🪢 Network Weaving
Activities
National and International Advocacy
In 1989, TBS and village partners discussed how mining in the Aravallis—near Sariska—was undermining johads. Dr. Singh concluded blasting had opened fractures in aquifers; communities needed relief. In 1990 TBS petitioned the Supreme Court to close those mines; in 1991 the Court ordered a stop, and in 1992 the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests restricted mining in parts of the range. To press state compliance, TBS and allies staged an 800-km march across four states. Dr. Singh walked from Himmatnagar, Gujarat, toward Delhi from 2 October 1993 for over four months. Advocacy of this kind contributed to closing some 28,000 mines by 1996. By 2001–02, TBS was contesting the 2002 National Water Policy, fearing it would deepen privatized control of water. The Rashtriya Jal Chetna Yatra crossed 320 districts in 30 states over fourteen months. That campaign helped launch Rashtriya Jal Biradari (RJB), a national forum in 2001 that ran roughly a decade—public meetings, riparian problem-solving, outreach to ministers and officials, and litigation where needed. In the 2020s, Jal Biradari linked to global drought-and-flood dialogue; the network claims more than 1,000 members and bodies such as the Indian Himalayan River Basin Council and the Indian Peninsular River Basin Council. With TBS vice chairman Professor G.D. Agarwal (environmentalist, former IIT Kanpur dean), the organization pressed for the Ganga. From 2008 his fasts—including over damming the Bhagirathi headstream—drew national attention. In February 2009, one outcome was national-river status for the Ganga and creation of the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGBRA).
Sustainable Southeast Partnership
The Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP)—a Spruce Root and Sealaska program—works as a regional collective-impact network. It supports collaborative, community-led responses to linked social, ecological, and economic challenges, guided by Indigenous values. Individuals, Tribal governments, Native corporations, nonprofits, agencies, businesses, and others can take part. Village-level hosts appoint community catalysts who assess energy, food, natural resources, and economic sustainability, then surface projects—from food security and energy to habitat restoration—and pair with regional catalysts on design, implementation, and tracking. Regional catalysts also shape policy, help build cooperatives and mutual support, and run workshops to grow capacity. In practice, SSP is bioregional governance: place-rooted, accountable to communities, and woven from village to region.
Vision for 2100
The working group is drafting a long-range biocultural vision: what South Asia might become by 2100. In that speculative picture, borders grow permeable; visas fade. Wildlife, nomadic pastoralists, and others move more freely. Older trade corridors such as the Silk Road reappear in new form. Border zones, once flashpoints, become peace sanctuaries run locally through strong direct democracy. Today’s hyper-nationalism gives way, in the vision, to civilizational and Indigenous identities; direct democracy is rooted in villages and neighborhoods and scales up across landscapes into bioregional governance. Traders and nomadic communities act as connectors—carrying news and goods across the bioregion.
Learning from Practical Experiments
Before leaning on abstract theory, they looked at what was already happening. One touchstone was a river parliament catalyzed by [[Tarun Bharat Sangh]], where roughly 60 to 70 villages in one river basin in Western India built institutions to govern the basin together. They also reviewed river-basin authorities and transboundary schemes—often top-down, bureaucratic, and narrow in how they defined a river’s social and ecological life. To widen the lens, they organized about 15 webinars: practitioners described experiments on the ground; others shared bioregional work from outside the region and took part in mutual learning.
Storytelling of Ravens
The Trust's first major initiative was Storytelling of Ravens, an in-person convening format that began in Sitka, Alaska in 2019. These gatherings brought together Ravens from across the bioregion to share personal stories of local resilience and regenerative solutions. The events emphasize emotional and relational depth, fostering transformation through shared vulnerability and celebration of what's working. From Oregon to Alaska, these annual gatherings weave together a network of changemakers who share knowledge, build relationships, and inspire collective action.
Democracy Festival (Festival Iltir)
To channel energy around that tension, they launched a Democracy Festival (Festival Iltir)—a space to surface what was moving. Interest ran high across sectors: large firms, public agencies, even the regional police chief engaged seriously. Last year’s festival drew 300 participants, including people from Barcelona and Catalonia’s national government, exploring how such processes could scale.
