🔎 Ways of Knowing
Every bioregion is known in more than one way at once: through measurement and story, through memory and prophecy, through the body and through the spreadsheet. Trouble often starts when only one of those ways is given authority, and when the others are treated as ornament or obstruction. This pattern is about holding multiple epistemologies in the same room without forcing them into a single vocabulary. The stakes are not academic. Who gets to decide what counts as evidence shapes what gets funded, protected, or erased. The practices here treat learning as something that happens in relation—with land, with peers, with audiences—rather than as a pipeline that only moves from expert to “public.”
Ontology
Activities
Water Warriors
TBS trained more than 10,000 Jal Yodhas (“Water Warriors”)—grassroots leaders, including women and youth—with technical and ecological skills to advance restoration locally. Tarun Jal Vidyapeeth offers a two-year course for water warriors and shorter courses for village institutions, NGOs, scientists, and officials. Many warriors organize through self-help groups and youth networks. By 2001–02, TBS had helped form 325 SHGs across 180 villages in Alwar and Mewat; women received training in plant-based medicine and took part in gram sabha decisions.
Water Literacy and Education
TBS ran trainings and workshops for farmers, youth, schoolchildren, and local officials—often through village heads—so communities could see how conservation linked to their own well-being and to the land’s productivity.
Cultural Revival for Ecological Kinship
TBS wove ritual and symbol into daily responsibility for ecosystems. Drawing on Raksha Bandhan, where sisters tie threads on brothers’ wrists, villagers tied threads around trees to pledge protection. After the first johad proved itself, Jal Utsav (Water Festival) in 1987 helped anchor community ownership; participants formed a village gram sabha (council) to share responsibility. From 1987, TBS supported three padyatras (campaign walks) each year, led by Gopalpura residents who chose routes, names, and how to invite other villages. Together, these practices frame restoration as cultural and relational—not only technical.
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.
Path to Prosperity
One of Spruce Root's signature programs is Path to Prosperity, a business development competition that supports local businesses with positive social, economic, and ecological impact. The program specifically promotes the regenerative use of the region's resources—businesses that see themselves as part of the ecosystem, not apart from it. In 2022, the competition attracted 23 applications from eight communities. The 12 finalists attended an in-person Business Boot Camp, receiving 26+ hours of training and technical assistance from 14 mentors. The goal is to build a network of businesses that understand their success is tied to the health of their communities and the land that sustains them.
Business Coaching & Programs
Lending is just one piece of a much larger vision. Spruce Root offers business coaching to stakeholders beyond their loan portfolio. In 2022, they provided business basics training to Tlingit and Haida citizens, and partnered with Sealaska Heritage Institute on developing a business curriculum for Alaska Native artists—recognizing that cultural expression and economic opportunity can thrive together.
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.
Val Estrela Historic and Cultural Ecotourism Site
After about 20 kilometers through great landscapes, the trail arrives at Val Estrela—the port where one-third of the slaves arrived in Brazil. This is a site of profound historical and cultural significance, and Sinal do Vale has started executing a master plan to regenerate the rivers, the old church, and weighing station to create a historic and cultural ecotourism site. They're doing this work together with the local quilombola communities and fishermen who maintained this abandoned site over the past decades. These are communities with deep ancestral connections to this place, who have been stewarding it even as it was neglected by broader society. Sinal do Vale is determined to continue this work, recognizing that restoration must honor both the ecological and cultural heritage of this place.
Camino do Guaraú Eco-Tourism Trail
The 110-kilometer trail starts not by coincidence at Sinal do Vale. By curating this officially recognized Camino do Guaraú, Sinal do Vale galvanized entrepreneurs, activists, change makers, and farmers to join the regeneration movement. The trail reconnects the local community to its heritage, culture, and ecotourism potential. The trail continues through nine other segments in the beautiful mountain range of the Mata Atlântica. In each segment, Sinal do Vale has identified areas that need reforestation or conservation to create an agroecological belt to preserve and regenerate the biodiversity in the region. Not least among the species they're working to protect: the golden lion tamarin monkeys, an endangered species that depends on the health of this ecosystem. This work is about creating connected corridors of life, ensuring that the fragments of the Mata Atlântica can support the full diversity of life they once sustained.
