Cascadia BioFi is the bioregional finance program of Regenerate Cascadia, advancing the financial infrastructure needed for regenerative outcomes across the Cascadia bioregion, from Southeast Alaska to Northern California.
BioFi convenes funders, investors, and place-based leaders to develop community-aligned, trust-based funding mechanisms that support landscape-scale regeneration. The program builds the relationships, governance structures, and financial pathways that connect capital with the communities already doing the work of restoring ecosystems, strengthening local economies, and stewarding the land.
BioFi is grounded in a foundational insight: finance does not flow effectively without social infrastructure. Before capital can move at the pace and scale the moment demands, communities need the conditions that make coordination and trust possible. These include shared understanding of place, trusted relationships, clear governance, and locally legitimate processes for deciding priorities. BioFi builds those conditions, then connects them with the financial architecture funders need to invest with confidence.
Our mission is to grow the bioregional financial ecosystems that resource regeneration across Cascadia, connecting capital with community through trusted relationships, coherent strategy, and community-governed allocation.
Why BioFi
There is no shortage of philanthropic capital committed to environmental and social outcomes. Over $326 billion sits in U.S. Donor-Advised Funds alone. Yet the people closest to the land, including community organizers, Indigenous stewards, and regenerative practitioners, remain among the least likely to receive funding. The issue is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of connective tissue between those who hold financial capital and those doing the work of regeneration on the ground.
Traditional philanthropy tends to operate through sector-based frameworks such as climate, housing, food, or education. BioFi organizes capital around place. It asks a fundamentally different question: What does this particular landscape need in order to regenerate, and how do we build the relationships and infrastructure to get resources there?
What BioFi Does
The program operates through three interconnected strategies. The first is holding relationships between funders and communities, creating shared understanding across what can be a significant cultural and institutional divide. The second is cross-education, ensuring that both funders and community organizers develop literacy in each other's worlds. The third is building fundable portfolios, helping communities articulate their regeneration priorities in ways that align with how funding decisions are made, while simultaneously helping funders understand what place-based regeneration actually requires.
In practice, this work takes form through the Cascadia Regeneration Fund, a bioregional trust designed to resource community-governed regeneration strategies; a Funder Co-Design that brings funders into direct relationship with landscape leaders through co-learning and co-design; and flow funding pilots that test participatory capital allocation at the landscape scale through the Landscape Hub Cultivator.
BioFi and BioRegen
BioFi is one of two interdependent programs within Regenerate Cascadia, paired with the BioRegen program, which provides the community organizing and capacity-building infrastructure that supports 10 active landscape groups across the bioregion. BioRegen builds the teams, governance, relationships, and strategies. BioFi builds the financial pathways and funder relationships that resource them. Neither works without the other.
The flagship initiative linking both programs is the Landscape Hub Cultivator (LHC), a year-long pilot supporting landscape groups to co-create hubs through bioregional mapping, regeneration strategies, governance prototyping, and flow funding pilots. The LHC is where BioFi's theory of change is being tested and proven in practice.
Program Roadmap
BioFi is currently prioritizing flow funding pilots through the LHC to test governance, deployment pathways, and learning systems necessary for a durable, community-governed fund. In 2025 and 2026, ten landscape groups are receiving initial funds for community-governed allocation, building the trust and practical experience needed for larger funding mechanisms.
As the program matures, BioFi will develop the Cascadia Regeneration Fund as a DAF-housed bioregional trust, convene forums on bioregional finance in the United States and Canada, and grow a funder community of practice through co-design and co-learning with early-adopter funders. The long-term vision is a full Bioregional Financing Facility for Cascadia: a replicable, open-source model for bioregions worldwide.
Alignment with the Global BioFi Movement
Cascadia BioFi is aligned with the global BioFi Project, which is advancing the development of Bioregional Financing Facilities worldwide. Regenerate Cascadia is a participant in the BioFi Project's Cultivator Cohort and was featured as a case study in the 2024 publication Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. The Cascadia program serves as one of the first practical implementations of the BFF model.
Parent organization: The Department of Bioregion is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and the legal and operational backbone for Regenerate Cascadia. It provides fiscal sponsorship, accounting, grant management, and administrative infrastructure, allowing landscape groups and the BioFi program to focus on the work.