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Dr. CHARLIE BRENNAN
'Sustainability, Regeneration & Healing for People, Communities, Ecologies & Places'
With over 30 years applied experience, Charlie passionately weaves together education and practical projects. For many years I have been involved in gardening, farming, landscape design and creation, conservation, horticulture, Permaculture, Landcare, bush regeneration. Regenerating forests and rivers, planting orchards, forests, caring for places.
Simultaneously, I have worked with community groups, schools, private landholders, organisations, refugees, businesses, volunteers, individual people, disadvantaged people and social groups, Aboriginal communities, universities and people of all ages and kinds.
Charlie collaborates with a team offering Consultation, Research, Design, Project Implementation, Workshops and Presentations.
PASSIONATE & IMAGINATIVE
From the earliest age, Charlie has been fascinated with the land. The moors, woods, hedgerows and productive fields of Devon, England became a first place of imagining into landscapes, places and life they contain. This interest grew as he moved from place to place, from England to Asia as a teenager, to decades of deep immersion into landscapes and communities of Australia and now more globally.
My life is joyfully dedicated to doing what I can to understand, acknowledge, support and co-create abundant, beautiful, healthy, human and ecological communities'.
PRACTICAL & ORGANISED
My roles involve hands-on work, consultation, research, project design, grant writing, project management, education and community engagement and evaluation. All these are about brining ideas, ideas, visions into everyday lived life. This requires organisation, discipline, team-work and a focussed desire to achieve the goals and dreams that many people share and aspire to.
Projects include gardens, community food gardens, river and forest regeneration, teaching permaculture, ethics and conservation to children, youth & adults, design of food garden spaces for refugees, coordinating conservation and sustainability alliances, a 2-year sense of place & ecopsychology project and celebration of Gumbayngirr/Aboriginal culture. Recently, developing qualitative research methodologies to deliver and evaluate horticultural therapy, sense of place and community healthcare projects.
INNOVATIVE & REFLEXIVE
Through reading inspirational and reflective texts, and through the experiences of teaching and researching Social Ecology, Social Sciences, Sense of Place, Ethics and Sustainability as well as Communications, Charlie combines practical knowledge with the ability to ask important, and sometimes tough, critical questions.
'My care, attention and expertise is carried out at the intersections of practice and theory and community and environment. Practical disciplined work learnt through tradesmanship and project organising is combined with cutting edge innovative approaches including being educated through the United World College movement, Permaculture and Social Ecology'.
In 2011, Charlie was awarded a PhD for research into putting sustainability ideas, ideals, designs and targets into practice. Completing ‘Situating Place-Practice: Critical Reflections on Conservation, Sustainability & Environmental Education’ reinvigorated his desire to design and create sustainable landscapes, projects, events and our workshop program evolved.
RESPONSES TO THE TIMES WE'RE IN...
Now, in response to the times we are in, our projects are bold, experimental and adaptable. As part of a collective team, we activity learn from global projects then weave together disciplines and approaches, designing and managing large-scale regeneration projects and offering innovative workshops in Australia & overseas.
Our consultancy, projects and workshops are cross-disciplinary, revolving around the interconnected and grounded themes of:
#Business
#Organisation
#Landscape Design
#Landscape Architecture
#Ecological Landscaping
#Permaculture Teaching & Design
#Foraging
#Food Forests
#Regenerative Agriculture
#Whole Farm & Property Design
#Bush Tucker
#Ecopsychology
#Sense of Place
#Horticultural Therapy
#Ecotherapy
#Rewilding
#Connectivity Conservation
#Indigenous Land and Culture
#Evaluation, Monitoring & Reporting
#Organisation & Social System Design
#The Sacred
#Teaching
#Workshop Facilitation
#Community Education
#Training
#And all kinds of Gardening !!