Salmon Biocultural Credit Program
Salmon Returns is developing a Salmon Biocultural Credit program—a verified unit of ecological and cultural regeneration representing the restoration of salmon lifeways, habitats, and the relationships that sustain them. Unlike carbon credits that excuse harm through offsets, biocultural credits fund repair, channeling capital into living systems and turning finance from a tool of extraction into an act of reciprocity and responsibility. These credits are governed and validated by Indigenous Nations and local communities, blending traditional knowledge and science to measure real improvements in ecosystem health and cultural continuity.
Magic Canoe
From the Storytelling of Ravens gatherings emerged Magic Canoe, a nonprofit media and storytelling organization dedicated to amplifying the people, projects, and possibilities helping Salmon Nation thrive. The Magic Canoe name comes from a story gifted by Cecil Paul, a Haisla First Nation Elder who used this story to save his home territory from logging. He described how a magic canoe grows bigger as more people join, soon holding all of us as we paddle in the same direction. As the narrative engine of the bioregion, Magic Canoe uplifts place-based innovation and regeneration through articles, videos, digital platforms, and convenings, connecting regenerative efforts across watersheds through shared visibility and values.
Local Government Incubator (INCAT)
Last year they opened an incubator for local governments—after many incubators for co-ops and nonprofits. Seven municipalities joined, all led by women—some in government, some in opposition—united in wanting a paradigm shift. Seven of twenty-one is a notable push; INCAT projects were striking in scope.
Cascadia Bioregion Program
BioRegen (the Cascadia Bioregion Program) tackles the “readiness” question: preparing local landscapes to absorb regenerative investment through community-led capacity. The program guides 10+ landscapes through a 12-month arc—ecological mapping, regenerative portfolios, budgeting, and success measures grounded in local priorities rather than outside corporate or government defaults. Communities self-organize into hubs that can receive and steward capital while deepening planning and governance. Work is anchored in a shared bioregional identity, living-systems principles, and long-term, trust-based investment readiness. Cohorts map assets, build portfolios, set budgets and strategies, and seed projects for funding. The BioRegen pilot (including what was called the Landscape Hub Cultivator) is underway as of 2026. It supports up to 10 Regenerate Cascadia landscape groups in an online community of practice to define what a landscape hub is and lay its foundations—interrupting entrenched patterns, treating relationship networks as essential for trust, practicing participatory governance across nested scales, and building bioregional infrastructure so funding can flow where Cascadia needs it. The first half-year emphasizes place-based regeneration strategies—bioregional mapping, nested scales of place, layers of stewardship—and a portfolio of regenerative projects per landscape with budget and story materials for communities and funders. The second half focuses on core teams, fundraising, governance, consent, carrying capacity, context-based indicators, and local funding ecosystems. Each landscape group receives $8,000 in direct support through the pilot (about $5,000 for planning and mapping and $3,000 for a flow-funding sandbox).
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.
Te Kawa Waiora
In 2020–2021, Te Kawa Waiora examined mauri—life force—along the Wairoa River and its margins, centring Indigenous partners and asking what a renewed, place-based ethics of care might look like. Findings pointed to a “new sacred”: honouring tūpuna insight while meeting present and future pressures. Lasting river health, the work argues, needs shared responsibility across hapū and towns. Co-designed with mana whenua, wānanga brought leaders and knowledge holders together. Outputs include a living framework for decisions that protect ecosystem mauri, intergenerational wellbeing, and relational duty. Te Kawa Waiora still orients regeneration efforts across the region.
ReVillaging Toolkit and Learning Exchange
ReVillage wants to help other places adapt this model. They are co-developing a “ReVillaging Toolkit”—legal templates, governance patterns, land strategies, and narrative resources. A hosted residency at Green Valley Commons is planned so practitioners can immerse in the work and learn peer-to-peer. They hope for a wider network of village-builders across California and the Pacific Coast to share resources, iterate together, and spread the cultural shift the work implies.
