Come Home to Your Bioregion
Regenerate Cascadia is a social movement and capacity-building organization working to regenerate the Cascadia bioregion. We are growing a network of practitioners, communities, and organizers throughout the bioregion, getting people to think on the scale of entire watersheds, and building the social and financial infrastructure to support work happening in the landscape.
Stretching more than 2,500 kilometers along the Pacific Rim, the Cascadia bioregion includes British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Southeast Alaska and Northern California. Nature works on the scale of watersheds, ecoregions, and bioregions. By shifting our focus into these living frameworks, we can break down large-scale, intangible threats from the global to the local, and design place-appropriate responses that are measurable, where every person can walk out their front door and take action.
At this human scale, the land we locate ourselves on becomes a point of connection to the web of relationships we are part of, something largely missing within our existing economic model. Culture stems from place, and we will have more in common with each other than with those in a distant seat of power with little vested interest in our region or people.
To regenerate the Cascadia bioregion and cultivate the conditions for a regenerative movement to thrive.
Regenerate Cascadia is a 501(c)(3) program of the Department of Bioregion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing bioregionalism and the idea that social, economic, and political systems should align with natural boundaries rather than arbitrary borders. The Department of Bioregion provides the administrative backbone for Regenerate Cascadia, including accounting, grant management, financial reporting, and legal compliance.
Where We Came From
Regenerate Cascadia was formed by Brandon Letsinger and Clare Attwell in April 2023 during the first Salmon Nation Edge Prize, where their vision to activate a bioregional movement in Cascadia won the Edge Prize for Innovation in Systems and Governance. After months of planning with more than 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.
During October 2023, they traveled to 14 communities around Cascadia, hosting presentations that asked: "How do we regenerate the Cascadia bioregion?" They met with more than 1,000 individuals, including Indigenous knowledge keepers, regenerative leaders, 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 to 12, 2023, where participants co-created working groups for Regenerate Cascadia. Recordings from the tour, summit, and unconference are available in the 2023 recordings archive.
Where We Are Now
Since that founding moment, Regenerate Cascadia has grown into a network of six staff supporting 10 landscape groups in Washington and Oregon, with 43 landscape stewards and an online community of practice of more than 600 individuals from over 150 organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Our work is organized through two interdependent programs, recognizing that funding must grow alongside bioregional organizing to ensure that regenerative efforts are supported by the financial ecosystems needed to sustain them.
Cascadia BioRegen
The BioRegen program invites people to form Seed Groups, Landscape Groups, and Landscape Hubs to undertake bioregional mapping, develop portfolio-based regeneration strategies, and strengthen core capacities for deep, place-based organizing. At its center is the Landscape Hub Cultivator, a guided cohort program that supports landscape groups in developing governance, storytelling, and regeneration planning capacities through structured phases of learning and practice.
In partnership with the Design School for Regenerating Earth, Regenerate Cascadia also convenes annual Cascadia Learning Journeys, six-month bioregional learning programs that blend bi-weekly online webinars, global community calls, and Cascadia-specific sessions. These learning journeys serve as a primary pathway for people new to bioregionalism, building shared language and relationships before participants move into deeper organizing through Seed Groups and Landscape Groups.
Cascadia BioFi
The BioFi program (Bioregional Finance) works to develop local, regional, and bioregional funding ecosystems to support the work that groups prioritize in their landscapes. A central goal is to build a Bioregional Financing Facility that can distribute and allocate resources into the landscape, as directed by the regenerators doing the work. A core insight driving this work is that finance needs social infrastructure first. Capacity, in this context, means the ability to hold relationships, especially with funders, and to steward resources with transparency and accountability.
Intergenerational Roots
The call to protect and regenerate the Cascadia bioregion is not new. It sits within a broader bioregional movement that has been active since the 1970s, inspired by the First Inhabitants who have called this region home for more than a thousand generations. The term Cascadia was first used in 1981 by Seattle University professor David McCloskey as a way to describe a growing regional identity defined by natural systems rather than political borders. It was adopted by organizers, academics, Indigenous activists, policy planners, and environmentalists who came together for what became the Cascadian Bioregional Congresses.
A growing number of people are recognizing that to secure the clean air, water, and food that we need to survive healthfully, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbors and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves is to go out and take action for ourselves.
Regenerate Cascadia carries this lineage forward. We believe that by organizing on the scale of watersheds and bioregions, and by building the social infrastructure for trusted relationships and accountable governance, communities can move from fragmented, project-by-project responses toward coherent, multi-generational strategies for the long-term health of the places they call home.
A Living Framework
Regenerate Cascadia's structural framework is designed as a system for the coherent flow of resources, educational, financial, inspirational, and cultural, that supports ongoing bioregional regeneration outcomes and learning. The framework enables capital to be distributed from a bioregional fund into smaller landscape-level funds that deliver resources to decentralized projects according to the needs of ecoregions and landscapes.
This ensures governance power is held by those closest to the work through trust-based networks that connect and align diverse projects within a landscape-level vision and strategy. At every scale, from watershed to bioregion, the framework prioritizes the representation of diverse voices, including those of ecosystems and keystone species, ensuring feedback loops from across the whole system enable collective intelligence to inform future action.
Each structural component Regenerate Cascadia is building is designed to be adaptable, replicable, and scalable in other localities. These are significant not only for the Cascadia bioregion, but as living frameworks for movements emerging around the world.