Launch Event :: Bioregional Funding Ecosystems
We are excited to announce the kick-off of a process to design and build bioregional funding ecosystems. In partnership with the Legacy Project, the Design School for Regenerating Earth is hosting an in person gathering of people who are actively organizing around this work.
The launch event will take place from September 24th thru 28th in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion.
Penny Heiple and I are working closely with Brian Puppa and Susan Bosak to create this gathering — which builds directly upon our previous collaboration led by the Legacy Project with the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit that took place in February. It was an historic process to birth the Story of Bioregional Earth with roughly 7000 participants from all over the world.
Between then and now, we have hosted the Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers learning journey here in the Design School to build coherence and help local landscapes begin to organize themselves around practitioner models of bioregional regeneration. One of our goals in that work has been to identify who is ready to start mobilizing financial resources into their local landscapes. This is built around the concept of bioregional funding ecosystems as it was presented at the summit in February.
Who Is Joining Us at the Kick-off Event?
In September, we are inviting the Design School members who have stepped into the design of bioregional funding ecosystems in their own bioregions to join us in Toronto. Together we will create the design framework for a year-long learning process in five bioregional contexts:
- Barichara Colombia :: Joe Brewer and Natalia Ortiz will participate as representatives of Fundación Barichara Regenerativa
- Cascadia :: Brandon Letsinger will participate as representative of Regenerate Cascadia
- Forests of the Northeast :: Keetu Winter and Chez Liley will participate as representatives from Wellspring Commons; Bill Baue as a representative of the Connecticut River Bioregional Collaborative.
- Greater Tkaronto :: Brian Puppa and Susan Bosak as representatives of the Legacy Project
- Ogallala / High Plains :: Will Masters as a representative of Ogallala Life and partner organizations
Each of these people will come to share what they are doing in their own region with respect to bioregional funding ecosystems. Together we will lay the foundations for a year of work creating them in each territorial context. We will also be joined by Tyler Wakefield of The Biofi Project and Martin Kirk of NoVo Foundation. Each in their way is contributing to this body of work as we create a community of practice around bioregional finance.
What Will We Do Together?
This gathering is by invitation only so that we can really focus on the design of a year-long process. Our purpose is to create the scaffolding for learning exchanges as we create bioregional funding ecosystems in our real-world contexts. Thanks to the generous support of the NoVo Foundation, Penny and I are able to offer seed funding to several of the bioregions that are participating.
We will be able to learn-by-doing in each of our bioregions with this financial support. The Design School is providing $120,000 in seed funding to the network of bioregions that will be distributed among them for the year-long effort.
This accompanies the funding already received by Fundación Barichara Regenerativa and for the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund that will serve as inspiration and living laboratories to guide our work in the other bioregions. All of this is part of what we outlined last week for Design School members in Creating the Earth Regeneration Fund.
How Can You Get Involved?
We apologize that we can’t invite everyone to this special design immersion. Luckily it is only the first of many that will follow. Each of the bioregions involved in this year-long process will host its own design immersion in partnership with the Design School.
This is visually depicted in the graphic above. Plans are being made for a Greater Tkaronto Bioregion immersion with local leaders in Ontario — most likely in November but possibly as late as January. There will be another design immersion in Barichara that all Design Members will be invited to that takes place in February. The other bioregions (Forests of the Northeast, Cascadia, and Ogallala) will create their own schedules in accordance with our evolving calendar.
We will notify all of you soon about how you can come and join us in person. In the meantime, we want to share more about how your membership dues serve as part of this Earth Regeneration Fund. We currently have about $20,000 saved up from the dues that you pay to be members of the school. Each month there is a modest income of about $1500 at the current size of our membership (roughly 425 members).
Penny and I want to help provide travel support and smaller seed funding to bioregional regeneration efforts throughout the year. This means your membership dues are already part of the Earth Regeneration Fund! We will start to share how you can apply for financial support to attend the design immersions — and at any time, you can donate into the fund.
We are already hosting the Barichara Regenerative Finance Lab that I encourage everyone to join. It is free for all members of the school. As the rest of this work gets going, there will be more ways to get involved. Stay tuned for future announcements!
Please share your questions and comments below. 😉
Onward, fellow humans.
Joe Brewer is co-founder of the Design School for Regnerating Earth as well as a co-founder of Barichara Regenerativa. You can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram and support his work directly on Patreon.
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