Arts & Museum of the Future
On site they developed a “Museum of the Future”: archives and time capsules honor seven generations back; school visits and participatory visioning imagine seven generations forward—a place where past and future meet in the present and stories of land and people can be held while new possibilities are shaped together. Community councils—arts, design-build, elders—guide decisions through town halls and co-design. A seasonal rhythm of festivals, monthly work parties, potlucks, and resilience trainings teaches mutual aid in crises such as immigration raids or natural disasters.
Osa Regenerative Learning Center (El Local)
El Local is a community hub and learning center that anchors regenerative projects. It hosts youth programs, intergenerational exchange, local storytelling, and skills for land-based living. The curriculum draws on Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge, local farming, and wider regenerative education. A school meets there; the space is multi-use and oriented to solidarity and reweaving community, with meetings, gatherings, visitors, and work traders keeping it active.
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.
La Arenosa Pilot Site
Work begins on one hectare of pineapple—a stand-in for common practice: bare rows on depleted soil, high erosion, little water holding. The team is shifting the plot toward regenerative management: soil amendments, water retention, agroforestry, and biodiversity buffers, with monitoring of above- and below-ground health, microclimate, and hydrologic response. With ForTerra, they test accelerated soil regeneration mixes and aim for a repeatable measurement stack—ecology, water, and economics—to scale across the basin and inform finance models.
Nila Vena Sustainability Forum
For roughly three years, representatives of all six tribes have met through the Nila Vena Sustainability Forum, using a council format akin to their regional health board—one appointed delegate per tribe. That familiar structure has supported dialogue on cultural revitalisation, clean energy, and regenerative economy.
Collaborative Knowledge Projects
Three years of mapping fed collaborative projects aimed at regeneration: - School workshops build youth literacy on the river and responsibility for its care. - Guided ecological tours ground understanding in direct experience of the catchment. - Citizen science deepens monitoring literacy and shared ownership of data. - Artist residencies reframe how the watershed is seen and imagined. Each format stays multi-actor and emerges from prior relationship work rather than top-down design.
Indigenous Taxonomy & Zoonosis
One line of work compiles an Indigenous taxonomy guide—how Maasai classify and relate to plants, animals, celestial bodies, and weather signs as predictive tools. A parallel track examines zoonotic disease through Indigenous lenses: how illness was understood to move among wildlife, livestock, and people, and how colonial-era shifts toward pharmaceutical reliance changed prevention and care.
Decolonizing Human-Wildlife Conflicts
Conflict-reduction programmes often lean on technical packages while understating long-standing Maasai practices. In MIKIA’s documentation, fence-heavy conservation has blocked elephant corridors, concentrated animals and people, and raised rather than lowered incidents. When Indigenous knowledge is sidelined, communities may be pushed toward lethal or noisy deterrents instead of approaches grounded in landscape relationships.
School Education Programs
With Enzesfeld elementary, educators start young: children map what lives nearby, then join maintenance sessions and learn that habitats need ongoing care—nothing stewards itself. The theory is that adults who grow up tending places will later invest time in communal goals.
Nature Tours and Experiences
Public programmes lean on direct experience: guided day walks and night walks where moths, beetles, bats, and other nocturnal life appear; festival stalls introduce the association’s work in plain sight. Feeling attachment to local biodiversity, participants are more willing to volunteer labour for upkeep. Night tours underline that diversity runs on a 24-hour clock, not only daylight hours.
Traditional Horse Experiences
Horses are integrated as working partners: feeding, handling, light riding. The pitch is not stunt tourism but invitation into daily mountain life—pastoral rhythms and long cohabitation between people and livestock.
Heritage Preservation
Heritage work prioritises buildings and landscapes that can still speak clearly to history—not every structure can be saved, but exceptional ones can be repaired, reused, and interpreted. Wood and stone return to use in living architecture where possible; hayfields are managed without chemicals; hand tools from shepherd culture stay in circulation so skills stay practical, not museum-bound.
