I'm tired yet also filled with contentment about the intense work we just completed in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion in Canada.
The news is filled with stories of massive flooding in North Carolina as Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern parts of Turtle Island. Now Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida. Yet in the paradox of this new reality, we hold celebration in our hearts that the Earth Regeneration Fund has been born.
In the photo above, you see ambassadors from three bioregions of the five which came together at the end of September. In the top left, Brandon Letsinger from Cascadia beside Penny Heiple and me from Barichara in the Northern Andes. In the middle left, Keetu Winter and behind her (to the right) Bill Baue (with his wife Jennifer) and Chez Liley from the Forests of the Northeast. Also in the photo are global observers Sydney Griffith (middle right) of Kinship Earth Flow Fund and Tyler Wakefield (top right) of The BioFi Project. Missing from the photo are Will Masters of the Ogallala, and Brian Puppa and Susan Bosak of the GTB (Greater Tkaronto Bioregion).
The purpose of our gathering was to birth the Earth Regeneration Fund as a network of Bioregional Funding Ecosystems that practice learning together as we build the foundational supports for value flow within each of our own bioregions.
The week-long immersion was co-hosted by the Design School for Regenerating Earth and the Legacy Project, which is the core team in the GTB. Since Bioregional Funding Ecosystems are grounded in both relationships and the land, the week began and ended with land-based group experiences at local farms. In the photo below, the group started the week at the regenerative Heartwood Farm & Cidery with an Opening Circle and introductions. This was the first time many had met in person.
The middle of the week focused on two days of bioregional mutual learning and deep dialogue at The Cedars, the lead site for the Bioregional Learning Center network in the GTB. In the photo above, you see Will Masters from the Ogallala (second from left) and Brian Puppa of the GTB (on the right).
The dialogue culminated with a day-long Regenerative Finance Forum at the Kortright Centre for Conservation.
At the Regenerative Finance Forum, the bioregional ambassadors were able to interact with a specially-invited group of community leaders, philanthropic organizations, conservation authorities, land trusts, regenerative farms, and youth engaged in regenerative education.
Susan Bosak of the GTB, pictured below, helped open the forum and set the bioregional context.
Our intention through the forum was to catalyze the Bioregional Funding Ecosystem of the GTB as a collaborative process that includes key stakeholders and others who are participating in the weaving process. As pictured above, speakers included the Toronto Foundation as well as NoVo Foundation, who expressed the importance of trust-based philanthropy that acts in service to bioregions as holistic life systems.
The GTB has brought together a Bioregional Portfolio of Regenerative Projects. Several speakers – including three of the Conservation Authorities, two regenerative farm owners, student EcoLeaders who are part of the GTB School Community Network, and a healthcare professional leading an intergenerational, bioregionally-oriented social prescribing process – shared their stories to illuminate the diversity of projects aimed at both social and ecological regeneration.
By the end of the day there was excitement among all sixty attendees to continue this conversation in earnest. A Regenerative Finance Design Lab is already being planned for November to continue the work of the GTB Bioregional Funding Ecosystem. Many of us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth will be involved now that the Earth Regeneration Fund has come into existence.
A "community fund" that serves the whole-life context of a given place is made up of two things. First and foremost, it is a story lived out by those who share common purpose. And secondly, it is a web of relationships that provide the context in which the story can flow forward through collective efforts.
In this spirit, the Earth Regeneration Fund is a story of bioregions coming together around the world to manifest their own Bioregional Funding Ecosystems. They learn together as a community of practice, support each other in emergent ways, and encourage the flow of value exchanges that strengthen their relationships and enable their impacts to grow up to continental and ultimately to the planetary scale.
Yes, the Earth Regeneration Fund includes money. It is a pooling mechanism for bringing resources together within and across this network of bioregional exchanges. But money is only one element of the many kinds of value that exist in the ecosystem that the fund helps create. We have shared identity, purpose, narrative, partnership, and the many ways that value can flow among us as human beings who serve different bioregions and the life systems they hold within them.
We are excited to announce that the Design School for Regenerating Earth is offering the first seed funding into this ecosystem. We are giving $125,000 into the network of bioregions that gathered in the GTB. Each leadership team will receive a $25,000 share of these funds to begin developing their own Bioregional Funding Ecosystem.
This means we have five bioregions that are learning as a network: Barichara in the Northern Andes; Cascadia; GTB (Greater Tkaronto Bioregion); Forests of the Northeast; and the Ogallala in the High Plains. They are part of a larger community of about 15 bioregional organizing groups that took form in the Design School as part of a learning journey to birth Bioregional Learning Centers all over the world.
Learning supports are already in place to help this process. The Design School hosts a Bioregional Leaders Guild, an Inner Space for cultivating the capacities we need to be regenerators of the Earth, Bioregional Updates for sharing what is happening across the network of 15 bioregions associated with the school, and a Regenerative Finance Lab that will be the home for focused dialogue and design work of the Earth Regeneration Fund.
As you can see, this is really happening now!
Our work is much larger than the Design School. This is part of the much bigger story of Bioregional Earth. There are many communities and networks of people working to spread regenerative practices in different parts of the world. By framing the Earth Regeneration Fund as a story, we can weave identities and cultivate shared agendas with these other groups as all of this evolves into the future. It is deeply important that the Earth Regeneration Fund can embody the integrity and clarity of purpose for entire bioregions to be regenerated.
As I described in The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, it is the bioregions of the world that constitute the minimum scale of organizing that is required. Bioregions are "whole-life systems" and thus are the scale at which organizing must be done. Yet no bioregion is an island (not even the islands) because they are all interwoven through the web of Earth System processes that connect all life on Earth.
We need a planetary network of Bioregional Funding Ecosystems if we are to cultivate the capacities for restoring jet streams, stabilizing ocean surface temperatures, restoring the hydrological cycles of forests in the Amazon and the Boreal ring of northern latitudes, and all of the other vital Earth processes that have lost the ability to regulate themselves.
Please join us in making the Earth Regeneration Fund even more real. Attend the activities of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. Invite your friends and colleagues to join us. Make a donation into the fund and grow the seed bank for our work.
