Creating a Community Website that Grows like a Forest

Let’s start with the necessaries - what is permaculture? According to Permaculture.co.uk, permaculture is:

1. An innovative framework for creating sustainable ways of living.
2. It is a practical method of developing ecologically harmonious, efficient and productive systems that can be used by anyone, anywhere.

Permaculture is based on three core ethics: People care, fair share, earth care. 

Permaculture enables people to have more sustainable lives through their food sources, homes and creating a productive ecosystem. It is designed to copy natural processes. With the world burning around us, permaculture is now being used for system design and developments in business all over the world to tackle problems that can’t be resolved through linear thinking. Our founder Sally believes that linear thinking lacks any kind of complexity or understanding of problems and so a more organic approach and a sharing of resources is desperately required.

Permaculture offers a guide and structure which goes way beyond the garden. It is revolutionary action disguised as gardening. From the founder Sally’s background in e-learning and her passion for permaculture, she believes that the blueprint style of selling us coaching and courses is not helping anyone: “We are simply not understanding the complexity of the problems we are facing. We need to slow down to speed up. Trying to find solutions so quickly is actually leading to more problems.” With permaculture as the base, we’re able to create a community website that we can build together.

In The Portal, the permaculture principle of using edges and valuing the marginal can be translated into collaboration over competition. The Portal is a marketplace but everyone’s offers are in the same place together and you have the opportunity to cross pollinate, stretching your edges which in turn makes your work richer and more fruitful. The community website nature of The Portal is that you’re aware of other people’s offers whilst you’re participating in one person’s course and learning and developing - widening your capacity rather than restricting what you consume.

Here at The Portal, we break it down into stages:

Just as the ground is prepared before planting, the ground in The Portal is prepared for Creators to establish a presence and be part of the community. In permaculture, there is a system of creating a food forest vs a monocrop. Monocrops deplete the soil by growing the same crop over and over and therefore producing crops with less nutrients. But a food forest has lots of different layers of vegetation so you’re able to grow many different edible plants that all support each other.

The monocrop is the algorithm with the same content being churned out and everyone ending up depleted.

Once you join The Portal as a Creator, Sally encourages you to watch the demo sessions, and join Q&A sessions to practice sharing ideas and to meet each other. Through these sessions, Sally builds the support network for Creators to be vulnerable and share, whether new or established as a business. Creators are able to bounce their ideas off Sally who will help improve them.

Creators also have the opportunity to meet others who could take on their offer as part of their own, creating the cross pollination effect and making it richer for all.

Here in The Portal we offer: