🎒 Learning Programs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.