🪴 Venture Cultivation
Activities
Small Business Lending
Spruce Root's approach to economic development starts with recognition: many entrepreneurs in Southeast Alaska don't have access to affordable capital through traditional financing channels. But Spruce Root sees beyond credit scores and collateral. Their small business lending program targets entrepreneurs who may not qualify elsewhere, but who contribute to economic development and community well-being in the region. Before potential borrowers even apply for a loan, Spruce Root provides business and career coaching. And they continue supporting them after the loan is issued. The loans can fund startup capital, working capital, business expansion, and more. Between 2012 and 2022, Spruce Root deployed $1.2 million in loan capital. In 2022 alone, they issued loans to four Alaska small businesses totaling $350,000. In 2023, new loans deployed amounted to just under $900,000—a sign of growing momentum and trust.
Edge Prize
An early experiment in funding the work of Ravens, the Edge Prize launched in 2023 as a distributed bioregional accelerator—a novel methodology for growing community through an online accelerator and prize challenge. Offering cash prizes from $500 to $20,000, the initiative convenes groups, offers learning opportunities and community building, provides funding, connects participants to additional resources, and builds a library of successful approaches. This initiative spawned [[Regenerate Cascadia]], demonstrating how small-scale catalytic funding can unlock significant community innovation when combined with learning, networking, and resource connections.
Nature-Based Enterprise
Nature-based enterprise ties livelihoods to healthy ecosystems inside each Tapere. Deprivation—scarce jobs, housing stress, thin services—slows circular economies even where biodiversity is high. Reconnecting Northland co-designs ventures that convert cultural and ecological capital into revenue, then helps align investment and fair flows so income supports regeneration rather than extracting from it.
ReVillage Co-Op Enterprises
They are breaking ground on a community-owned enterprise—a public house, marketplace, café, food hub, and small-business incubator—in a long-vacant historic firehouse (once a train station) facing the new town square. The Community Food Hub & Marketplace is underway; a Community Farm Project is funded and launching soon. Each effort is co-created with communities already in place, toward a future in right relationship with land and history. Smaller cooperatives are forming in the ReVillage ecosystem: an intergenerational childcare collective, a local food and land-care initiative, and service ventures emerging through relationships. They are testing income-sharing, cooperative ownership, and regenerative service models that can sustain livelihoods where centralized systems often overlook rural communities. Technical help on legal structure and seed funding for place-rooted enterprises remain needs—the building blocks of a local economy that can support people while regenerating land.
Panama Venture Studio + Restoration Fund
A venture studio plus restoration fund are designed as one pipeline: co-design place-based methods and enterprises, then move catalytic capital into landscape portfolios and shared infrastructure under governance that privileges community priorities and ecosystem outcomes. Financing may layer philanthropy, public instruments, and canal- or climate-linked tools without reducing outcomes to carbon tonnes alone—using markets where helpful while safeguarding social and ecological integrity.
Northeast BFF & Venture Studio
The group is building paired capital: a bioregional financing facility (trust capital aligned with an intertribal table) and a venture studio for bioregionally rooted enterprises unlikely to emerge from conventional markets. Profits from studio ventures are intended to help fund the broader institutional shift.
Project Portfolio Development
CEDPO has backed about 15 initiatives chosen through its systems map—spanning environment, society, and economy. Examples include: - Ngäbe communities: knowledge exchange, seed saving, traditional agriculture and medicine, productive-system strengthening, and ecotourism grounded in Ngäbe practice (phase one complete). - AsaOsa (recyclers’ association): operational support for the peninsula’s main recycling hub, where informal wages lag the environmental service provided. - Women-led enterprises: native vanilla in agroforestry (including export links) and meliponiculture for pollinators and income. - Marine work: Racing Coral trains divers in reef gardening in the Golfo Dulce; Mar y Tierra links land use, education, and monitoring to integrated watershed–coastal management.
Development Portfolio
Blueprint is assembling a portfolio of investable initiatives—forests, farms and soil, health, food access, micro-economies, and arts—so funders encounter a systemic regional program rather than isolated projects. After Hurricane Helene, about 40% of regional tree cover was damaged, elevating wildfire risk and debris work alongside longer-term forest stewardship tied to water and identity. Soil, water, and farm programming aim to scale producer-led regeneration and food security. Health efforts include: - nature-based care models - food-insecurity work links farms to dignified community distribution - micro-economy support tries to diversify beyond fragile tourism - arts are treated as infrastructure for cohesion and narrative change Financing is designed to braid these streams—ecology, livelihoods, culture, and care—as one bioregional investment thesis.
Bioregional Venture Studio
A bioregional venture accelerator is taking shape to grow a network across Greater Toronto that repairs ecology and strengthens communities. It is framed to unlock labor and finance so people can scale existing businesses or start new ones, shift time into regenerative work at community level, and move beyond “day jobs” where that is the barrier. The aim is to support small and medium enterprises with finance, education, and a cooperative network inside the bioregion, alongside partners already on the ground. The accelerator would connect funders (foundations, agencies, philanthropists) with a regenerative business network and a council of advisers, using cooperative exchange to move resources. Sectors that could channel impact toward ecological renewal and community well-being include manufacturing (reducing dependence on global supply chains), water, forestry, and agriculture. The approach stresses prototyping—testing assumptions—and measuring impact in dimensions beyond financial return alone.