As part of the Earth Regeneration Fund, sharing the story of the Cascadia bioregion helps bring it alive in public consciousness and adds another dimension to the overstory of Bioregional Earth.
Cascadia is more than simply a place. Cascadia is a state of mind and a terrain of consciousness – the most effective framework of scale where connectedness and identity make sense.
Stretching over 2,500 kilometers along the Pacific Rim of North America, from Southeast Alaska to Northern California, and as far east as the Yellowstone Caldera, the Cascadia bioregion represents more than a geographical region; it's an area that shapes a distinct culture, ecology, and sense of place.
Understanding that these elements are connected – and that there are consequences if we don't see them as connected – underpins the growing recognition that we need nothing short of social and cultural transformation, including how we learn to live in right relationship with the Earth.
Building on more than forty years of organizing from the first Cascadia Bioregional Congress held in 1986, Regenerate Cascadia's mission is to regenerate the Cascadia bioregion and create the conditions for a regenerative culture to thrive. Regenerate Cascadia is a social movement and a capacity-building program to develop appropriate infrastructure. This includes administering a bioregional flow fund to support the long-term regeneration of the Cascadia bioregion.
The seed for the current Regenerate Cascadia structure came out of the 2022 global Regenerative Communities Network summit. The three of us – Clare Attwell, Brandon Letsinger, and Taya Seidler – met in April 2023 during the first-ever Salmon Nation Edge Prize, where our vision to host a bioregional activation tour won the Systems and Governance Edge Prize.
Building on this success, Clare and Brandon spent the next several months planning with more than 100+ local community organizers on both sides of the Canada/US border. We partnered with the Design School for Regenerating Earth to co-facilitate a month-long Bioregional Activation Tour with Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple. We all traveled to fourteen communities across Cascadia in October 2023, hosting presentations that asked, "How do we regenerate the Cascadia bioregion?"
We met with more than a thousand people – including Indigenous knowledge keepers, regenerative leaders, community artists, and elders across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia – through presentations, workshops, site visits, and strategy sessions.
The tour revealed many insights about the needs of our communities and what's required for real regeneration – giving us a much clearer picture of where support is most needed and how we can help cultivate lasting bioregional impact.
Many grassroots efforts operate in isolation, limited by a lack of resources, training, and support. Inadequate governance tools, volunteer burnout, funding scarcity, and a breakdown in trust often prevent collaboration and long-term impact. Without confronting these structural issues, even the most well-intentioned initiatives will struggle to sustain meaningful change.
A central goal of Regenerate Cascadia is to grow capacity coherently across the scales of landscapes, ecoregions, and bioregions – something that currently doesn't exist locally or globally – as a multigenerational strategy for the long-term health of the Cascadia bioregion.
We share learning around bioregionalism, grow the shared context of our place necessary for effective co-stewardship, and provide direct funding for core teams and projects. We offer much-needed administrative scaffolding to groups at various stages of development so they can receive decentralized flow funding and lead new bioregional initiatives as part of a shared, coherent, multigenerational regeneration strategy.
Building this kind of capacity isn't just a structural transformation – it's a cultural one.
Culture encompasses worldview, identity, and a sense of belonging. It acts as the connective tissue that binds communities together and communicates the values that underpin actions.
Without a strong cultural foundation, even the most well-intentioned ecological initiatives often falter. The current dominant societal culture and systems create disconnection – emotional, physical, and social – that extends geographically, culturally, and economically. This fragmentation affects our relationships with each other and the natural world, leading to a breakdown in trust, ethical standards, and systemic solutions. The polycrisis we face today is deeply rooted in this disconnection, making it imperative to focus on reconnection as a means to enable long-term regeneration.
We need to build a new "reconnecting model" – one rooted in bioregional culture, where shared identity, belonging, and relationship to place become the foundation for regeneration, and where communities are empowered to co-create the conditions for trust, collaboration, and long-term resilience.
One of the most effective tools we have for rebuilding a cultural foundation and restoring our sense of connection to place is bioregional mapping – a practice that helps communities rediscover the deep relationships that tie them to the land and to one another.
Bioregional mapping is a participatory process that invites communities to explore and document the unique ecological, cultural, and historical patterns of their home-places. Rooted in the understanding that every landscape holds a deep-time story, bioregional mapping helps people see the land as an interconnected whole – where watersheds, species, food systems, and human communities are all part of a living web.
Bioregional mapping is not just a tool – it is a foundational theory of change, and a basis for bioregionalism. We believe regeneration begins with reconnecting to our home-places, stories, and relationships that shape our landscapes, laying the groundwork for shared stories of place that hold the depth of precolonial history and Indigenous knowledge.
By engaging communities in the practice of bioregional mapping, we help cultivate the cultural and relational groundwork needed for lasting transformation. As this awareness grows, so does the ability to coordinate meaningful, place-based action grounded in right relationship to the Earth.
In the context of Cascadia – a bioregion defined by its shared watersheds, mountain ranges, and ecological systems rather than political boundaries – bioregional mapping is especially important. It helps illuminate the natural coherence of the region, building a shared sense of identity and history that transcends borders. By revealing the common ground beneath our feet, bioregional mapping lays the foundation for regenerative strategies and participatory governance rooted in the land itself – offering a compass for collective decision-making in service of long-term ecological and cultural thriving.
