🔀 Grants Programs
Activities
Seacoast Trust
Recognizing that the work of regeneration requires long-term, patient capital, Spruce Root became the fiscal sponsor of the Seacoast Trust—a permanent funding mechanism created to provide access to capital for Indigenous-led conservation projects that place local communities at the center of efforts to achieve a healthy environment. The Seacoast Trust's guiding principles include respecting community voices, upholding Indigenous governance and leadership, and valuing the integrity of all knowledge systems—including those anchored in 10,000 plus years of Indigenous history, traditions, and stewardship. The Trust will fund the work of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. Projects slated for funding include Native forest partnerships, healthy salmon habitat, Indigenous Guardians programs, youth leadership opportunities, food sovereignty, climate migration, regenerative economies, and reduced carbon footprints. The Trust provides grants for work programs, loans for small Tribal businesses, Southeast Tribal Land Purchases, and local infrastructure projects, as well as exchange-traded and impact funds, network coordination and capacity building. In 2022, the Seacoast Trust reached an initial $20 million funding goal with the help of Sealaska, The Nature Conservancy, and the Rasmuson, Hewlett, Edgerton, Chorus, and Wilburforce foundations. But the real vision is much larger: the goal of the trust is to reach $100 million in order to fully fund the work of Sustainable Southeast Partnership in perpetuity—ensuring that this work doesn't depend on the vagaries of grant cycles, but can continue for generations.
SINAL Flow Fund
The SINAL Flow Fund is a locally managed funding mechanism designed to channel diverse capital streams—including public grants, donations, supply chain finance, and investment capital—toward regenerative initiatives in the region. The Flow Fund enables implementation of community-led projects by lowering access barriers to funding and supporting infrastructure for scaling a bioregional economy.
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.
Cascadia Regeneration Fund
The Cascadia Regeneration Fund (“Cascade”) is Regenerate Cascadia’s vision for a living financial architecture for bioregional transition. Cities can raise billions for transit or schools; comparable mechanisms for watershed regeneration barely exist. The fund is structured as a bioregional trust, with nonprofit standing in the U.S. and Canada. The main vehicle combines three back-end donor-advised funds (DAFs) into one flow fund feeding localized landscape sub-funds, governed and regranted by hubs developed through the Bioregion Program. Governance stays as local as possible; funding reflects ongoing evaluation from communities doing the work. The intent is to let money flow like water through a coherent strategy, with metrics defined on the ground. Seeding has reached $40,000 toward an initial $100,000 goal by December 2025 to test regranting—setting up larger flows from 2026.
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.
Osa Biocultural Fund
The Osa Biocultural Fund is a flexible tool to seed community-run work in food sovereignty, ecological restoration, arts, and education. It is designed with participatory governance anchored in local women and elders. They are seeking $29,000 to develop and scale the fund, which distributes more than $25,000 a year to regenerative projects. One fully participatory round used $6,000. Ambassadors, the council, participants, and investors all voted on which projects to fund. That modest sum has helped spark broader collaboration—among them a complementary currency at the local farmers market and a microcredit system applicants now run themselves.
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.
Hudson Valley Bioregional Trust & Fund
A Hudson Valley trust and philanthropic fund is being built to move money through the guilds. Convenings have begun; fundraising is aimed so each guild can steward at least roughly $1 million, with allocation led by people closest to the issues.
Project Development
A project pipeline spells out phases from idea to delivery and what evidence each stage requires. The first proposal funded by Guayabillas DAO was school water infrastructure: raised by a stakeholder DAO, approved by WhatsApp poll, paid from the $5,000 community treasury, and recorded on DAODAO and Notion—an end-to-end test of proposal, vote, spend, and documentation.
Traditional Knowledge in Governance
The cooperative is entering a cooperative service agreement with the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) so these bioregional models can guide program funding—for example, funding agroforestry only where traditional practice indicates agroforestry fits, avoiding projects that mismatch place. Early thinking also asks how this bioregional lens could inform legislation and public land management in Hawaiʻi today—a bridge from Indigenous and place-based knowledge into contemporary governance.
