After more than 15 years of hosting volunteers on our permaculture farm, I thought I knew this terrain pretty well. We’ve hosted people from all over the world, in different life phases; with different expectations, skills and levels of initiative. I’ve seen beautiful exchanges; and I’ve seen situations slowly drain energy on all sides.
So when I decided to create an online course on how to successfully host volunteers, I didn’t expect to be surprised.
But I was.
While designing the course, I treated hosting itself as a design challenge, using social permaculture principles, looking at flows, relationships, boundaries, feedback loops, and energy over time. And something interesting happened: new ideas appeared! Very practical ones. Things we had not implemented yet; not because they were difficult, but because they had never been made explicit.
That’s the magic of permaculture design.
Even after years of hands-on experience, a good design process makes you look from all angles and can reveal blind spots. It can sharpen what already works, and gently upgrade a system that earlier felt "good enough".
This experience reminded me why hosting volunteers is often harder than people expect.
Hosting is usually described as informal and simple. You open your house and set people to work. But in reality, it is a complex social system. It involves expectations, communication styles, cultural differences, emotional labour, boundaries, care for the work, for your earth, care for the people, and care for yourself.
Many well-intentioned hosts struggle; not because they don’t care, but because they lack structure. Hosting is treated as something casual, while it actually needs clarity to remain humane and sustainable.
That insight is the core of my online course Successfully Hosting Volunteers.
The course is not about maximising free labour. It’s about prevention rather than repair; design rather than improvisation; and hosting as a regenerative practice. It’s for hosts who want good relationships rather than resentment; contribution rather than confusion; reciprocity rather than burnout.
I’ve put the design, the lessons, the mistakes, and the practical frameworks into an online course, so others don’t have to learn everything the hard way.
If you’re curious, you can read more about the course here