As communities engage in bioregional mapping and begin to reconnect with the story of their landscape, an essential foundation is laid for cultivating trust and leadership from within.
These participatory processes naturally surface individuals who are deeply trusted and rooted in place – those who can help guide collective efforts and sustain the core relationships needed for long-term regeneration. These community leaders play a vital role in weaving together people, projects, and priorities, ensuring that regeneration is collaborative, inclusive, and grounded in lived experience.
At the same time, the work of regeneration calls for a fundamental shift in how we govern ourselves. Existing governance systems often fail to support the kinds of long-term, cooperative, and place-based strategies that regeneration requires. Too often, they are shaped by short-term cycles, fragmented jurisdictions, and outdated paradigms that overlook the interconnected nature of ecological and community well-being.
Emerging regenerative cultures must prioritize new models of governance – ones rooted in transparency, accountability, mutual care, and the wisdom of place. This includes reimagining how decisions are made, how resources flow, and how responsibility is shared across generations. By grounding these new forms of governance in the land and the relationships that sustain them, communities can begin to co-create the conditions for resilience, justice, and collective thriving.
To bring a whole-systems approach to bioregional regeneration, Regenerate Cascadia is launching two major interdependent initiatives for 2025–2026: the Cascadia BioRegen program and the Cascadia BioFi program. Together these support community-led regeneration efforts across the bioregion while creating the financial infrastructure needed to sustain them for the long haul.
The Cascadia BioRegen program is focused on supporting individuals and groups organizing around the regeneration of their local landscapes.
Recognizing that each place is unique, the program offers different pathways of engagement based on the stage and needs of each group. Some groups are just getting started (exploring, learning, and forming early connections) while others are more established (coordinating projects across larger areas, building partnerships, and implementing on-the-ground initiatives). As these efforts grow, they can evolve into regional hubs capable of stewarding larger-scale regeneration strategies, managing local funding ecosystems, and providing the structure needed to support collaborative work.
To help people organize into the BioRegen program structure (Seed Group, Landscape Group, or Landscape Hub), more than ninety people have joined our Cascadia Cohort for the Design School for Regenerating Earth's 2025 learning journey How to Organize Your Bioregion. This six-month journey invites participants into a shared exploration of how to become effective stewards of their landscapes – cultivating the relationships, skills, and worldview shifts needed for true regeneration. Regenerate Cascadia is co-hosting the Cascadia Cohort with the Design School to support participants in forming local Seed and Landscape groups, engaging in bioregional mapping, and deepening their practice of bioregional organizing.
Through biweekly webinars, global community calls, and Cascadia-specific sessions, participants will learn alongside others in the region and around the world, supported by our dedicated Cohort Coordinator, Andra Vltavín.
The BioRegen Program culminates in the Landscape Hub Cultivator – a pilot initiative designed to support the emergence of up to ten local Landscape Hubs across Cascadia. These hubs will act as Bioregional Learning Centers within their regions, also doing the coordination work of bringing together community members, regenerative projects, and funding strategies under a shared vision for bioregional resilience.
Building on the momentum of our 2023 Bioregional Activation Tour, the Landscape Hub Cultivator will unfold in two key phases. The first focuses on bioregional mapping and the creation of a living regeneration strategy, including a community-driven project portfolio, budget, and shared metrics for success. The second phase centers on growing the local funding ecosystem to implement these strategies – helping groups access bioregional flow funding, build regenerative finance mechanisms, and develop backbone teams to coordinate future efforts.
The program reflects Regenerate Cascadia's vision of cultivating decentralized, connected, community-rooted leadership across the bioregion.
Alongside the organizing and capacity-building infrastructure of Cascadia BioRegen, our Cascadia BioFi program is building the financial ecosystems needed to support regeneration at scale.
Its focus is growing bioregional financing facilities: community-rooted networks and tools that move resources to the people and projects doing the work of healing land and culture. Whether through a regional regeneration fund, local investment circles, collaborative funding tables, or trust-based philanthropy, Cascadia BioFi is about creating new pathways for capital to flow in alignment with regenerative values and community priorities – while helping groups develop the skills and capacities needed to fundraise effectively, manage grants, and engage with aligned funders. By weaving local, regional, and bioregional levels of investment, Cascadia BioFi is laying the groundwork for a financial ecosystem designed for systemic regeneration rather than extraction.
The Cascadia BioFi Conference in May 2025 will bring together more than 200 changemakers working at the intersection of regenerative practice, community action, and bioregional finance to shift global, extractive systems toward local, place-based initiatives that restore landscapes and promote community wellbeing.
As we step into this next phase of the bioregional movement in Cascadia, we do so with deep humility, commitment, and hope.
The path toward regeneration isn't linear – it's a living, evolving process rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and a shared sense of responsibility for the places we call home. By cultivating a culture of collaboration, supporting the emergence of local and bioregional systems of governance and finance, and investing in the inner and outer work required for transformation, Regenerate Cascadia is helping to lay the foundation for a more resilient and life-affirming future.
The time is now, and it calls to every one of us. Let's Regenerate Cascadia, together – for all of our relations.