La Garrotxa 2030 Strategic Planning Initiative
In late 2019, participatory governance was spreading across La Garrotxa; several rural municipalities had piloted citizen participation, often co-designed and facilitated by Resilience Earth. Seeing a chance to lift municipal learning to regional scale, they proposed co-producing a Strategic Plan for Territorial Resilience with the regional government. The president backed it politically and financially—with one condition: the plan must transform how governance is practiced region-wide. A core group of 12 people, chosen for sectoral, geographic, and cultural diversity, became the “critical yeast” tasked with keeping the process participatory and transparent enough to catalyze broader change. Months into the pandemic, they ran 17 online thematic round tables aligned with the SDGs. Over 600 people joined during COVID—“that was nuts,” Oscar recalls. To reach youth and diverse communities, they produced materials for 57 schools and held sessions in community centers and places of worship with minority groups. A wide survey drew more than 2,200 responses. In all, 40-plus participatory sessions fed a ten-year regional plan. Direct participation reached 7,000–7,500 people—over 11% of the population. They adapted the SDGs into 21 local targets (“Garrotxa SDGs”) that different actors could own, paired with an observatory of 400-plus indicators to track the plan. A tension surfaced: once strategy, indicators, and distributed governance are in place, traditional electoral politics can feel redundant. Oscar asks what remains for a party platform when “everything is been decided”—whether officials become “public service servers” carrying out what communities already decide in everyday hubs. Some elected leaders resisted, sensing the process could sideline them. They used an iceberg model to push strategies to real depth—and that resistance is still in play.
Hubs and Guilds Development Program
This is a structured capacity system—nested support from local landscapes to the full bioregion. It sets up landscape hubs that convene diverse actors—land trusts, solar installers, housing developers—to shape shared landscape visions with real budgets. Hubs cover defined areas and help administer bioregional regeneration funds. Guilds—communities of practice on topics landscape leaders need—produce classes, resources, and directories. An ambassador network orients newcomers to Cascadia, bioregionalism, mapping, and why those frames matter.
Regional Activation Tour
To learn what regeneration would take, Brandon and Claire ran a month-long Regional Activation Tour in October 2023, soon after they met. With more than 100 organizers and projects around the Salish Sea and Willamette Valley, they visited 14 communities in 30 days and met over 1,000 people through talks, field visits, workshops, and interviews—all asking what it would take to regenerate an entire bioregion. Elders at each stop shared knowledge; the team documented bioregional learning around that question. They followed with an online capstone so participants could workshop and share expertise, then a Cascadia Summit to shape what Regenerate Cascadia would become. A major output was a movement map—who and what sit where, and where trust must be built through relationships, not anonymous institutions. Several core design challenges emerged. Work happens in landscapes but stays disconnected. Capacity to support it is thin. In Seattle, Brandon notes, people can discuss raising $54 billion for a third phase of light rail or hundreds of millions for schools via levies—but regenerating a watershed is often “give to your local nonprofit.” The design problem: help practitioners see their work, connect with others, and get resourced. Funding pathways for watershed regeneration are weak. Practitioners are underfunded and lack time to hunt for grants. Work stays siloed, competitive, and project-sized rather than coordinated at landscape or bioregional scale—even when funders exist, bridges to people on the ground are missing. Roughly 130–140 people stayed engaged after the tour; the movement map continues to show where regeneration lives and where new links are needed.
Deep Economic Code Work
The deepest layer addresses the “economic code” of the place—alliances among academia, institutions, and government to move beyond GDP toward more holistic metrics that shape decisions and finance. The tension is to pair a bold horizon with practical next steps.
Regenerative Action in Thematic Areas
A middle layer focuses on thematic work across the Sydney bioregion and metro—food systems, river restoration, and related themes. Specialists have labored in these areas for decades but are not always woven into one strategy. Regen Sydney aims to convene unlikely alliances, align intentions, and apply upward pressure on existing government layers. They are beginning with the Cooks River Alliance in a southwest catchment and are watching where that collaboration leads.
