The Eldenbridge Institute offers a wide range of classes ranging in scope from 90-minute presentations to single-day events and full weekend workshops. This course catalog provides an overview of our currently developed courses. Events will be scheduled based on demand, so please contact us if you are interested in a particular class or topic. We can also schedule custom courses for interested groups, so feel free to contact us to discuss your group’s specific needs.
Permaculture Courses
An Introduction to Permaculture & Community Resilience – this 90-minute discussion provides an excellent overview of Permaculture as a design science that offers real solutions to the problem of creating regenerative communities and growing real food.
Introduction to Permaculture workshop – a two-day workshop that provides a solid foundation for understanding the tools and techniques of Permaculture Design. This course is a combination of lecture, storytelling, demonstrations, and hands-on activities.
The Backyard Chicken Flock – learn everything you need to know to get started with your own small backyard flock, from where to get your chickens to coop design and feed requirements. Meet some of the chickens from our flock and learn how to properly handle both chicks and mature birds. This class can be presented either as a full-day event or as a series of four evening classes.
Creating Natural Soil Fertility – in this weekend-long class, you will learn the basics of the soil-food web, how to build and maintain a compost pile, and how to properly brew compost tea. We will also look at why the microscope is such an important tool for accessing soil fertility. This course includes the hands- on construction of a thermophilic compost pile, brewing of compost tea, and demonstrations of soil analysis with the microscope. This class is critical for anyone interested in growing an organic, nutrient- dense garden.
Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) – this course meets all the requirements for an internationally recognized Permaculture Design Certification, including the main 72-hour lecture component, numerous hands-on activities and demonstrations, and the required design project, all supplemented with information on health and nutrition that helps tie it all together. This class can be presented either as a two-week intensive or as a series of 6 full weekends.
Health & Nutrition
An Integrative Approach to Health – this one-day workshop covers how the various modalities of healing all work together, and how lifestyle, nutrition, and physical activity play into maintaining health.
Kitchen Reboot: Overhauling Your Kitchen for Health – a weekend class that will give you everything you need to set up your kitchen for healthy cooking. Includes what to throw out, what cookware and tools to use, and what staple items to stock. This workshop also covers a number of important basics like making stock and other kitchen basics that will help you get the most out of your food dollar.
Food Preservation and Storage – this class is broken down into two day-long parts. Part One covers the purchase and storage of bulk staples such as grains and legumes, along with the basics of using a grain mill to produce your own fresh flour. The second part covers the lacto-fermentation of vegetables, drying, and other low-energy preservation methods. Although this class is usually presented as a single workshop, either part can be scheduled separately if needed.
Making Real Breads – come learn how to make real bread from scratch in this hands-on class. We will start with wheat berries, mill our own flour, mix and knead the dough, let it rise and proof, and then bake it off to produce the final product. We will cover sourdough, yeast breads, and quick breads. This class requires a full weekend starting on Friday evening.
Herbal Medicine Preparations – learn the methods for making your own herbal medicine products, including tinctures, salves, infusions, decoctions, lip balms, and poultices. This is a full-day class.
Nature Connection
Learning to See Plants – in this day-long class, you will learn to see and identify the basic structures of plants which are needed to use a field guide for positive identification. We will cover the basic characteristics of a number of plant families, which field guides are best, and how to keep on learning by yourself.
Bird Language – a weekend class with extensive field work to jump-start your learning of bird language. We will cover the five voices of the birds, the shapes of bird alarms, and common patterns such as the bird plough. A good weekend working in a group setting can help you progress as much as you might in an entire year of working alone.
An Introduction to Tracking – tracking is much more than just learning to identify footprints. Come experience this weekend-long field class in learning to see deeper into the patterns of the forest. We will learn the basics of track and sign identification, the various gates used by all of the forest’s four-legged creatures, and why tracking encompasses so much more than you probably ever imagined.
Wilderness Navigation – the basics of reading a map, using a compass, plotting a course, and finding your way through the wilderness. Also covers natural navigation without a compass, sun compasses, astral navigation, and song-lining. This is a full-day field class with live navigation exercises.
The Basic Fire Class – this day-long class provides an introduction to building and tending fires in the wilderness safely and effectively. We will also cover some of the basics of cooking over an open fire. We will end the class late in the evening after a dinner cooked over the fire followed by some great storytelling as we tend the flame. This class is usually scheduled in the fall or winter.
The Advanced Fire Class – an overnight class in which we begin to learn the ancient art of starting a fire with the bow and drill. You will start by building your own bow drill kit and gathering the tender, kindling, and firewood required to create your fire and keep it going efficiently. Once we have our fires going, we will look at other fire starting methods such as flint and steel. As we prepare dinner, we will learn some more advanced fire cooking techniques. Students will sleep around the fire, taking turns tending the fire through the night. This class is usually scheduled in the fall or winter.
Wilderness Experience for Teens – a weekend in the wilderness with almost no equipment, learning to do everything without modern equipment. This class is usually scheduled in the fall or spring to make it more fun and practical to practice skills such as fire tending and shelter building. Although this course is normally designed for high school-age students, a version for college students is also available.
Regenerative Community
Storytelling & Community: The Power of Narratives – an evening class focused on how narratives define a community, how the community must manage the storytelling in order to be healthy, and how you can begin to develop powerful storytellers in your community.
Running a Church-Farm Ministry – this 90-minute class covers the basics of how a church can run a large-scale garden as a ministry providing food for those in need in the local community.
Creating a Mentoring Culture – this weekend-long program focuses on how to get one-on-one mentoring relationships started in your community and how to use deep nature connection mentoring as a tool to address the developmental needs of the children in your community.
Eight Transitions that Will Change the World – this two-day class offers an introduction to the eight major driving forces that are changing modern culture and creating large-scale transitions in how global civilization works. Based on research first presented by our head instructor, Alan Booker, back in 2008, this class helps you gain a firm understanding of the underlying changes that are creating the changing landscapes we are currently experiencing in the areas of economics, resource use, and culture.
Special Classes
These classes are scheduled by request only. If you are interested in a topic, please contact us.
Optimal Biomechanics for Athletes – in the day-long experiential class, Alan will bring his over thirty years’ of martial arts experience into a series of discussions, demonstrations, and practical exercises designed to help athletes improve their overall performance. We will look at breathing, relaxation and dynamic power, the biomechanics of muscle action, the principles of proper body alignment, using the senses to improve performance, and why the mind-body interface is so important.
Eight Transitions Executive Seminar – this three-day interactive discussion of the eight transitions is designed to help executives and those managing large asset portfolios work through the implications of the macro-scale drivers of global change. We will step back to look at the big picture of what is driving change, lay out possible scenarios, and consider possible strategies for adapting to the emerging landscape.