Guided Tours
Tours respond to a simple demand: visitors and locals want to know the story of the land. Guides frame history as orientation—where communities come from shapes where they can go. The format is participatory: guests walk with neighbours who move cattle on foot to high pasture, share meals such as balmoș on the slope, join mushroom forays, and help with hay in July or plum harvest in September—rhythms of work rather than packaged spectacle.
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.
Sustainable Ethnobotanicals Research Program
SERP documents and studies ethnomedicines and native forest foods—safeguarding ancestral healing knowledge and testing regenerative health products. It supports cultural revitalisation and could widen the enterprise beyond annual crops when the knowledge base matures.
Native Tree Reforestation Campaign
A long-horizon campaign targets 749,000+ native trees on degraded ancestral land—guided by Indigenous ecological knowledge, aimed at biodiversity, food sovereignty, and climate resilience. Delivery includes nurseries, a core field team, ecological assessment, and harvest rules aligned with forest health.
Youth Agroforestry and Cultural Training Program
A training arc aims to reach more than 500 Indigenous youth in agroforestry, ecology, and cultural practice—passing knowledge between generations and preparing leaders who can govern territory regeneratively while identity stays central.
Native Crop Regeneration and Supply Chain Development
Wild cacao and wild pepper anchor the model—food and medicine—restoring degraded forest while standing up processing and trade. Early revenue is meant to keep operations on the ground. Economic integration targets agroforestry on an initial ~2,200 ha, processing infrastructure, and a demonstrator that forest-based communities can earn livelihoods while protecting and restoring land. Pepper and cacao are the live cases; a later phase may extend toward ethnobotanical products.
HERE Magazine
A print magazine, Here, is planned to carry reporting and narrative from across the estuary—helping readers see the watershed as connected systems rather than isolated issues. behow.org serves as the public hub for guilds, fund news, and convenings.
Pollinate HV
The group first mapped pollinators most at risk in the estuary watershed, then published practical guidance at pollinatehv.org. Local ecotypic seed—genotypes matched to the basin—was scarce, so they partnered with Hudson Valley Seed Company to produce it. Those seeds now move through the Library of Local network.
Learning and Capacity Building
Forever Sabah Institute prototypes ways to strengthen people in the network as changemakers—blurring lines between theory and practice, student and teacher, local and global, classroom and field.
Watershed Conservation and Payment for Ecosystem Services
The Babagon catchment is a 3,001 ha forested watershed serving roughly 57% of Greater Kinabalu’s water demand, yet its three Indigenous Dusun communities have seen little benefit. Babagon Dam (1997) flooded Kg Tampasak—graves, orchards, padi—forcing resettlement below the impoundment with lasting harm. To protect water quality, the state restricted livelihoods on upstream Dusun lands and pressed for state-led stewardship of territories communities had long managed. After four months’ scoping and a one-year PES readiness phase, Forever Sabah brokered a multi-year dialogue among communities, government, and private actors to design Payment for Ecosystem Services. The fund model treats communities as trustees with government and others, pooling and returning payments from prospective streams—if cabinet approves and territorial rights are recognised, that could support durable jobs in monitoring, catchment care, and restoration. Mirani Momogompi Tadon Waig (MMTW) is the trained local team for monitoring, nurseries, and restoration, blending science and customary practice—including dragonfly and fish indicators—to read watershed health.
Human-Elephant Harmony
Since 2016, Human-Elephant Harmony has worked with Dusun communities, agencies, and partners to treat conflict as a coexistence problem. Herds returned in 2014 after absence since mid-1980s forest fires. Telupid’s forests had largely become oil palm; elephants used plantations for food and reserves for daytime cover, while unfenced smallholders bore crop damage—fueling calls for relocation. From March–December 2016, Forever Sabah worked with the Telupid District Office; village input recalled older protocols of mutual respect with elephants, so the frame shifted from “conflict” to Human-Elephant Harmony. Workshops began in three villages (a fourth joined in 2018) around a four-part plan: train a Community Elephant Ranger Team, map elezone zones, build citizen science, and fence selected sites. Kopisuladan di Aki (“friendship between villagers and elephants” in Dusun Labuk)—nine young professionals with strong field knowledge—received a February 2018 National Conservation Trust Fund grant (RM 200,000 over 22 months, co-financed by the U.S. Shared Earth Foundation at USD 65,000); five members became Honorary Wildlife Wardens. “Listening to elephants” tracks movement, diet, and use of oil palm. Observation showed elephants following machinery that clears mature palms to feed on chipped replanting waste—evidence that access to oil palm matters for nutrition in these landscapes and that trade-offs around plantation entry differ from simple removal narratives. No further translocations have been attempted from this area since CERT formed; several calves have been raised in Telupid. The team estimates about 25–50 elephants use Telupid—the northern edge of the wider Central Sabahan population.
