💬 Peer Learning
Activities
Resilience Circles
With Jump/Scale, Spruce Root runs Alaska Native Resilience Circles—a year-long cohort for Indigenous entrepreneurs that treats business viability and personal and cultural well-being as one fabric. Strong communities need viable enterprises; sustainable enterprises need healthy people and cultures. The program strengthens Alaska Native businesses in ecosystem care, long-term economic resilience, overall wellness, and community mental health. Cohorts meet in person and online for workshops on personal and business finance, marketing and branding, physical health and nutrition, mental health, and Indigenous culture and values. Financial skills sit alongside cultural grounding and wellness practice. By year’s end, participants leave with sharper business tools and a denser peer network among Indigenous entrepreneurs. Spruce Root and Jump/Scale describe the work as more than training: it is part of reclaiming Indigenous knowledge, wellness, and economic sovereignty across Alaska.
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.
Manos Cambiadas
They launched “Manos Cambiadas,” rooted in an old pattern of neighbors helping neighbors. They worked alongside neighbors on farms and with what people needed day to day. The project continues and has mobilized more than 1,200 volunteers as community members rotate labor across farms.
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.
Regenerative Agriculture Demonstration Network
Demonstration farms knit neighboring holdings into a learning network—sharing practices and materials in place. One early experiment uses waste wool as mulch around aronia berries. The longer-term bet is that these sites become reference points: for farmers trying new crops, for visitors relearning relationships to food and land, and for shifts in what people grow, buy, and expect from the landscape.
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.
Regenerative Agriculture Machinery Bank
To practice regenerative agriculture, specific machinery is needed, and not all farmers can afford the full range of machines required. Farmers in the area decided to create a community machinery bank, sharing equipment among members. The bank now counts 61 members, demonstrating how resource sharing enables broader adoption of regenerative practices. The cooperative combines equipment access with collaborative learning. They have developed a network for shared farming tips ("truquillos")—those little secrets that farmers share with each other when they have trust and complicity. This approach recognizes that knowledge sharing is as important as resource sharing in building a regenerative agricultural movement.
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.