Building Practical Skills

What Skills Are Needed?

People have a basic need for:

  • Food and water
  • Clothing
  • Housing, furniture, housewares, appliances, and tools
  • And sometimes medical treatment

The more these needs can be met directly, locally, and sustainably or regeneratively, the more resilient your community.

Where To Start?

If you’re not sure where to begin, take some time to consider the following questions. Perhaps note your answers on paper.

  1. What kind of creative activities do you most enjoy? Where do you have natural talents or curiosity?
  2. Where do you see a need in your own life or others’?
    • Have you ever thought to yourself that you could save money by doing something yourself instead of buying products or services from others?
    • Is there any product in your life that you know is created in an unethical way, or using toxins?
    • Has any product or service that you use become more expensive, lower quality, less reliable, or more difficult to obtain (temporarily or permanently)?
  3. Have you ever had a feeling there is a skill you need to focus on developing?

Stay with these questions for as long as it takes for a direction to emerge.

High-Priority Skills

Here are some generally high-priority areas where you might consider building practical skills:

  1. Growing food:
    • Start learning from local gardeners, whether through educational events, workshops, gardening groups, etc. If you want in-depth training on permaculture, you might consider taking a course in permaculture design.  
  2. Preserving food:
    • With possibilities including canning, cheesemaking, and food dehydrating, you can find plenty of recipes and information online.
  3. Raising animals:
    • It’s a big commitment, but depending on the animals you’re raising, it can be pretty simple to get started. Beekeeping might be the easiest entrée. Poultry and rabbits (in small numbers) don’t need a huge amount of yard space.
  4. Making and mending clothing:
    • Eliminating plastics and slave-made items from your wardrobe can be more affordable if you know how to sew, knit, crochet, etc. There are tons of free online tutorials and patterns.
  5. Woodworking:
    • Depending on how advanced your interest, there is plenty of free content online or you might consider taking a course.
  6. Plumbing:
    • Some things are best left to a professional, but online videos can help you learn to fix a leaky faucet. And becoming a professional plumber is supposedly one of the safest ways to avoid being replaced by AI at work.
  7. Mechanics:
    • Some people learn well from following online videos and performing their own maintenance and small repair tasks as they come up. You might also ask around to see if there’s anyone in your network who knows a lot about cars and can show you things.
  8. Accounting:
    • Knowing how to keep track of and report on an organization’s finances is a key skill that few are confident and comfortable with.
  9. Medical intervention:
    • Basic first aid and low-risk home remedies can be learned fairly quickly/easily and at little or no cost. These may be useful in cases of mild illness or as a temporary measure until professional help can be obtained. But amateur medical research must never be confused with professional medical training.
  10. Earth Building:
    • Building houses and other structures (shed, oven, coop, etc.) from earth-based materials, such as cob, adobe, or rammed earth, is a sustainable alternative that can also be low-cost and easy to learn. Aside from watching online videos (free) or attending a workshop (expensive), you might check out The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans.

Random resource (I will try to make a list when I find more things like it): Here’s a cool e-magazine promoting low-tech solutions. It’s solar-powered and sometimes goes offline.