The P4R team work remotely, ensuring the smooth running of the P4R virtual office and projects, in order to support the regional networks and our organisation’s mission.
P4R Office Team
The main functions of the P4R remote office (or operations circle) are coordination, administration, finance, networking, and communications. We also work on small scale projects, engage and work with volunteers and support a wider group of representatives from our regional network.
Sundus Alsaqqaf, P4R Networking and Admin Coordinator
Sundus is originally from Yemen and migrated to Malaysia as a refugee. After living and working there for 8 years, she migrated to Halifax, Canada with her family. She has an Associate degree in Health Science and worked for several years with Blue Ribbon, one of P4R’s partners. During her work experience, she focused on enhancing the team’s resilience toward extreme climate change through active learning programs regardless of where the participants come from and their political status.
Sundus is a lover of nature and passionate about meeting people from diverse cultures and perspectives. She enjoys working in a team, making friends, and connecting globally. Sundus believes, that communities that work together are more effective than working alone and whatever we learn, we should contribute back to others.
Benedetta Martin, P4R Communications Coordinator
Originally from Italy, Detta has been travelling across Australia since 2018 to look at ecological projects. She had the opportunity to work at different permaculture and agroforestry properties, to study and learn close up about the projects and the ways of living of those who manage them.
Through these experiences she developed a strong passion for food, its traditions and connections to culture, economy, politics, health and sustainability. She now works with P4R because, having seen the endless ways permaculture’s ethics and principles can be applied to society and nature, she believes in its capability to improve refugees’ lives.
Evan Welkin, P4R Global Coordinator and Council Treasurer
Originally from the US, Evan lives in Italy at Borgo Basino, an experiential education and collaborative agriculture project he co-founded in 2020. He is a network ecosystem designer with over a decade of experience supporting coalitions, networks, and collaborations. He has supported the Global Ecovillage Network, the European Network for Community-Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability, Climate Action Network International, the Balkan Refugee Network, Artists at Risk Connection, and Quaker-led sustainability and peace networks. He holds a Masters degree in Ecological Design Thinking from Schumacher College, where his research focused on bioregional network design and assessment.
P4R Council, Founders and Trainers
Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) is a global network of educators, practitioners, community leaders and networkers coming from diverse fields of work, with a common vision to disseminate permaculture knowledge widely, and to not only teach displaced people but to develop the model where those taught can teach others in camp settlements, resettlement communities and local organisations.
Rosemary Morrow (Rowe), P4R co-founder, Council Member, trainer and network member
For almost 40 years Rowe has worked extensively with farmers and villagers in Africa, Central and South East Asia and Eastern Europe, especially dedicating the last few years to refugees in camps – the people of war-torn nations such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Syria Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and East Timor, and to communities experiencing the serious effects of climate change like the Solomon Islands, and the effects of the GFC, like Spain, Greece and Portugal.
She founded Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) with a small group of people and conducted permaculture courses in camps in seven countries with large refugee populations to establish whether permaculture could provide a radically different model for refugee camps.
Ruth Harvey, P4R co-founder, Council member, trainer and network member
Ruth is a teacher, horticulturist, permaculturalist, artist and writer. Her active concern for refugees began in 2016 in Greece, where she co-founded a school in a refugee camp, teaching English to refugee children through the experience of making and growing; and later ran permaculture workshops and weekly cinema in refugee housing in Italy.
A founding member of Permaculture for Refugees (P4R), she has seen the profound shift and reorientation permaculture has brought to refugees in Bangladesh and Greece through building community and food security. She continues to contribute to and support P4R’s work.
Marguerite Kahrl, P4R co-founder, Council Member and network member
Marguerite is an artist, Permaculture designer and educator, and is cofounder of the Association Con MOI, an informal group of Italian and migrant citizens who strengthen social and human bonds through sharing food, skills, time and mutual attention. One of Con MOI’s first actions was to stimulate reciprocity and reduce waste in an urban community with the recovery and redistribution of surplus food that could no longer be sold, without any exchange of money. In her work Marguerite creates models and prototypes to stimulate cultural change.
Konstantinos Tsiompanos, P4R Council President and network member
Konstantinos is a human rights barrister, a permaculture teacher, a forest school teacher and an environmental educator. He practises law in Greece, where he represents and advises asylum seekers and refugees, mainly unescorted minors and victims of SGBV. He holds a research Masters degree in Environmental Sciences with a focus on the formation of environmental identity and has wide and diverse teaching experience in Europe and the USA. After attending a PDC with refugees taught by Rosemary Morrow in Greece in 2019, Konstantinos was very inspired from what he experienced and founded Sporos Regeneration Institute, a non profit organisation active in permaculture education, refugee integration and vocational training. He has since organised and taught numerous permaculture courses for refugees.
