Workshops & Skill Building
Education and building community are main priorities for us at Gateway Farm. We work in collaboration with our partners Garden Juju Collective to provide educational offerings to build skills and community.
Water: The Practical & The Magical
Dive, with us, into exploring the practices, wisdom and magic of water.
Water is essential: often taken for granted until it’s not available, not clean, or there’s too much of it, this workshop reflects back on the fact that we, and all life, are nearly all water. How do we design and manage water - collect and store, move water, keep water clean, and give access to water? What are the unique scientific qualities of water?
Water features in just about every aspect of life - washing, drinking, swimming, cooking and cleaning, as well as in wild places, gardens, forests. It's in our bodies, the air and atmosphere, living systems and the bodies of water on Earth.
We illuminate the mythology and ecopsychology of water too. It’s life, it's magical. Yet - as Ivan Illich says, we’ve flattened water, made it blank, homogeneous, characterless. What are our experiences and feelings about being drawn to water places? What are our collective cultural memories of water? Can we experience, anew, this amazing substance?
This workshop is for you, if:
Water has ever captivated or mystified you.
You crave a deeper, more sacred, connection with the numerous life giving properties of water.
You want to be a caretaker of water.
You want to expand your knowledge and skill in water capture, conservation and cleaning.
You want to be a part of the 'Ripple Effect,' learning and spreading knowledge of positive water practices.
Our futures depend upon water and our relations with water. Please join us for this informative, transformative, stimulating and confronting exploration into all aspects of water.
Permaculture Workshop & Showcase
Day 1: Permaculture - for Here & Now in 2025!
September 13th, 2025
In this one-day workshop we explore 4 different aspects of permaculture. Drawing from Garden Juju Collective’s international teaching and research we present -
Radically redesigning everything
Making food forests & perennial food systems work
Social permaculture and impacts
Updating Permaculture for here & now
Permaculture Weekend at Gateway Farm
Day 2: Permaculture Community Showcase
September 14th, 2025
We showcase local and regional permaculturists and their projects, skills and approaches. All this set in Gateway Farm a permaculture-inspired, regenerative & rewilded working farm in Plymouth, Michigan.
There’s such an abundance of projects, practices and people in our permaculture community. Many of these are carried out quietly day to day. Here we put these on stage, give voice, and the public profile they deserve. We share these community solutions that we all need and want.
Day One: Saturday October 11th Workshop
This powerful workshop helps us illuminate, explore and re-enchant our relationships with our living world. Supporting, challenging and empowering you, this workshop provides tools and skills (including place making exercises), ideas and language and step-by-step plans for change. All of this is located within a body of literature and supported by an essential design tool. Participants will emerge from this workshop with an understanding of ecopsychology and their vital sense of place in this changing world.
Day Two: Sunday October 12th Convergence
We’re excited to announce the Second Annual Ecopsychology Convergence at Gateway Farm! Join Dr Charlie Brennan, Bridget O'Brien, collaborators & guest speakers. Our ecopsychological feelings, identities, relationships with forests, rivers, seas, gardens, farms, towns, all beings and even highways – everything – are completely fundamental. And yet, in this human-centered world this is often overlooked or denied, and living systems around us increasingly compromised.
We’re looking forward to speakers and panelists, workshops, world cafe style conversations, emergent discussions and tree planting. Ecopsychology is bound with sense of place, place literature, ecology, Indigenous and Cultural studies, from literature and beautiful ideas to how we practically live our everyday lives.