[Scpg] Sustainable urban ag graduate intern position

[Cory Brennan]

There sure is a lot of exciting, great news coming from all directions with permaculture going mainstream and getting a lot of attention. It must be 2012, LOL!  I have some good news to share, too.

I was just hired by the Chamber of Commerce of St Petersburg, FL, as the Sustainable Urban Agriculture Coordinator for the city of St Petersburg (250,000, Zone 9b-10A, Florida Gulf Coast beach town). The purpose of the position is to help make St Pete a model community for sustainable urban agriculture. This is a pretty exciting position for a permaculturist to have! I'm hoping to raise a lot of awareness about permaculture in the process and maybe even get it broadly used... 

The project has openings for one or two graduate interns as support, and I would like to find someone who has permaculture experience, particularly in urban ag, for the position. The position is for one year, it pays $3500 (matching funds may be available), and it is fairly intensive work.

Skills that would be useful would be (and not all of these are needed in one candidate!):  Urban ag experience (semi-tropical a plus), community organizing experience, database experience, GIS capability, asset/data mapping, Drupal, very good collaboration and people skills with a variety of cultural and ethnic groups, good research skills, fund raising/grant writing, experience with community process (i.e. open source, charettes, etc).  The person would need to relocate to St Petersburg for one year (hey, not a bad place, beach town on the Gulf with a rapidly expanding permaculture/transition community...).

The people skills are important - this is a project that has some strong community support and involvement and it will be successful to the degree that we create and facilitate even more community. 

This could turn into a more long term position as we will be creating jobs with this project. There are other opportunities starting to open up here in various colleges as well.  

I will need assistance with:

--Creating a public database of community needs and resources re: sustainable urban agriculture in St Petersburg.
--Setting up an online "portal" providing interactive tools to facilitate communication and collaboration between people interested in and/or practicing sustainable urban agriculture
--Facilitating existing projects to add value and create opportunity via those projects
--Develop an inventory of existing farms, gardens, sales outlets and other urban agriculture resources. We will be doing this in the form of an asset map.
--Completing a Blueprint/Vision and Strategic Plan for making St Petersburg a model for Sustainable Urban Agriculture in the US
--Raising the funds to enable the strategic plan to be carried out and for this program to continue

Please forward this to anybody you know who might be a good candidate for this position...

Best, 

Koreen Brennan
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