Sheena Shah
Permaculture Designer And Founder Of, Harvesting For Good East Africa
Bold Question: What if we changed the narrative of preparedness, that would help communities bounce back from climate disruption?
Path to Metis: Sheena is a third gen Indian Kenyan born and raised in Nairobi. She is a Permaculture Designer with a background in Early Childhood and Montessori Education. Sheena is passionate about eco-social change, with a demonstrated history of working in permaculture and sustainable development. Over the last decade, she has worked for mission-driven organizations, helping to develop and implement key systems to support permaculture education, healthy food access and fair markets for communities in Kenya, improving livelihoods tenfold. She served as the Education Programme Manager and was later appointed as the Executive Director at the Permaculture Research Institute of Kenya.
In late 2018, Sheena exited the NGO world, and ventured out on her own to start up her own business, Harvesting for Good East Africa, which provides the same framework of educating and empowering individuals, groups, schools andbusinesses to start up their own green spaces and kitchen gardens in any space available using regenerative and biophilic design. The most rewarding part of her jobis completing a successful project, when all parties are happy, empowered and more importantly seeing their spaces be completely transformed from barren to absolute green and abundant landscapes! She wholeheartedly believes that this work is important, especially providing holistic and basic skills to gardeners and individuals that they can then take back to their communities, pass on the knowledge and can properly inoculate people around them.
Though this journey has taken different forms, the core values of earth care, people care and fair share have run through the thread of her work. The pandemic reawakened and rerouted her to think about how to evolve with the changes that she was seeing. People are showing a growing interest in permaculture principles and techniques to heal their lives, communities and the planet. Permaculture offers a grounding in many of the life skills we should have been taught at school, imagining nature as a new science with a lot of niches to fill in. Their hope is to offer ways that people can participate in lowering their carbon footprint, while engaging in their local environment and building a strong and resilient community.
Sheena strongly believes that….. "You have to create your own opportunities, don't wait for anyone to hand it to you."
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