What Mission Statement What We Do History Looking Forward Facilities Get Involved Employment Apprentices Contribute Teach Why Who Founders Stewards Fellows Advisory Board Supporters Honorary Members Faculty Heroes Where Programs Year at a Glance Calendar By Category By Instructor Past Programs When Year at a Glance Core Curriculum Seasonal Activities Register Register in Program Login to Account Gallery People Farm Woods River Lake Facilities Events News Store On Site On Line Links Contact		From Soil to Society: Celebrating the Essential Connections Between All Living Things           CORE CURRICULUM           Every program, workshop and course offered at Pollination Project will, we hope, advance and contribute to our mission: to enhance our awareness of the primordial relationship between all living things and to inform our sense of stewardship of the earth and its inescapable connection to an ideal of civic virtue that is capable of founding the sort of community which will justly command our allegiance.       But not every course or workshop will necessarily be part of what we might call a “core curriculum”. While striving to remain open to the lessons that we will learn along the way, to remain receptive to criticism and to correcting the mistakes that we may make on this journey, and while wishing to avoid any kind of didacticism or dogmatism in the manner in which the mission of Pollination Project is advanced and promoted, we nevertheless cannot shrink from our responsibility to state what we stand for and hope to achieve. And such a statement is only very inadequately expressed in words, but is, we believe, more effectively transmitted through the experience of participation in the life and work and best felt in the cycles and rhythms of the farm and the forest. Accordingly, we will strive, through trial and error, to develop a “core curriculum” of courses and workshops that adopt, as their point of departure, nature as guide, source of wisdom and artistic inspiration. In time, and as our infrastructure permits and our capacity grows, the core curriculum will evolve and will respond to the needs and interests of our participants. We must begin modestly, with a few workshops that we consider fundamental to our notions of the social enterprise aspects of Pollination Project. These include workshops on sustainable building techniques (straw-bale construction), working with fibre, animal husbandry, skills for the new farmer, organic farming, food preservation, music and movement, yoga, creative writing and screenwriting. Strictly speaking, this is not yet a “core curriculum”, but the initial steps on a journey on which we hope that such a core curriculum will emerge and evolve. In the future, we intend also to run study groups and hold retreats aimed at exploring the ways in which the reverence for nature and the principle of sustainability can inform public policy, our conceptions of justice and the architecture of civil society.       But we begin with the earth.