School Food Gardens - Living Classroom Illawarra Fifteen Years On - Aaron Sorenson - APC14-2018

The Living Classroom has a 16-year history, seeded in the Illawarra region of NSW by Daniel Deighton and Aaron Sorensen who developed the program within Cringila Public School in 2003. The program’s success was then further supported by the development of the permaculture partnership within the Illawarra where local business, organisations, and council supported the programs implementation within the Warrawong Community of schools. This now includes a range of schools from primary through to tertiary institutions taking on the program. It is an outdoor learning program where students learn practical life skills like designing their own vegetable gardens, growing and then preparing their own food and the importance of regenerative practices such as soil building, water saving and composting, all while getting out in nature and being active. Unique to the program is an ambassador model of “kids teaching kids” where students engaged in the program are supported to be leaders of their Living Classroom. Aaron Sorenson spoke at the 14th Australasian Permaculture Convergence in 2018, where Behind the Lines recorded him. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. To give attribution for this work, include the URL of this page. Any work based on this work must also be released under this license.