Waverley Community of Practice
In Waverley they are midway through a three-phase program. Phase one—community of practice. They invited groups already active locally—Transition Bondi, Bondi Innovation, beach cleanups, and others—and asked what regeneration in this neighborhood could mean. Over four months they balanced rigor (so institutions would take outcomes seriously) with convivial process—picnics, film nights, and similar gatherings. A community of practice of about 160 people formed; visioning held social and ecological dimensions together. Mapping exercises helped people attune to the place’s particular rhythms. Phase two—cornerstone indicators. Guided by Katherine Trebeck, they use “cornerstone” measures as a counterpoint to indicators that read as technical or illegible to the public. The idea: a small set of metrics the public can stand behind—living at the interface between institutions and communities. Cornerstone indicators braid social and ecological dimensions. One example: families who are glad not to need a car in a given area—touching transport, services, autonomy, and emissions in one indicator. Midway through phase two, they compare the neighborhood vision (informed by memory of pre-colonial conditions and honest about structural barriers) with what council is already doing, surface gaps, and ask how to measure progress toward the vision. Phase three—transition pathways. They will help people find roles in the transition. With vision and indicator-backed targets, the question becomes how the community can act together in ways that complement council and raise ambition. Methods will include live modeling games and “warm data” sessions to weave diverse knowledges. Participants have already offered sharp reflections—for instance, that connection to place can rest in a deeper spiritual bond with nature. There is no single fix; some see Waverley’s doughnut work as carrying wider significance.
The Connectivity Partnership
The Connectivity Partnership formalises cooperation among NGOs (WWF-New Zealand, NZ Landcare Trust), agencies, and iwi—pooling knowledge, co-funding, and coordinating corridors and catchments. It helped lift neighbourhood projects toward landscape strategies for biodiversity, pests, and water that braid western science with Māori worldviews. A parallel aim is syndicated investment: government, philanthropy, and impact capital opening shared windows for community priorities.
Te Kete Hononga: The Basket of Connections
Te Kete Hononga (“basket of connections”) bundles navigation support for community initiatives: funding, training, and agencies threaded through a trusted Kairaranga (weaver)—a local person trained to open doors across the system. One contact per community reduces friction with fragmented government programmes while keeping authority close to whānau knowledge and aspirations.
Stone Soup Social
Like many efforts here, it began with food. The first gathering was a stone soup social—people brought ingredients, shared a meal, and started to meet. That rhythm ran from February 2, 2020, for about six weeks until COVID shut public gatherings down.
Northeast Bioregional Strategy & Intertribal Governance Framework
A draft regional regenerative strategy—Indigenous co-governance at the core—bundles restoration with food, fiber, and fuel systems, then links those to efficient buildings, clean energy, and active mobility (trails, multi-use paths). The spatial imagination is villages and cities re-embedded in larger land regeneration. Co-design with tribal and non-tribal partners proceeds under rights-of-nature framing; resources are steered toward projects that earn reciprocity with Native nations facing distinct colonial legacies.
Social Ecosystem Mapping
Early work mapped the social ecosystem: who holds stake in the basin, where they operate, and how trust might grow through repeated contact on their own ground. Mapping follows a “full polycentric” logic—many centres, each assessed with criteria fitted to local conditions, not one template. The basin is treated as a mesh of places—schools, municipalities, farms, NGOs, artists, scientists—each a centre of attention and care with different leverage on the river.
Network Naturregion Building
Many high-value patches sit isolated—a poor recipe for persistence. “Orphan” greens—verges, corporate lawns, small parks—can still host diversity if managed intentionally. The association coordinates Network Naturregion: people networking places—municipalities, schools, kindergartens, clubs, students, farmers, hunters, firms, and staff—so fragments link into something closer to a functional habitat network.
Value Chain Collaboration Canvas
VC3 stitches stakeholders so each chain link reinforces the next. In Tabanan, agroforestry cacao growers work with Agridesa on data-backed farming, digital tools, and finance; Cau Chocolates off-takes organic, agroforestry-grown beans. When actors align, projects become investable and finance can follow. Farmers report stronger soils and bean quality plus roughly IDR 10 million extra per harvest cycle—income that helps keep forest on the land, catchments intact, and businesses viable.
Cultural Celebration Across Villages
Borgofuturo was refocused on weaving relationships and a shared valley identity through celebration and planning. Rather than a single three-day event in one village, it ran across four weekends in four villages. Between weekends, participants joined collective walks on trails linking settlements—learning the land and each other. The format moved from one centralised festival to a distributed, connected experience: walking connections that make the valley legible as one place, not a set of competing hamlets. Organisers invited residents, mayors and officials, civil-society groups, and local firms. Each weekend took one of the four strands: built infrastructure; culture; environmental education; and local production and craft.
