
We offer a 9 months volunteer programme for young people (from 18 to 30 years old) who would like to learn or develop their skills in permaculture design, regenerative farming and sutainable living.
The volunteer program offers permaculture education, practical ecological farm work, multicultural volunteer community experience, all with a focus on learning by doing. The program is organized in cycles of 9 months with a group of 5/6 volunteers. It is perfect for a solid introduction to the principles permaculture design, the practice of regenerative agriculture and the work and life in an ecological farm. We also deepen into leadership building, capacity building and life design projects. We work 7 hours daily ranging from routine farm work (garden, forest, animals, infrastructure maintenance), individual and group project development, workshops, and community work in other farms.
We ask all participants to collaborate on cleaning, cooking and farm maintenance tasks.
Activities in the farm
Typically we organize the week around the following activities:
- Farm maintenance and farm projects. Gardening, animal care, infrastructure repair, seedlings, land restoration, etc.;
- Individual and group projects, where we apply permaculture design methodology;
- Permaculture design and skills development workshops, also time to study deeper on your own;
- Cleaning and organizing indoor and outdoor spaces;
- Planning and evaluating work, participating in community meetings;
- Documenting work and learning process;
- Community work in the neighborhood and with local non-profit partner projects.



Example of projects
- Veggies and trees Nursery (ongoing)
- Gardening, vegetable production (ongoing)
- Edible forest (ongoing)
- Fruit harvest and transformation (ongoing)
- Solar dehydrator project
- Water mgmt infrastructure project (designed)
- Energy production project
- Soil building project (ongoing)
- Forest planting project
- Eco-construction projects (ongoing)
- Beekeeping (ongoing)
- Sheep raising (ongoing)
- Infrastructure repair and maintenance (carpentry, masonry, painting, stone walls, water tanks, etc.) (ongoing)
Volunteer profile
Requirements are:
- To be passionate about the environment, farming, and permaculture;
- To be willing to learn rural and manual skills and to enjoy doing physical work;
- To be ready to spend 9 months living and working on a farm with basic comfort;
- To be deeply interested in permaculture design theory;
- To have an open-minded attitude and predisposition to learning;
- To be ready to participate in maintenance activities such as cooking and cleaning;
- To be willing to learn spanish. Basic spanish preferred.
- Preference will be given to candidates with fewer opportunities (facing cultural, economic or social marginalization).
Framework of the programme and costs
Finca Luna belongs to the Association Gaia Tasiri, a non-profit organisation registered in Spain. The program is fully funded by the EU and we give priority to people with fewer opportunities (people at risk of social, cultural or economic exclusion). If you are between 18 and 30 years old, there are bursaries available if you qualify under the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) requirements. ESC scolarships cover your costs of travelling, food, accomodation and pocket money. We currently receive groups of 5 to 6 volunteers and we have open scholarships for nationals or residents from Spain, Morocco, Armenia, Palestine, Georgia, Syria, Poland, Czech Republic, and Greece. To apply, please fill out this application form.



Accommodation
Volunteers are hosted in our volunteer house inside the farm, in shared bedrooms. Most of the year, external facilities are used (solar shower, compost toilet). Internet connection is available around the library/common space.
In winter, we frequently work under the rain and temperature can go down to 3 degrees Celsius by night (it can be cold inside too). In summer, we normally work with 32C degrees and it can go up to 40 degrees.
Food
At Finca Luna we are still far from being food self-sufficient. With your help we’ll try to remedy that. Food is covered partially by our farm produces, but you would need to complement your diet by shopping in the nearby town and farmers’ market. ESC volunteers get money allocation for this. Food is prepared and shared among the group of volunteers.
Please note we are not a vegetarian / vegan project, but we welcome people following all kinds of diet. We believe there is no ethical, ecological or biological right and wrong answers regarding diets. What is important is mutual respect and openness to hear each other.
Permaculture training
At the moment, there is no onsite Permaculture Design Certificate course planned. But we constantly give permaculture workshop in order to work according to the permaculture concepts and methodology. The aim of our project is to train you so that you can become a social and environmental changemaker, improve your awareness of the natural environment, become proactive actor of your personal and professional life, and to become leader in your community. We focus on learning by doing, where mistakes are part of the process. Our goal is you enhance confidence and autonomy in conducting ecological farm tasks. Volunteers are trained through workshops (permaculture, composting, eco-construction, etc.) and the development of individual projects.
To apply for volunteering, please fill out this application form.
Examples of Design Projects
Gardens

Forest Gardening

Hobbit Domes

Plant nursery
We currently have 3 plant nurseries: one for trees, one for seedlings and one for cuttings / bigger plants. Interns interested in this work usually take responsibility for one of them in turn, also contributing to design ideas for improving them if they wish.
As we love nurseries (most of our production is gifted to neighbours and friends at present, and we have exchanged all sorts of stuff for plants in the past) we’re always open to making new or improved ones, like this rather ‘wild design’ one of our students came up with :

The old trial greenhouse and the guinea-pig multifunctional greenhouse design we made for a future larger greenhouse.
Chicken house



Solar Showers

It was re-designed in february 2015 & has been through several re-designs already.
We could do with more showers, so there’s scope for much creativity as there are lots of ways they can be designed, … eg. as an integral part of a wood-heated sauna-spar complex that we are fantasizing about from time … 🙂
Just this simple shower can be improved by building a compost-heated winter version & by adding a storage tank for hot water.
Compost Toilets

Again, we started with the very basic sawdust bucket-system which we still use in parts of the growing project as they work very well, but in 2015 a friend also built us a larger twin chamber composting toilet.