Host a Community Invitation

Many of the solutions our planet needs are already happening in the landscape, but how do we visualize, connect, and support these efforts as part of a coherent strategy on the scale of entire watersheds for the long-term regeneration of the Cascadia bioregion?

Call to Action: Host a Community Invitation for Bioregional Regeneration in Cascadia

What does a regenerative future for your landscape look like?

If $100 million flowed to your landscape to make this happen, how can this money have the most impact, and be connected to the regenerators on the ground, as best determined by the people doing the work and as part of a coherent and long-term regional regeneration plan that has been built with the buy-in and consent of our communities?

How do we make sure to use this “moment” to lead to a regenerative future, rather than fizzling away?

Regenerate Cascadia is creating a Bioregional Financing Facility and Funding Ecosystem to support regenerative projects across the Cascadia bioregion. To make this vision a reality, we invite landscapes across Cascadia to self-organize Bioregional Regeneration Teams to organize hubs made up of communities in those areas, and prepare their landscapes to receive and leverage this funding as part of a coherent bioregional strategy. These teams will play a key role in visualizing, connecting, and supporting regenerative work happening in their local landscapes and ensuring that funds flow to the projects and communities that need them most. Much like how mycorrhizal networks in a forest connect trees and plants, exchanging nutrients and information to foster ecosystem health, bioregional regeneration teams act as conduits for connecting financial, social, and knowledge resources across landscapes as part of a larger bioregional context.

If you may be interested in forming a team in your own landscape, we are calling on community leaders, regenerative practitioners, and changemakers in landscapes across Cascadia to host a Community Invitation—a short, one-day event designed to set the context of this initiative, engage with your local community, and start to identify the projects and people who would like to work with Regenerate Cascadia moving forward.

We envision a mycelial network of Bioregional Regeneration Teams in every watershed, helping to connect, visualize, and support regenerative work already happening in that landscape. More than that, we see groups working with on-the-ground communities to identify core design challenges and develop portfolios and priorities for what needs to be supported, and to weave across existing silos to create a long-term and whole system vision for what regeneration means in that place and a bioregional regeneration strategy for how to achieve these goals. In the backend, Regenerate Cascadia is working to connect these efforts as part of a coherent bioregional vision and to create a bioregional financing facility and funding ecosystem to partner with local teams and initiatives and flow funding into the landscape.

What is a Community Invitation?

A Community Invitationis a one-day event that includes a presentation hosted in person by Regenerate Cascadia—followed by a participatory community discussion that is co-facilitated by the local organizing team.

The purpose of the event is to help to set the context, identify essential themes, what voices need to be present who are missing, and build interest for who might want to be a part of a regeneration team moving forward. You will be invited to co-design and co-facilitate this process with us.

These initial sessions are also meant to be the start of a conversation, to meet each other in person, and can be small and intimate. This might be as simple as a potluck, a cup of coffee, or a meetup at a library – or, if spread out geographically, a zoom call.

After the community discussion session, the goal is to identify who wants to continue this process by forming a Bioregional Regeneration Team, which will work with Regenerate Cascadia as part of our 501(c)3, and that we will support to host future bioregional mapping sessions, develop a landscape strategy and budget (both for your team and the landscape itself), as well as determining and growing community owned measurement, reporting and verification, and work to visualize, connect and support local projects happening the landscape. Lastly, we want to work with these teams to flow funding into their communities.

Everyone is welcome to propose hosting an invitation (no existing group is needed). The invitation aims to unite people in groups around places and topics that may not yet exist. If there is no local group, individuals will be invited to a larger regional incubator to help support these initial steps.

Why Host a Community Invitation?

Visualize the Future: Bring your community together to imagine a regenerative future for your landscape, where people and nature thrive together.
Connect with Local Leaders: Identify and connect with the individuals and groups in your region who are ready to lead regenerative efforts and take action on the ground. Invite people already leaned into this idea. We’re not here to convince people Climate Change is happening or to our efforts siphoned by individual projects, rather invite people making the change happen, and who want to act as a ‘mycelial web’ to help visualize, connect and support a regenerative future.
Flow Resources to Local Projects: Be part of the larger Cascadia Bioregional Financing Facility, which will direct funding and support to the projects and communities in your landscape that need it most.
Build a Plan with Community Consent: This process is centered around community-driven governance and participatory decision-making.

If you would like to host an Invitation

To host a Community Invitation in your landscape or to learn more about the process, please contact Brandon brandon@regeneratecascadia.org. We are happy to answer any questions, and will work together to set expectations and choose a time and location that works alright. We’d also love to work with you directly to help design a co-facilitated community discussion that you, or your local team can lead as the second part of the event.

As a host, we are asking you to:

Invite Regenerate Cascadia to come and give an invitation in your landscape.
Set a Date and Time, and organize an appropriate venue.
Invite local community members to participate, and ensure the event is inclusive, welcoming, and collaborative.
Provide housing for one or two people if needed.
Help facilitate the community discussion with support from Regenerate Cascadia.
Guide the follow-up process, helping to form the Bioregional Regeneration Team for your landscape.

How we will support this process

To support this invitation, Regenerate Cascadia will be meeting online and in person with applicants, provide monthly information sessions, share updates into our newsletter and calendar, and organize an online community of practice that all participants will be invited to. Members will be able to come together to share, learn, meet and plan in different cohorts based on interest and location, and be matched with initial outreach, fundraising, and communications assistance.

When your group is ready, we will set up a webpage and site for you and create your own organizing space on the backend of Regenerate Cascadia, where you can connect with others, and new members can join and get involved. We also hope that groups can begin hosting their meetings and planning for what’s next. Once you start meeting, Regenerate Cascadia will also provide stipends for teams just getting off the ground.

