Interview with Lisa DePiano
Wondering how to create a right livelihood that combines many disciplines into high-impact, regenerative work?
Lisa DePiano is grounded at the intersections of public art, economic development, participatory design and social justice. She came to permaculture from a background as a community organizer in West Virginia working against Mountain Top Removal and for global justice. She sees permaculture as a tool to see connections between social, ecological and economic problems and to create solutions for the world we know is possible.
Lisa is featured in the award winning documentary, Inhabit a Permaculture Perspective and her company, Mobile Design Lab, which specializes in participatory permaculture design "permablitz" installation's include the grey water system at Occupy Wall Street, the Parkways tiny food forest park in a parking spot on Broadway and the Lee Street Public Forest Garden in Cambridge, MA.
She is a certified permaculture designer/teacher, and Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts and was a research fellow at the MIT Media Lab.
Lisa has extensive experience in social enterprise and worker cooperative development including co-founding the Montview Neighborhood Farm, one of the first worker-run human powered urban-farm and edible forest gardens in the country and establishing the bicycle powered compost program while riding with the worker-owned collective Pedal People.
For over a decade she has taught permaculture to hundreds of students in dozens of courses in the United States and abroad, including the Permaculture Women’s Teacher Training. She is board member for the Permaculture Association of the Northeast (PAN) currently developing bottom up quality standards for permaculture education.