Monitoring Strategy
Monitoring pairs formal science with in-context participation: “cold” metrics and “warm” observation together describe watershed condition. Citizen science tracks woodland, river, and coastal habitats; nature-connectedness workshops use paired individual and group evaluation. The point is not only whether targets are met but whether interventions match need—using community reflection to “warm” technical data and adjust practice accordingly.
Gaelic Cultural Heritage
A flagship Nature Connection strand is the human ecology residency with Ranish Sandland and Mary Macfadden—Gaelic-speaking researchers in the upper catchment who recovered songs, stories, and place names, including archival material not performed for centuries, returned to local use. Revivals reached Tomintoul’s village hall with musicians such as Julie Fowlis. Collaborators described the effort as cultural darning and mending—repairing frayed ties to land and community.
Hala Traditional Agriculture Mapping
Traditional Hawaiian land management is a layered bioregional system. At broad scale, moku were political regions aligned with environmental gradients (temperature, sun, rain), shaping how entire landscapes were used. Over roughly seven to eight years, a documentation effort has combined those customary frameworks with geospatial analysis to inform present land-use choices. The work maps historical agricultural signals against environmental layers—botanical surveys (including 29,000 kukui trees along the Hāmākua Coast), soils, archaeology, archival checks, and modeling at roughly 85% accuracy. A flagship line traces the kou (candlenut-based) system: mapping kukui and breadfruit exposed a sharp break at Laupāhoehoe—breadfruit drops out, kukui patterns and soil fertility shift, coinciding with the boundary (Humuʻula) between the moku of Hilo and Hāmākua. That alignment shows large-scale land care tracked political lines that themselves tracked ecological gradients—even where drivers such as soil fertility are not obvious on the ground. Nested ahupuaʻa ran from mountains to sea, often organized around water, so communities could access a wide resource gradient. Finer kaluulu-style belts (for example Kona’s breadfruit zone) matched environmental limits and cultural preference.
RECenter the Resource Recycling Center San Salvador
RECenter gathers recyclable and repurposable material for the local community and runs education on how everyday choices shape impacts. The project includes machinery to process plastic into blocks and, at the time of documentation, was moving toward acquiring an extruder for further repurposing.
Educational Hive
Muñoz sees formal education as misaligned with present needs; the Hive, built with Ugal, links experts, learners, and bioregions for applied projects, with achievements logged in a passport-style record. A Ghana school food-forest illustrates what becomes possible when learning meets place. A purchased farm is becoming an on-site training center; a Peru-born program brings nature itself into schools as teacher.
Community Engagement and Education
At Colegio Virgen de la Candelaria, workshops linked students to their environmental heritage. Young people sampled macroinvertebrates, set camera traps, and—with great student amazement—saw güiñas and foxes on screen for the first time though they had lived beside those habitats. They debated how domestic animals affect native fauna and sketched responses. By the close, many children held ecological ideas that had eluded some adults. Dialogues surfaced urgent worries: water access (“I have to wait eight days for water delivery because I need the water”), rising river pollution, land pressure from newcomers, social friction (practices, consumption, trash, noise, loose dogs), and cultural loss—fewer yayipun ceremonies, palín games, and collective celebrations.
