial scholarships to Costa Ricans and other residents of Latin American countries. Please contact us for more information. 

In addition to this cost, participants are responsible for buying personal supplies like flashlights, work gloves, boots, etc. These items are for safety and will benefit participants beyond their time at VerdEnergia. Participants are also responsible for personal transportation, housing and food when off-site.  

Interested? We’d love to host you!


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About VerdEnergia

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With the principles of Permaculture as our guiding tool, we seek to transmute the challenges facing our communities into replicable solutions. Our work enables us to find right livelihood through the regeneration and gentle cultivation of the forest we are honored to call home.