Welcome to the PALS Collective!

Let me get a few things out of the way.

First, what is PALS?

Lo these many moons ago when my strapping young lads were even younger, we advocated for a year-round education approach but wanted to focus on non-academic things during the summer. We set up a variety of learning tasks that might have been covered at one time in Home Economics (back when that was a thing) like hand sewing, woodworking, and basic gardening. We called it the PALS program – Post-Apocalyptic Life Skills – because anything that sounds dystopian is automatically cool to teenager.

Fast-forward to the distant future of Now, and we’re looking around and noticing that there are a lot of people who are definitely not well-educated in the PALS department, but they’re feeling the need to become educated.

What’s the PALS Collective?

Me and my jaunty cohorts have collected over many years a network of people who all have a little piece of the Post-Apocalyptic puzzle. We know chicken people, sheep people, woodworkers who only use hand-tools, old-school blacksmiths, master gardeners, engineers, architects, and so very many more vocations that I could sit here all night and keep remembering and adding to the list – but that’s going to be on another page.

Anyone in the PALS Collective is a teacher, a vendor, a student, a practitioner, a member – or any combination of the above. The people that we get to teach at our weekend events have been vetted and prepped to provide the very best information possible – because we ourselves are also teachers and trainers, and we want you to get the best of it.

Those who teach often also do, and for our purposes, that means that the person who leads the Chicken Husbandry classes will also probably have chickens available for you to buy/adopt/raise, and there will also be plans or contractors on hand willing to help you build a chicken coop. We’re not just going to throw knowledge at you and then cut you loose with a wave; we want to help build a network of people who support each other in material ways.

What’s coming next?

The PALS Collective, as of November 2024, is in its nascent phase of development, but the people behind it have the remarkable skills to bring things to fruition with minimal time and resource. (That probably comes from herding writers and other sketchy characters over the years.) If you’re getting in on the ground floor, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter that will roll out every Thursday.

We’ll be building a Cottage Directory of people in the North Texas area with whom you can trade and bug for help on occasion. We’re putting together weekly events with vendors, classes, and entertainment for folks of all ages. Eventually, we’ll have handy cheat-books for all of our programs, poster-sized one-page guides for quick references, and whatever else we need to create to help you build a self-sustaining life in a community of people who value your contributions.

This is all new, so stay tuned, get signed up for the newsletter, and await our further instructions.