Ecological Assessment and Monitoring
In 2022, researchers and community members sampled macroinvertebrates in three Cruces tributaries—Colico, Afunalhue, and Petrohue. Stream quality varied by site: Afunalhue and Petrohue scored good quality; Colico was slightly degraded. Names carry history: *Cudico* suggests dirty water; *Colico*, yellow water. Camera traps showed a skewed roster: six of nine species exotic—dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, rodents—versus three native. Native fox and güiña (kodkod) still appear as hopeful signs. The work sets baselines and indicator species for later comparison. The community mapped currents across the territory, tracing contamination. At least four flows remain in good ecological condition; Coihueco stream shows degradation. Watershed characterization links local flows to neighboring areas and tracks shifts in species and water quality.
Oral History Collection and Memory Mapping
In trawün (community meetings), elders remembered when *pitrales* and *gualves*, *canelos* and *lumas* dominated the land—recorded in this account—along with stories of change, place, and legends such as the Girl of the Radales, who appears to those who walk the radal groves. Memory work recorded sharp losses: puma, skunk, monito del monte, burrowing owl, and other beings elders knew from lived experience. Legendary fires turned routine; crops sometimes burned before harvest while families fought only to save houses. As one elder observed: “Before, the puma could be found in any sector, because there was more forest and houses were far apart... we were living in a space where we coexisted with wildlife” (elder testimony). That reality had changed sharply, calling for a coordinated response. The project also built a documentary archive of territorial memory and linked youth to ancestors. Naming dozens of plants, animals, and relations, the community still carries biocultural depth that can ground regeneration.
Bioregionalization Course Development
Recognizing the need for broader learning, Colombia Regenerativa is developing a course in bioregionalization where conversations serve as a fundamental design element. The goal is co-creating these bioregionalization processes alongside regenerative governance with a school of governance, enabling communities to deepen their local organization.
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.
In the Zone Habitat Tracker
Since most of the land in the region is privately owned, landowners in the Carolinian Zone play an instrumental role in habitat sustainability. Habitat partners, landowners, volunteers, and community members are welcome to participate in the Conservation Impact Bond by logging their habitat projects using the In the Zone Habitat Tracker. This multi-partner platform, facilitated by Carolinian Canada and WWF-Canada, connects and assists diverse landowners and communities to grow, steward, and measure healthy landscapes using "Big Picture" measures of landscape health and resilience, as well as localized impact metrics.
Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond
The Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond (DZCIB) links investor repayment to five holistic outcome streams—habitat, knowledge/circling, economy, relational connection, and ecocentric wellbeing—rather than treating ecology as the only ledger. Partners launched design work in 2019 in ethical space hosted by Chippewas of the Thames First Nation. The five-year pilot began March 2020, spanning 60 ha in the zone, to accelerate healthy landscapes, nature-based solutions, reconciliation, and human–nature relationship. - Capital: CAD $130,000 from VERGE Capital (Pillar Non-profit Network), structured as a repayable prototype via the VERGE Breakthrough Fund (5% interest, three-year term). - Habitat delivery: Indigenous TEK and Western science together; 53 projects with nine partners (First Nations, trusts, municipalities, ALUS, etc.), typically with 1:1 in-kind match. - Outcome payers: Third-party evaluation gates repayment. Payers include 3M Canada, multi-year public anchor funding, and Pollinator Partnership—grants legally conditioned on outcomes. - Leadership: Carolinian Canada, VERGE, Thames Talbot Land Trust, Deshkan Ziibiing, Ivey Business School—explicitly Two-Eyed Seeing in design and review. Five pillars (each with a pay-for-success benchmark): habitat gains; people learning on the land; intercultural economic opportunity; nature connectedness; ecocentric sightings—broadening “success” beyond hectares. Through July 2021, the pilot reported 69 ha improved, 39,000+ native plants, and ~450 people in land-based learning—spanning volunteer planting (e.g. Briscoe Woods), invasive control and corporate seed collection (Hawk Cliff), bilingual trail and language work (Anishinaabensag Miikaanens), and multi-site work with conservation authorities and First Nations. As Robin Wall Kimmerer notes in the report, restoring land without restoring relationship is empty; relationship is what endures.
