Regenerate Cascadia
🌐Regenerate Cascadia implements a carefully structured approach that flows from bioregion to watershed to ecoregion to local landscape, integrating indigenous knowledge and stewardship practices across the Cascadia bioregion.
Bioregional Context
Cascadia spans from Southeast Alaska to Cape Mendocino in California, extending east to the Yellowstone Caldera. Defined by the watersheds of the Fraser and Columbia Rivers, it includes 15 major watersheds and 75 distinct ecoregions, with 80% of its 18 million population living on just 12% of the land area.
- Network Affiliation
- BioFi Project
Background
The Cascadia bioregion stretches roughly 2,500 miles from Southeast Alaska to Cape Mendocino, California, reaching east to the Yellowstone Caldera. The Fraser and Columbia watersheds frame 15 major watersheds and 75 ecoregions. The Cascadia subduction zone has shaped this landscape for millennia—home to more than a thousand generations who have lived bioregionally, with Indigenous peoples stewarding the land since time immemorial.
Today 18 million people live here; 80% occupy about 12% of the land, mostly along the Seattle–Portland–Vancouver corridor. That concentration forms a “thin green line” with outsized influence—between interior extractive economies and markets across the Pacific.
Origins and Network
Brandon Letsinger’s path with Cascadia began in 2005. He founded the Department of Bioregion, a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) with a mission of “a world of interconnected bioregions and bioregional movements.”
At the first Salmon Nation Edge Prize in 2023, he met Claire Atwell—community artist, weaver, and organizer in Victoria, British Columbia. Together they asked how to regenerate a whole watershed, ecoregion, and bioregion across jurisdictional lines.
Regenerate Cascadia runs as a program inside the Department of Bioregion and is growing a charitable society in British Columbia to support cross-border organizing.
Their guiding question is practical and sharp: If $100 million reached their landscapes tomorrow, would they be ready to receive it? Would it reach the communities and ecosystems doing regenerative work, on their own terms? So far, the answer has largely been no.
They work through nested frames—bioregion → watershed → ecoregion → landscape. Brandon describes watersheds and ecoregions as rooms in a house: the bioregion is the house; ecoregions are not the whole system alone. Landscapes within watersheds are where people step outside and connect. The aim is to link action across scales so people see work happening, learn from neighbors, and build coherence within and between places.
Activities
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.
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.
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).
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.
Vision and Legacy
They are forming an investor design circle and a funder community of practice from the recent Bioregion Conference and preparing collaborative financing forums for mid-2026. The aim is federated grant processes—coalitions around shared landscape visions—rather than isolated, project-by-project competition.
Regenerate Cascadia’s story is still unfolding: nested mapping from bioregion to doorstep, hubs and guilds that hold knowledge and money closer to place, and a regeneration fund meant to behave like the watersheds it serves. The open question remains whether Cascadia can organize quickly enough—in governance, relationships, and finance—for major investment to land where ecological and community work actually happens.