Guild System Development
Through the BioFi Cultivator programme, HERE began convening guilds: networks of connectors and practitioners who name priority issues, commission studies, and steer funding. Four guilds are forming, each targeting at least about $1 million in community-directed capital—decisions kept close to the problem. Food tackles food-system priorities; Shelter addresses housing affordability and its overlap with climate vulnerability; Ecology coordinates forest health, invasives, deer, and rising fire risk in the Northeast; Culture holds a regenerative cultural thread so food, shelter, and ecology do not drift into silos.
Network Building and Learning Exchange
A network structure has formed organically: the team connects organizations and actors running regenerative initiatives—in any dimension—to bioregional networks inside Colombia and to the Global Network of Regenerative Communities, so lessons travel horizontally rather than staying project-bound. Colombia Regenerativa still convenes bioregion-to-bioregion exchanges and, through the global network, links especially with peer processes in Latin America.
Burren Peer-to-Peer Learning Network
The programme brokers farmer-to-farmer learning: who already farms for nature pairs with neighbours who want to transition. The premise is simple—farmers often resist outside experts but listen to peers—so the network supplies structure, trust, and follow-up rather than top-down advice.
Cross-Sector Collaborative Infrastructure
Over the past two years, Blueprint has facilitated regular convenings of over 50 individuals and organizations, building shared language, governance structures, and aligned funding strategies. This infrastructure has enabled rapid collaboration across issue areas such as food security, forest health, energy access, and rural mental health. The team is creating a formal backbone organization that can hold shared capital, facilitate project incubation, and distribute funding to aligned local partners.
Bay Delta Community Learning Ecosystem
A strategic network-building initiative that combines monthly community calls highlighting local projects with Bioregional Explorers Club field trips to build direct experience of the watershed. The program brings together diverse stakeholders through regular strategy workshops and community gatherings, focusing on building relationships and shared understanding across the bioregion.
Biofabric Places Network
The Biofabric Places Network is a collaborative system of material production hubs. The network enables different bioregions to learn from each other—materials "cooked" in similar ways but adapted to local contexts, from Middle Eastern deserts to European cities. Each time, they work together with industries, universities, and build local networks with cities and various partners to find cooperatives that can continue building and producing these materials locally. They're mainly focused on building materials, examining how waste streams in cities and larger regions can contribute to a healthier building industry.
Cross-Border Indigenous Alliance Building
The alliance is a long-horizon effort to weave together Indigenous nations on both sides of the Ecuador–Peru border—more than 30 peoples and nationalities in a region where colonial borders have often split communities and territories. The point is not a one-off summit but sustained relationship-building: recurring Indigenous-led assemblies where people bring decisions home to their own authorities; ceremonies and protocols that set the tone before policy debate; and working sessions that can host technical and political questions—land, extraction, climate—without displacing local norms with outside timetables. Over time, that rhythm of meeting has helped groups with fraught histories see themselves as a single political and cultural force. Participants describe the shift as a “marriage between peoples,” drawing on traditional approaches to conflict resolution to move from rivalry toward shared strategy.
Community Reconciliation and Forgiveness
In 2023, church leaders across the valley met together for the first time—no small feat, since many congregations would not previously share a building. By mid-2024, representatives from that gathering were each tied to an initiative in the valley—early childhood, food gardens, animal welfare, and more—another first in the historical record they can find for such a cross-cutting assembly.
ABIF Network Development Program
ABIFs are family-based ecological units where each household commits to creating a beautiful, biodiverse living space that integrates cultural and ecological practices. These socio-ecological systems form the building blocks of what ASPROCIG calls a "socioeconomical territory"—their proposal for how life should be organized. The network grows organically through a mentor-based pattern following the Fibonacci sequence. When a family member approaches a friend or neighbor who is already part of ASPROCIG, they learn about the benefits of joining. Established ABIFs provide face-to-face support to help new families set up their systems, ensuring that knowledge is continuously shared and that new families receive dedicated guidance.
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.
Circles of Activity
Work is organized around seven broad themes—Circles of Activity—treated as interconnected parts of one system. Each circle convenes cohorts with distinct roles: Conservation Authorities (the 13 authorities in the GTB, plus a municipal cohort) to advance a Portfolio of Projects for large-landscape regeneration, including food and water security; Business and Funding Leaders to help build the Bioregional Funding Ecosystem; Educators to help shape the Schools Community Network; and Healthcare Practitioners for the Wellbeing Path. Indigenous worldviews and knowledge are woven into each circle.