Healthy Landscape Strategy
Carolinian Canada's Healthy Landscape Strategy aims to grow Canada's Biggest Wildlife Garden connecting Toronto to Windsor with healthy habitat. The strategy is informed by ecologist Doug Tallamy's research demonstrating the ways in which native plants support greater insect populations, biodiversity, and landscape health than non-native plants. The Healthy Landscape Strategy includes four key activities, linking restoration and conservation priorities based on the latest local and global science: 1. Save local nature: Increase commitment to saving habitat with long-term agreements. 2. Steward healthy landscapes: Use best ecosystem practices to increase habitat quality. 3. Seed, grow, create, or restore high-quality habitat: Use native plants sourced locally, ecologically, and ethically to increase habitat quantity and connections. 4. Lead healthy resilient communities: Connect communities to nature through strong equitable collaboration, positive engagement, First Nations leadership, and an ethical, local native plant industry. Support a climate-smart, green economy for thriving local communities through cross-sector collaboration. Native plants hold cultural and relational significance to many Indigenous peoples who view native plants as relatives and friends, not commodities. As the demand for native plants increases, part of Carolinian Canada's strategy is to ensure an ethical seed strategy for native plants within the region.
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.
Burren Public Engagement Program
Each year the winterage—moving cattle onto the mountain—draws a public ritual around transhumance. Crowds can reach a thousand people helping move stock, with national media coverage—a visible vote of confidence in farmers who produce food and steward a globally rare landscape.
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 Sanctuary
At the center of this project is a ceremonial dome built by the collective, where rituals, women's gatherings, intergenerational healing work, and arts-based events are held throughout the year. The space also hosts low-impact learning journeys and regenerative tourism, designed for deep listening, not consumption. Visitors engage through storytelling, ancestral practice, land-based work, and silence. Financial support is being sought to improve hosting infrastructure (kitchen, housing, water systems), offer stipends to local stewards and elders, and support regenerative programming that centers Muiska cosmology, ecological repair, and community resilience. The sanctuary serves as a living showcase for bioregional practices and a space for international learning exchanges. Visitors engage through storytelling, ancestral practice, land-based work, and silence, experiencing whispers of Mother Earth in this living temple of peace. As the grandmother Margarita—a revered elder of the World Council of Elders—used to say: "When the mind unites with the heart, everything is possible." This is Bosque Fractal's invitation: to unite mind and heart, to regenerate the land and the spirit, and to inspire Colombia and the world toward peace and ecological wholeness.
Appalachian Cultural Infrastructure
The initiative supports place-based cultural work by developing a bioregional cultural infrastructure that includes arts funding, participatory storytelling projects, and partnerships with cultural institutions across the Southern Appalachians. Projects include: - Short-form stories follow each project, sharing tangible impacts - A full-length documentary, "Blueprint Appalachia," chronicles how the region is rebuilding post-Helene in a regenerative way This media will be nationally distributed, reframing how people see and support Southern Appalachia. By elevating local stories to national attention, Blueprint aims to shift narratives about the region from one of poverty and dependence to one of resilience, innovation, and cultural richness.
River Detectives
River Detectives extends the community-science approach toward catchment care. From August 2023 to August 2024, residents researched historic management of rivers, bogs, and lochans—asking what past practices might teach present stewardship. The Flax & Flood strand traced mills, weather, and water—how nineteenth-century climate shifts and extreme events shaped operations and supply. That historical ecological knowledge informs today’s questions. Part 2 turns toward systematic monitoring so communities can describe current river conditions and inform management choices.
Tayside Community Science Initiative
As one of five NatureScot pilots, the initiative asks how community-led monitoring can strengthen resilience and regeneration—grounded in place-based knowledge, shared learning, and collective agency. An opening mapping phase surfaced recurring problems: incompatible methods across groups, weak hooks to regional or national strategies, and cases where communities collect extensive data but rarely see direct benefit. The team is now documenting live examples—from flood monitoring to heritage work on how Strathmore land-use history altered water paths—and asking what adaptive governance would mean for community monitoring that actually feeds decisions.
Waterford Bioregional Mapping
Mapping work combines science and lived attachment. Participatory workshops ask residents where they feel emotionally tied to the territory; those insights layer onto geological base maps of river basins and land use. In the Anne Valley, community-led water-quality monitoring adds ground-truth to institutional data. Throughout, the process engages Gaeltacht na nDéise (Irish-speaking Waterford) so language and culture stay visible in how the bioregion is drawn and discussed.
