Pippa Buchanan
Making Special

Pippa Buchanan (MSc SA) is an Australian resilience and sustainability educator, facilitator and urban permaculturist. Her focus is on supporting and facilitating social learning processes which assist individuals, communities and organisations to develop ecologically sound futures and adapt to climate change impacts. She draws on permaculture design, systems thinking, informal education theories, future scenario development and facilitation approaches such as Art of Hosting in her work.Pippa has completed two PDCs and participated in Rosemary Morrow’s Permaculture Teaching Matters course which cemented her interest in permaculture’s potential within disaster risk reduction and recovery.

In 2017 Pippa completed an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation with the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, Wales. Her research project explored how permaculture teachers and practitioners consider hazards such as floods and bushfires in their design work.

Following her studies, she established the Permaculture and Disaster Risk Reduction working group to support permaculture approaches to household and community disaster preparedness. To get involved with this LUSH Spring Prize shortlisted group please join the mailing list.

Pippa’s background is in informal and academic adult education, language teaching, web and games development and she holds academic qualifications in adult education as well as computer and information science. She has collaborated on several artistic projects around water management, resilience and the commons, and participated in projects led by organisations such as FoAM, Brussels and Time’s Up, Linz. Pippa is fascinated by transformational processes, whether they be the evolution of new social forms, fermented foods or the transformation of yarn into knitted items.