Trudy Juriansz, P4R Council Secretary and network member
Trudy is passionate about envisioning and working towards a world where people are empowered and healed by self-determination and collaboration in environmental and social justice. She holds a graduate degree in sustainability education and is an accredited trainer in ecovillage design and Analog Forestry. She is an experienced networker and her approach is about relationships and reciprocity, about heart and action. Trudy co-founded a democratic school in Thailand for refugees and migrants from Myanmar and managed an education centre and ecological farm in Sri Lanka that focuses on forest ecosystem restoration, using permaculture and analog forestry.
Greta Carroll, P4R Council Member, trainer and network member
Greta is a permaculture educator and small-scale organic farmer currently living on Wardaandi Boodja. She has previously taught for Permaculture College Australia and is currently a course facilitator for Permaculture for Refugees and Nettle and Snail. Passionate about accessible, inclusive education, Greta has built curricula and learning experiences for diverse groups. She has worked with people in displacement settings for over a decade, in Australia and internationally.
Antonio Scotti, P4R co-founder and network member
Antonio is a permaculture educator and designer based in Barcelona, Spain. Antonio has a Diploma in Applied PC Design. Co-founder of Cambium Permacultura en Formación Association and of the first Spanish Transition Hub in Barcelona. He has experience in designing and implementing permaculture designs and has had experience teaching undocumented people from Africa and South America and more recently (2019), in the Lavrios refugee camp in Greece together with Rosemary Morrow. Antonio has also been part of the teaching staff of the Gaia Education Design For Sustainability online program from 2009 till 2021 and co-founder of the Academia de Permacultura Íbera. More info: http://www.permacultura-es.org/formacion-en-permacultura/2166-facilitacion.html
Sarah Queblatin, P4R co-founder and network member
Sarah is a regenerative solutions designer weaving experiences in environmental education, cultural heritage, peace building, and humanitarian assistance. Her life-long practice is in restoring and re-storying narratives of place and belonging through ecosystem restoration and leadership. Because of her work with climate and conflict vulnerable communities, she was inspired to form Green Releaf Initiative to support community leaders in response and in prevention of more disasters and displacement using permaculture. Sarah co-designed REGEN NATIONS, a design lab on regeneration in Asia and the Pacific with the Global Ecovillage Network. She also crafted the proposal for Principle 0, to formally acknowledge traditional ecological knowledge in permaculture. Keeping to her path as a creative, she founded Living Story Landscapes, harnessing cultural memory and imagination in climate and conflict vulnerable communities. www.soilsoulstory.com.
Morag Gamble, P4R advisor and network member
Morag is a global permaculture and ecovillage ambassador, teacher of permaculture teachers on six continents, homeschooler, permayouth mentor and perma-humanitarian. Crystal Waters (ecovillage in Australia) has been her home for more than two decades. Morag is director of the Permaculture Education Institute, CEO of Ethos Foundation – a permaculture education charity, leader of creator of Our Permaculture Life Youtube and blog, and host of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast. She has taught around the world in ecovillage and permaculture centres and places like Schumacher College. She is also a member of Re-Alliance, Regenerative Songlines Australia and Regeneration Melbourne.
Ivan Blacket, P4R trainer and network member
Ivan Blacket is a farmer, educator and consultant with a focus on integrated regenerative food production systems. He grew up on a small goat dairy on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula and, since studying agricultural sciences at Melbourne University, has managed multiple production systems around Australia from agroforestry market gardens to large fruit orchards. He has developed food systems at The Farm at Byron Bay, Conscious Ground and Common Ground Project, and educated hundreds of aspiring farmers and homesteaders in the process. He is currently a facilitator with Permaculture for Refugees.
Sarah Boulle, P4R trainer and network member
Sarah is an educator, disaster resilience worker and permaculturalist based on Bunjalung country in Australia. She has worked as a facilitator and teacher for over 20 years with people of different cultures, and ages. She also spent many years working internationally for an NGO focusing on natural disaster recovery work. Sarah has a Certificate IV in Permaculture and coordinated the children’s program for the International Permaculture Convergence in India in 2017, and for the Thailand Permaculture Convergence in 2016. Sarah combines her international aid and teaching experience, with her permaculture passion to work as a course facilitator for Permaculture for Refugees.
Jed Walker, P4R trainer and network member
Jed Walker has taught permaculture in Australasia, India and Bangladesh. Currently teaching in New Zealand, Jed also worked for some years in Sydney with migrants and refugees. He is currently involved, through Permafund, in supporting permaculture projects for refugees in Africa and Asia. From his many discussions with grant applicants, Jed is able to pass learnings between projects as growers share their knowledge and stories.