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.
Climate Adaptation Learning Journey
Over five days, participants move through the bioregion—farms, coasts hit by flooding, river communities facing high water, sites where people are repairing roads themselves—linking water quantity and quality to everyday decisions. The aim is twofold: strengthen communities as first responders to local climate risk, and work with elected councillors so adaptation strategies are co-produced rather than imposed from outside.
Dancing in Salt Marshes
The program pairs salt-marsh restoration and water conservation with cultural engagement—including work toward river rights charters—so ecology and culture move together rather than as separate “environmental” and “arts” tracks. Because the marshes are too fragile for heavy visitation, the BLC commissioned a film: two dancers from local communities perform in costume on the marsh itself, giving people a visceral connection to a place many will never walk on.
Voices of the Dart
A community-based river stewardship program addressing the projected 39 megalitre daily flow deficit of the River Dart by 2050. The initiative uses a three-pronged approach: educational workshops across multiple riverside communities, citizen science data collection in partnership with Westcountry Rivers Trust, and artistic engagement through clay work and storytelling sessions—bringing together scientific data with local knowledge and cultural connection. The project has produced tangible outcomes including a Water Data Resource Pack, targeted reduction in per-person water usage, and a growing network of citizen scientists monitoring water quality along the river.
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.
Education Alliance
They hold that regenerating the landscape requires a shift in how people feel and think about land. The alliance pools energy, talents, knowledge, and experience toward that end, with the vision that regeneration becomes lived practice, not only a technical agenda. They pursue two main lines of work: a shared framework of knowledge and competencies for what regenerative education means in the territory, and a social strand that stresses cohesion and cooperation—because landscapes are shared, not individual. The “Regenerando Mariposa” / “Regenerating Butterfly” concept— involving the collective planting of butterfly shaped landart sculptures made from aromatic herbs–—ties art, creativity, and biodiversity regeneration into learning that can inspire wider society.
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.
Educational Work with Schools
The work is less a single education program than a series of intentional conversations across communities. Projects with schools brought Balearic teachers into a “soil, soul, and society” dialogue; parallel conversations on local food helped give rise to Slow Food Balear. Multiple intervention points have seeded connections that ripple through the island’s social and ecological systems.
Sacred Pathways Revitalization Project
The project uses ancient infrastructure as a tool for contemporary environmental awareness and cultural reconnection, honoring both pre-Christian and Catholic heritage. Building on the foundation of Jaime Ferrer's "Terra, Alma, Societat" work, they co-initiated a project that brought back to life seven ancient pilgrimage routes to the holy forest of Lluc. Reviving those routes—which reach back toward pre-Christian pilgrimage and sites used by prehistoric communities up to 5,000 years ago—opened a conversation about how people engage with the landscape today.
Tourism Industry Transformation Initiative
Mallorca's economy is dominated by tourism, which comprises approximately 80% of economic activity. This creates a unique context for regeneration work—tourism is both part of the problem and a necessary intervention point. The alliance has started to work on crafting partnerships within the tourism industry in order to start catalyzing change. The work included producing documentary series highlighting regenerative practices around the island called "Isla Viva".
Urban-Rural Connection Initiative
The Urban-Rural Connection Initiative creates bridges between urban and rural areas by establishing agroecological stores in urban neighborhoods, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas. Products from ABIF units are marketed directly to urban consumers with prices kept accessible, ensuring that quality organic food reaches communities that might otherwise lack access. Consumers participate in educational programs on traditional food preparation, reinforcing culinary heritage, nutritional awareness, and sustainable consumption habits. This helps maintain traditional food knowledge while building urban-rural connections.
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.
School Community Network
Through schools, the initiative supports an intergenerational zone where people learn with and from each other in real community settings and take collective action on regenerative Legacy Projects, using a land-based learning model. Core teams combine a student EcoLeader, a teacher (often with parents), and an Elder-in-Residence; those teams extend engagement outward through neighbourhoods.