PermEco Inc. has a long history of developing strong relationships with partners to help fill gaps in services and bring expertise to the programs we run. Local not for profit organisations Country Noosa and Permaculture Noosa assist with marketing, advertising, awareness and promoting our services and the local store, cafe and catering business provides catering for events. Founders and long term volunteers Tom Kendall and Will Kendall-Sevenstern look after the day to day running of the Kendall Permaculture Farm and the not for profit organisation, teach and train volunteers and students, look after the website and reporting and have the capability and knowledge to provide advisory services. We rely on volunteers at the Kendall Permaculture Farm to look after animal systems, gardens and food forests and implementing new systems on the Farm under the guidance of longer term volunteers.

We have a close association with the Permaculture Research Institute Australia and its founders Geoff and Nadia Lawton, who are held in high esteem in their field and regularly provide us with advice and support. Tom Kendall is an accredited Permaculture teacher through the Permaculture Research Institute Australia, enabling us to give our students certificates that are recognised world wide. 

Advisory board

Our advisory board consists of but is not limited to:

Geoff Lawton
Geoff Lawton is a world renowned permaculture consultant, designer and teacher. He first took his Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course in 1983 with Bill Mollison, widely considered the “father of permaculture.” Geoff has undertaken thousands of jobs teaching, consulting, designing, administering and implementing, in 6 continents and over 50 countries around the world. Clients have included private individuals, groups, communities, governments, aid organizations, non-government organisations and multinational companies, including:

• consultancy in the environmentally green, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates
• development work from the Greening the Desert projects in Jordan
• rehydration strategies in the deserts of Hadramaut, Yemen
• housing projects for the Kurds in Iraq after the war, rebuilding an entire village with 53 straw bale houses

In 1996 he was accredited with the Permaculture Community Services Award by the permaculture movement for services in Australia and around the world.

He has currently educated over 15,000 students in Permaculture worldwide. These include graduates of the Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course and courses focused on the practical design of sustainable soil, water, plant, animal, energy, structures, legal and economic systems.

Geoff has established permaculture demonstration sites that function as education centres in all the world’s major climates — information on the success of these systems is networked through www.permacultureglobal.org. Geoff established the Permaculture Research Institute and the www.permaculturenews.org website to network mainframe information worldwide.

Dr. Daniela Ceccarelli
Dr. Daniela Ceccarelli is an independent marine ecology consultant with extensive training and experience in tropical marine ecosystems. She completed a PhD in coral reef ecology at James Cook University in 2004, and since then, her fieldwork has taken her to the Great Barrier Reef, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, Tonga and the Marshall Islands, and to remote reefs of northwest WA and the Coral Sea. For the last decade she has worked as a consultant for government, non-governmental organisations, industry, education and research institutions on diverse projects requiring field surveys, monitoring programs, data analysis, reporting, teaching, literature reviews and management recommendations. Her research and review projects have included studies on coral reef fish and invertebrates, seagrass beds and mangroves, and have required a good understanding of a wide range of topics. More recently, she has been contributing to the spatial planning efforts in the Pacific through the IUCN’s MACBIO program. She also continues to collaborate with colleagues in academic institutions to further her research interests on coral reefs.

 

Tom Kendall

Tom is a permaculture farmer with over 40 years farming experience and a broad acre agriculture background. He is co-founder of the PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) and PRI Luganville, Vanuatu and teaches Permaculture Design Certificate courses and conducts other Permaculture training for PermEco Inc. at the Kendall Permaculture Farm Education and Training Site, nationally and internationally, as well as online. Tom has co-taught Permaculture Design Certificate courses with Geoff Lawton and has taught Permaculture courses in Australia and overseas. Tom has over 1000 hours of PDC teaching experience and has been training people in practical permaculture skills since 2006. He has taught Permaculture Design Certificate courses in Jordan and Vanuatu as well as Australia and has experience in tropical, sub tropical, temperate and dry land climates. He became a PRI accredited teacher in 2012 and has taught 3 – 5 PDC courses per year since then.

Tom does regular consultations for personal land holders as well as not for profit organisations and government departments in Australia and overseas. He has worked and consulted in sub-tropical and tropical climates (Pacific and Caribbean islands, north east Australia etc) and dry land climates (Iran, Jordan, Western Australia etc). Tom has an amazing ability to read hydration and fertility issues on large scale as well as smaller scale landscapes. With his farming background, Tom is a very hands on and practical man and is solution focused. He has extensive travel experience and integrates easily with local cultures and people as he comes from a humble and down to earth position. Tom enjoys studying landscapes, buildings and the effects of climate and culture on structures, flora and fauna.

Tom has a talent to identify and repair damaged and eroded landscapes, focusing on soil health and transforming damaged land to highly productive land. He repaired 7000 acres of dry land farm which had been conventionally farmed for many years and which was experiencing loss of top soil and erosion, by converting it to organic / bio-dynamic practices and making it profitable again. He also repaired around 10 acres of degraded, low fertility, sub tropical ex-banana farm land, which is now a lush, flourishing Permaculture Demonstration and Education site. All land improvement was done on a low budget with minimal outside inputs, and was designed to derive an income from the land. Being brought up in a remote area of Western Australia, he was taught from very young to be inventive, innovative and self reliant, a practice he still continues today and teaches to his students.

 

Will Kendall-Sevenstern
Will (previously known as Zaia) grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website development, design and maintenance, writes articles, records and edits videos, organises events and looks after email and bookings. She is a life coach and a musician, and takes great pleasure in helping others discover joy and purpose in life.