What is Regenerate Cascadia?

Regenerate Cascadia is a 501(c)3 social movement and capacity-building program of the Department of Bioregion developing a vision and framework to administer a regeneration fund for Cascadia, a bioregion located along the upper Pacific Rim of North America stretching from Southeast Alaska to Northern California, and as far east as the Yellowstone Caldera. A central goal of Regenerate Cascadia is to grow capacity cohesively across the scales of landscapes, ecoregions, and bioregions—something that currently does not exist locally or globally—as part of a multi-generational strategy for the long-term health of the Cascadia bioregion. Regenerate Cascadia is addressing the complex challenges in funding connected landscape outcomes across a bioregion through a whole systems approach that: prioritizes the central role of place-based stewardship; ensures decision-making is held by those at the local level; develops trust-based networks that hold the integrity of the work; and uses a nested scale structure to facilitate information flow, representation, and learning across the whole system.

Regenerate Cascadia was formed in April 2023 during the first-ever Salmon Nation Edge Prize, where the vision to activate a bioregional movement in Cascadia won the Edge Prize for Innovation in Systems and Governance. After months of planning with 100+ local community organizers on both sides of the Canada-US border, they partnered with the Design School for Regenerating Earth to co-facilitate a month-long Bioregional Activation Tour. They traveled to 14 communities around Cascadia during October 2023, hosting presentations that asked, “How do we regenerate the Cascadia bioregion?”. They met with more than 1000 individuals, including Indigenous knowledge keepers, regenerative leaders, groups, community artists, and elders across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia through presentations, workshops, site visits, and strategy sessions. This was followed by an online summit that brought together 50+ presentations in a ‘Festival of What Works’, and concluded with an Open Space Unconference from November 3-12, 2023, where participants cocreated working groups for Regenerate Cascadia. The vision resonated strongly with many communities across the bioregion. Jay Bowen, an elder of the Skagit people who opened the Summit, articulated the following statement in the opening ceremony:

“Gathered before us are the most important people in the world. It may be a small group right now, but in a few short years, there’s going to be a long line of people waiting to get involved in this very important movement that is overseeing the welfare of our communities.”

Since then, we have been working with more than 140 people to co-design Regenerate Cascadia as a 501(c)3 nonprofit program, grow our capacity, and, most recently, have worked with a Cascadia Cohort through a six-month learning journey with the Design School for Regenerating Earth, connecting this work into a broader framework of bioregional groups working together around North America and the world.

Our Core Design Challenge is: How do we regenerate an entire bioregion?

How do you see the land as a whole system? What are the bioregional frameworks and layers important to steward for that place? What are the layers important to consider that are often left off of corporate or government maps? What larger regional systems, and smaller watersheds need to be examined?
What ecosystem functions are being altered or have deteriorated? Who are the largest impacters of these changes, and who is most impacted, who will need to be part of the conversation?
Who are the original stewards of this place? What are place-appropriate technologies and ways of living adapted for that area?
If you took actions to conserve or restore this area, what would those actions be?
Who is already doing this work in the landscape? How are non-human inhabitants and ecosystems represented? What are their challenges, silos, and who needs to be supported? What voices are missing? How can this work be brought together through a whole systems lens? Who could support this work?
What is the shared governance and relationships that need to be held? How will you cooperate to prioritize and make decisions? How will you maintain right relationship?
What would a 5-year plan, a 50-year plan, and a 500-year plan for a regenerative future in this area look like? How can this guide initial activities?
How would you evaluate those actions or describe the impacts of those actions? How does this help guide learning and future activities?
How much does it cost to perform those actions? What do you need to support a team that can organize and coordinate activities on these bioregional frameworks, determine carrying capacities, and monitor success?
How is learning flowing to other groups?

Bioregional regeneration requires people working together in every community and watershed to ask these questions, grow the capacity to be able to answer them, and see people supported as determined by the communities themselves. This means developing bioregional frameworks, sensemaking and mapping existing work, identifying challenges, breaking down silos, and creating a shared vision and budget. In the long term, it means being able to determine metrics for success and allocate funding to regenerative projects and groups as part of a coordinated effort as part of an entire watershed, ecoregion, or bioregion, scales which few to no people are currently organizing on.

Next Information Session:

To be announced soon.

To learn more, or inquire about hosting a landscape invitation, reach out with: brandon@regeneratecascadia.org

If you are not sure this process may be right for you, feel free to reach out or attend one of our upcoming information sessions.

Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFF)

Download the entire Bioregional Financing Facility E-Book here (email required).

Read the full Regenerate Cascadia Case Study on page 130!

Bioregional Funding Ecosystem (BFE)

Learn more about the Earth Regeneration Fund, and the start of our own Cascadia Regeneration Fund.

Who is this for?

Community invitations and growing bioregional regeneration teams are for networkers, weavers, and organizers who want to see impact happen on the scale of entire watersheds, ecoregions, and bioregions, to see people doing this work resourced at a level they need to be.

About the Presenters

Clare Attwell

Brandon Letsinger

Get to know Brandon a bit… recent interview by David Bollier on the Frontiers of Commoning with Brandon Letsinger on “Cascadia and Bioregional Organizing”. August 31, 2024. enjoy!

Connecting Communities Together

Join and find others and connect with us directly at:

Hylo Community: hylo.com/groups/cascadia-bioregion

Telegram Community
t.me/regencascadia

After receiving your interest form, we will help connect people in similar areas or topics together with each other, and provide support for core capacity building. When ready, we will also share an announcement and find people to help get your core team off the ground.