Our Core Team
Our Core Team
Clare Attwell
CO-ADMINISTRATOR, Victoria BC
Clare is a textile and multi-media artist living in Victoria, British Columbia in the Salish Sea and is a co-founder and administrator of Regenerate Cascadia. When she is not working on her own art, she works as a community artist, using the arts in imaginative ways to help community groups explore complex issues such as cultural and spiritual identity, including community visioning. Clare Grew up in South Africa and moved to Canada as a young adult. She is deeply influenced by her early years in Africa under Apartheid. She creates predominantly large-scale wall hangings that evolve from her work with the community. She is especially interested in exploring what makes complex systems functional, particularly how they relate to organizations and social systems.
Brandon Letsinger
CO-ADMINISTRATOR, Seattle WA
Brandon Letsinger is the co-founder and administrator of Regenerate Cascadia. He is also the executive director of the Department of Bioregion, co-producer of the Cascadia Northwest Arts and Music Festival and President of the Cascadia Association Football Federation. In the past, he also launched CascadiaNow! in 2005, which he stepped back from in 2017, as well as helping organize the Cascadia Poetry Festival, Cascadians Against White Supremacy, Yes Cascadia, Vote Cascadia, and the Cascadia Underground, an independent media center on Capitol Hill. He also runs a 6400′ square foot art space in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, Vice, USA Today, the Atlantic Monthly, NPR, the BBC, National Journal, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Canadian Broadcasting, as well as a host of local newspapers and radio segments.
Tanja Woitasczyk
PROGRAM OFFICER, Eugene OR
Tanja has been helping as a core team member since the Cascadia Activation Tour and helped make sure that the Regenerate Cascadia website was updated and running correctly for the Cascadia Bioregional Summit in November 2023. Since then, she has stepped on as both a project manager, and as the program officer for our fiscal sponsorship program. Tanja has previous experience as an event director, and personal climate coach, helping women create sustainability in health, environment and relationships.Â
Cory Sevin
COMMUNICATION & NEWSLETTER, Mt. Vernon WA
Cory Sevin has stepped on to help us develop basic onboarding materials, as well as basic communications sharing updates and helping make sure a monthly newsletter gets sent.
Lisa Bade
EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS, La Connor WA
Lisa Bade was born in Seattle and grew up in a family of educators who prioritized social justice. She earned an MA in Education and taught Studio Art and Art History at Highline High School for 10 years. During that time, she worked with other artists to create parade scale art, posters, and street art for demonstrations and rallies. She eventually worked collaboratively to organize the Art of Resistance Political Artists’ Conference series. Seeking to expand her knowledge and experience as a socially engaged artist and educator, she took a position researching education interventions in Cambodia, living for four years in a small provincial town. During that time and since, she has been involved as a resource person to the Asia based Schools of Peace network of activists, facilitating and advising on socially engaged art practices.Â
Christian Michelle
WORDPRESS DEVELOPER, Federal Way WA
With my degrees in Web Design and Development, I have made a remarkable career out of something I have loved since I was a kid. I have been working professionally in the world of Web Development for the last twelve years, doing both backend and frontend development for companies large and small. I have managed both onshore and offshore teams, ensuring their work passes through the correct reviews before deploying to our clients and customers. My skills lie in content management systems, ecommerce platforms and wide scale database creation and maintenance. I have over fifteen years of experience with such coding languages as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, HTML, SASS/LESS/CSS and many more.
Independent Consultants
Olivia Nowak
LE COLIBRI STUDIO, Portland OR
First Nation Protocols and Communications Consultant
Olivia Leigh Nowak is a story facilitator, filmmaker and founder of le colibri STUDIO. Olivia connects people, builds community, and nurtures creative collaborations that uplift the many diverse voices working to address some of society’s most critical issues. Recently, her work has included directing and producing documentary content focused on broader awareness and transformation around racial and gender inequality, climate and environmental change, and efforts to build sustainable local communities. She’s worked on features such as Black Rock and Pandemic Elementary, as CBC short docs. In addition to film, she has spent time working, and learning in Indigenous communities in South America and BC, collaborating with Centre for Indigenous Fisheries, Watershed Futures Initiative, Kitasoo Community School , Peace & Unity Summit and Aya Healing Retreat.Â
Taya Seidler
PROCESS POWER, Brisbane AUS
Bioregional Finance Facility Program Development Consultant
I am a deep generalist with a passion for developing systemic strategies and capacity building to address and embrace the complex nature of our climate emergency. My background as a strategist, systems change designer and capacity builder supports me in understanding the nexus of complexity, impact strategy, and mobilising collaborative networks of change agents across multiple disciplines to work together on the design and implementation of solutions. I have 19 years experience working across sectors, government, civil society and community groups (with a focus on the climate and environment movement), to bring systems thinking, strategy, design and process skills to enable increased impact at all levels.
Jericha Senyak
JERICHA SENYAK CONSULTING, San Francisco CAÂ
Accounting and Finance Consultant
Hi, I’m Jericha! I’m an accidental arts accountant. I started as a part-time bookkeeper when I was a young artist just trying to make ends meet. If you had asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to work in finance when I grew up, I would have laughed out loud…but here I am. Over the years, I shifted from plain bookkeeping to working more and more on the systems, tools, and concepts that make up most of nonprofit finance. These days, most of my work centers on making the core pieces of the financial puzzle less stressful and more accessible for other arts & culture workers.
WHO WE ARE
About Regenerate Cascadia
Regenerate Cascadia is a grassroots 501(c)3 program of the Department of Bioregion. We are a group of more than 100 volunteers in 14 different cities around Cascadia, who are working in the spirit of a gift economy, to help activate and birth a regenerative movement for the Cascadia bioregion.Â
If this sounds like you, join us!
Regenerate Cascadia: An Invitation
Klahowya tillikum! Stewards of Salmon Nation.
Thank you for taking the time to read this invitation and join us here.
When people come together to share their stories, it’s not uncommon for them to feel an alive crackle of potential. When the conditions for sharing knowledge and learning are present, we get a taste of what might be possible together. Yet, routinely the people doing the work on the ground are left out of the decision-making process. Too often, decisions are outsourced to experts and institutions with little or no direct relationship to the bioregion.  Â
So, how do we begin to take back our agency to restore a felt sense of right relationship with the land and each other? How do we weave ourselves coherently across many different watersheds and territories to connect the work done on the ground? How do we imagine new forms of bioregional governance while honoring and celebrating our unique stories of place?Â
Regenerate Cascadia is emerging from our time in the Salmon Nation and Terran Collective Edgeprize, for eight weeks, a community of Edgewalkers – weavers on the edge of different communities but tied to the whole – gathered to share open-source Indigenous knowledge for a more resilient world. Â
Our communities know what they need. Edgewalkers are weaving the work.
But what comes next? Through an activation tour happening from September 28th-October 30th and a bioregional summit November 3rd-12th, we aim to create a shared vision and framework, grow watershed hubs, explore bioregional frameworks and governance, and grow an ecosystem of regenerative funding that can support this work in every watershed of the Cascadia bioregion.Â
Our names are Clare Attwell and Brandon Letsinger. While we are the primary conveners for Regenerate Cascadia, we are excited to partner with a fantastic community of catalysts from around Salmon Nation to ask ourselves one simple question – how can we empower all of our work and connect it with the resources we need, for the long term regeneration of the Cascadia bioregion? For more than 40 years, Cascadia has played a central role in this organizing. Now it is time for us to step up and take responsibility for the stewardship of our bioregion and the regeneration of our Planet. We can’t wait to see what work we weave together.
In bioregional solidarity,
Clare Attwell and Brandon Letsinger