Diamante Bioregional Trust Development
The Diamante Bioregional Trust is a community-aligned capital channel aimed at grassroots regenerative action. So far, the consortium has raised, spent, and tracked about $125,000—foundational work on a lean budget—while building toward a $125 million goal to take tested approaches across the wider bioregion. A curated set of ready-to-implement projects—water protection, reforestation, legal land defense, cultural revitalization, decentralized education—comes out of years of groundwork with communities bordering the Osa Peninsula.
Bioregional Financing Facility Development
A bioregional funding mechanism currently in development, the CEDPO Financing Facility is designed to receive donations and investments from Costa Rican donors, the Costa Rican government, and international sources. The facility will support the core CEDPO operations team, finance locally led regenerative projects, strengthen community organizations and governance, and maximize available resources through connections with government institutions, NGOs, and universities. CEDPO aims to raise $100,000 annually for operational needs. As of 2025, $35,000 has been secured, hoped to be a three-year commitment, leaving approximately $65,000 annually to be raised.
Farm Infrastructure Support Initiative
Targeted grants fund practical upgrades—stone walls, feeding systems, water management—that lift environmental scores and make day-to-day farming easier. The logic matches the results model: invest where it shifts outcomes, not where it merely ticks boxes.
Appalachia Community Capital Design
Blueprint is developing community capital strategies that embed regenerative values and local decision-making. This includes designing grant and loan mechanisms to fund land-based projects, cooperative enterprises, and creative infrastructure. The group is prototyping governance structures that center equity, lived experience, and intergenerational leadership. They are actively exploring flow fund models and bioregionally rooted donor circles, and they envision a "Community Wealth Table" where local actors co-govern the deployment of resources.
Blue Ridge Foodshed Capital Infrastructure
The Trust is partnering with Abundance Capital to administer the Blue Ridge Foodshed Fund—a catalytic donor-advised fund (DAF). This multi-donor fund receives tax-deductible grants from public, private, and corporate donors, creating a capital pool for grants, zero/low-interest loans, and return-based investments. Returns flow back into the Fund to be reinvested in more initiatives. The team is identifying catalytic projects in three specific landscape clusters across the region. Potential investments include local processing and aggregation centers, mobile market units, cold storage solutions, and co-located services for farmers and food entrepreneurs.
Bioregional Basic Income
Livelihoods tied only to thin margins and short contracts rarely leave air for the slow work of feeding a watershed. Bioregioning South East Ireland is testing whether a regular, place-aware stipend can function less like a handout and more like infrastructure. In August 2025 they launched what the alliance calls the first Bioregional Basic Income it knows of anywhere, paid to Roger Ahern, who grows food under Greenman’s Garden in the bioregion’s west and already moves between market beds and mentoring roles on sites such as Bushy Park—so the pilot lands inside a living food web rather than on a blank slate. The same thread runs through Ireland’s wider experiments with basic income in the arts and on farms, and through emerging research partnerships; how money, land, and learning are being braided together unfolds as part of their bioregional finance work.
Capital Allocation and Financial Strategy
Currently, approximately 70% of funding comes through Acción Andina's international network, with 30% from matching grants and public-private partnerships. The organization is actively transitioning toward more diversified blended finance mechanisms to reduce dependence on any single funding source. Grants flow to infrastructure development (nurseries, fencing), direct reforestation activities, youth employment programs, and capacity building. Sub-funds support microgrants for community initiatives, citizen science monitoring programs, and branding support for regenerative products. The allocation model ensures that decision-making power remains with local communities while accessing resources from international allies.
Bioregional Funding Ecosystem
The Bioregional Foundation stewards regenerative value flow and governance in the bioregion. The funding ecosystem is meant to back regenerative projects; mobilize financial, social, and natural resources across the bioregion; track and evaluate progress; convene local groups, organizations, and projects; support meaningful participation in decisions; and improve equitable environmental and socioeconomic outcomes over time. The Earth Regeneration Fund (also called the Bioregional Pando Funding Ecosystem) frames whole-system social and ecological regeneration. The Legacy Project is launching a Catalytic Cohort to establish the first Bioregional Pando Funding Ecosystem—pairing funders with practitioners in a tailored action-learning process. At the September 2024 Bioregional Regenerative Finance Forum in the GTB, the Earth Regeneration Trust was launched alongside the emerging Bioregional Funding Ecosystem.