Regenerate Cascadia was featured as a case study in the book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet, published in 2024 by the BioFi Project. The case study, written for the Finance for Gaia publication, documents Regenerate Cascadia's approach to coordinated, coherent bioregional organizing and its emerging framework for bioregional finance.
Authored by Taya Seidler, Clare Attwell, Brandon Letsinger, and Sheri Herndon, the case study traces the arc of the movement from the 2023 Salmon Nation Edge Prize, where the vision to activate a bioregional movement in Cascadia won the Edge Prize for Innovation in Systems and Governance, through the Bioregional Activation Tour, the formation of landscape groups, and the development of the structural framework that now supports the Landscape Hub Cultivator and BioFi programs.
Key Themes
The case study examines several core dimensions of the Regenerate Cascadia model. It describes how the organization addresses the complex challenges of 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.
Central to the case study is the structural framework (see Figure 1 in the publication) that illustrates how Regenerate Cascadia enables the coherent flow of resources, including educational, financial, inspirational, and cultural capital, that supports ongoing bioregional regeneration outcomes and learning. The framework enables capital to be distributed from a large bioregional fund into smaller landscape-level funds that deliver resources to decentralized projects according to the needs of ecoregions and landscapes.
Significance
The case study provides one of the most comprehensive published accounts of what it takes to build social infrastructure for bioregional finance. It demonstrates that regeneration and funding ecosystems must grow together for lasting, systemic change. The publication has been cited by funders, researchers, and bioregional practitioners internationally as a working example of how to connect grassroots organizing with aligned capital through community governance.