Established in 2006, The Ecology Center of San Francisco (ECOSF) is a cooperative that cultivates ecological awareness in the San Francisco Bay Area and aims to grow public spaces into empowering, enriching, and educational neighborhood centers. ECOSF encourages and promotes the cooperative model by using consensus-based processes for all ECOSF decisions. One of its core programs is Design and Build, which relies on permaculture principles to design, plant, and cultivate bountiful food bearing and native habitat gardens to transform schoolyards and other outdoor areas into ecological, experiential learning spaces. In 2010, ECOSF established The School Farm, an outdoor experiential learning space on the shared campus of two local high schools, which includes a productive, organic farm, an on-site compost production, a greenhouse nursery operations, a rainwater catchment system, an outdoor classroom/kitchen, and small, functional examples of natural building techniques. Committed to education, it also runs a range of workshops focused ecological gardening, urban homesteading, natural building, and related topics.