Ten years ago, the man who was PSW president at the time (and is again in 2026!), Greg, came up with the idea of a Permy Pod. This is a group of people from the main PSW group, who live locally and get together as required to help and support each other with living the permaculture life. Around that time I had put a pod together with a few of my PSW friends and you can read about how things went with that group here. Although things tapered off when Covid arrived.
Over the last ten years lots of work has been done to establish and support perm pods and some lessons have been learned, this is how things have developed since Covid.
Permy Pod Formation
The best description of what a Permy Pod is and what it can achieve is reproduced below (the 'why' and 'how'), extracted from an email sent out in early 2025 by our president Greg Meyer to raise awareness of the concept and encourage members to consider forming their own Permy Pod (see below).
Also developed around this were a series of Guidelines for PSW Permy Pods, and these are also reproduced below.
To facilitate this idea, a group of eight ‘Permy Pod volunteers’, were put in place around western Sydney to help coordinate, develop and act as liaison for Permy Pods in their area. The email referred to above also detailed the names of the volunteers, the areas they represented and their emails so that interested members could contact the directly.
As mentioned above, the original idea was for people in the same geographical area would form PermyPods but it has become clear over time that the strongest and best functioning pods were developed by those people who got along with the other members of the group well, ie they were friends, rather than just being close to each other geographically.
The Why and How of Permy Pods
Guidelines for PSW Permy Pods
Ongoing Permie Pods
Pods have sprung up and continue to kick goals in a number of Sydney areas including Parramatta, the Hills, Kellyville and the lower Blue Mountains.
Where it was appropriate, members of an individual pod would report on activities which happened the previous month during the ‘Month in Review’ section of each public meeting, held on the evening of the first Monday of the month. There was also mention of pod activities during the end of year round up at the PSW AGM held in December. (see pics below).
Permy Pods are a Permaculture Sydney West initiative that is working well, which will continue to expand, enabling members to work together, beyond the group facilitated meetings such as Monday night public meetings, Perma blitzes and living skills activities.
