The Design School for Regenerating Earth, co-founded by Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple, is helping people live into the story of Bioregional Earth by regenerating their bioregions and building a planetary network of learning exchanges.
The Design School for Regenerating Earth is for ongoing learning, sharing and connecting, with an emphasis on practical application in your own region. It's fantastic! The wealth of knowledge, experience, and generosity of spirit of co-founders Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple, along with their unbounded energy and passion for engaging communities to (re)connect with their land and one another is inspiring, contagious, and empowering. And the community of beginners and veterans in bioregional work that Joe and Penny continue to draw together around the world is unparalleled – and truly welcoming.
— Martha Kellerhals-Djerf
For all who are interested in bioregional regeneration and developing Bioregional Learning Centers, the Design School for Regenerating Earth is doing amazing things. There are now (at least) twelve Bioregional Resource Hubs, hosting an amazing number of projects, co-creations and much more. The Design School is truly transformative – it is beautiful to see what's growing here! Huge thanks go to Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple for their amazing and inspirational work.
— Pete Jeffs
I have been a member of the Design School since August 2023. I've found incredible value in it and in the amazing, wholehearted work, efforts and love Joe and Penny and others in the community are putting into it. It is extremely well organized, there's an overwhelming amount of resources for the price (membership fees are used to support the continued work of the school and bioregional initiatives).
— Frances Pimentel
I have been working with the Design School and its predecessor Earth Regenerators since Fall 2022 and it's great! I couldn't recommend the community and learning journeys more. That's how our efforts in the Driftless bioregion got started.
— Evan Hudson
The Design School is a learning cohort for regenerative projects where folks are able to attend live or recorded sessions that are super informative and are further weaving together learnings and networks bioregionally. Highly recommend!
— Tiffani Hart
I'm part of the Design School (since March 2024) and find it to be an amazing resource and community. It is inexpensive, robust with resources, filled with passionate and knowledgeable community members, and honestly a great resource that I'm blessed to have stumbled upon. In the short time that I've been learning with Joe, Penny, and company, I have gained so much.
— Caleb Quaid
Much more than a traditional "school," the Design School for Regenerating Earth is unique because it connects theory and practice, online learning journeys with real-world experiences, member-led activities and immersions – while drawing on tools and approaches from around the planet.
Join like-minded and like-hearted people in your landscape and other bioregions to explore how to connect the personal and the planetary, develop bioregional leadership, weave together diverse regenerative projects, create Bioregional Learning Centers, and grow collaborative funding and governance systems.
A Message from Joe Brewer
Catastrophic climate change has already occurred in some parts of the world. It happened before I was born and has continued throughout my lifetime (and yours) without us being aware that this was the case. If we were unable to discern this reality, what other truths are we missing? How might the stories we tell ourselves be misleading, incomplete, or downright wrong? This challenge of discernment applies equally well to how we understand what does work for addressing our planetary predicament.
Campaigns have been launched to "plant a billion trees" and restore health to the Earth. Yet those with ecological training will observe that there is a profound functional difference between what are effectively giant monoculture tree farms – like so many of the "forests" in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, comprised mainly of Douglas firs – and real forest ecosystems that have gone through the stages of ecological succession while increasing the number of interrelated niches for diverse species to coexist within them.
The old adage tells us that we must have the courage to change what can be changed and the wisdom to separate wheat from chaff, to discern what might yet be changed. The regeneration of Earth is a process that humanity must enact in the middle of a planetary-scale collapse. Some things cannot be changed, like the climate disruptions which have already caused widespread human suffering. Other things, one might say, should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, like the invention of the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing the synthetic fertilizers that enabled the human population to grow to billions beyond our carrying capacity.
Yet there is also a horizon of hope beyond the despair that deserves to be recognized and honored. We find it by embracing the fundamental insight that all living systems self-organize around the patterns of regeneration. Applied to the scale of entire landscapes, this reveals how all truly sustainable human cultures throughout history were organized at the territorial scale as bioregional economies. A planet-wide network of learning ecosystems is needed that can hold the complexity of birthing these regenerative bioregions.
To regenerate Earth at the scales needed, we must consciously and intentionally nurture our bioregions and cooperate across those bioregions at unprecedented levels. Members of the Design School for Regenerating Earth are choosing to step fully into this challenge and do what we can to embody and live out the design pathway for regenerating Earth.
What's Included in Design School Membership
- Online learning journeys geared toward sharing and directly applying knowledge and skills to the work of organizing on the ground in our bioregions. We blend theory and practice, and apply what we learn in the real world as we learn it.
- Access to an extensive library of webinars by Joe Brewer and other leading practitioners on a wide range of topics including Prosocial Groups, Rethinking Economics, Regenerative Finance, Earth Systems, Tipping Points, Cultural Evolution, Bioregional Mapping, and Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers.
- Skill and capacity building through the Bioregional Leaders Guild.
- Facilitated learning exchanges with bioregional organizers across our network. We offer live sessions geared toward optimizing learning exchanges; a dedicated space for sharing updates, stories, and events across bioregions; and a Resource Hub where members can find and share resources relevant to organizing on the ground.
- Pathways to participate in bioregional activations, design immersions, and other activities in the bioregions of our network. Joe and Penny occasionally travel to a region of neighboring landscapes to help activate bioregional awareness; weave bioregional dialogues within and between landscapes; and provide shared language, tools, and resources for organizing for regeneration at the landscape scale. Other organizers in the network are also learning to host their own bioregional activations.
- Access to our Inner Space where we reflect with one another, connect, and cultivate our inner capacities for this work.
- Opportunities to host a member-led activity for others in the school, including design labs and workgroups.
- Meaningful connection and collaboration with peers from around the world.