The Cascadia Regeneration Fund is a bioregional trust being developed by Regenerate Cascadia to provide consistent, community-governed funding for regenerative projects across the Cascadia bioregion. The fund links Cascadia's various ecoregions and local landscapes into a place-based, nested-scale finance ecosystem, supporting regeneration strategies, budgets, and priorities developed through the Landscape Hub Cultivator.
From its inception, Regenerate Cascadia has envisioned a financing mechanism that funds regenerative projects throughout the bioregion. The Cascadia Regeneration Fund is the primary vehicle for realizing that vision. It translates the BioFi program's theory of change into action by moving capital through a bioregional flow fund architecture, grounded in community governance, embedded in living systems, and structured for nested coordination across landscapes, regions, and the bioregion as a whole.
How the Fund Works
The fund operates through a distributed architecture that mirrors natural systems. At the bioregional scale, the Cascadia Regeneration Fund aggregates capital from philanthropic sources, Donor-Advised Funds, and aligned investors. At the regional scale, ecoregional sub-funds coordinate resource allocation across related landscapes. At the local scale, landscape-level sub-funds are co-managed by Landscape Regeneration Teams, who direct resources toward implementation-ready projects that reflect community priorities.
Each Landscape Hub develops its own regeneration strategy through the Landscape Hub Cultivator process, beginning with bioregional mapping and leading to the identification of a prioritized portfolio of projects. The fund finances these portfolios, ensuring that capital flows support coherent, locally defined strategies rather than isolated grants to disconnected projects.
Governance
The fund is designed to be governed by the people doing the work. Participatory governance ensures that decision-making power is held by those closest to the land and most affected by the outcomes. This includes landscape stewards, Indigenous knowledge holders, community organizers, and regenerative practitioners.
At the landscape level, regeneration teams develop budgets and allocate resources according to community-defined priorities. At the bioregional level, governance bodies coordinate across landscapes, manage shared infrastructure, and ensure accountability and transparency across the system. This nested structure enables local autonomy while maintaining coherence across the bioregion.
Measuring Impact
Each Landscape Hub develops its own impact and evaluation framework through the LHC process. These frameworks include context-based indicators that reflect social, ecological, cultural, and economic conditions within the landscape; bioregional carrying capacity assessments that establish the thresholds and regenerative potential of each place; monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems for transparent tracking of progress and outcomes; and multi-capital frameworks that honor the full spectrum of what communities value, including relational, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of regeneration.
Data and insights are compiled at the landscape level and synthesized across ecoregional and bioregional scales. Some indicators are unique to the landscape, while others are designed for interoperability, enabling funders and governance bodies to aggregate insights and allocate resources effectively.
Current Status
The Cascadia Regeneration Fund is currently in its design and prototyping phase. BioFi is prioritizing flow funding pilots through the Landscape Hub Cultivator to test governance structures, deployment pathways, and learning systems necessary for a durable, community-governed fund. In 2025 and 2026, ten landscape groups are receiving initial funding for community-governed allocation, building the practical experience and trust that will inform the fund's design.
The fund's initial capital structure is being developed through Donor-Advised Funds, creating a familiar and accessible pathway for funders to direct capital into landscapes as guided by landscape groups and their regeneration teams. As the program matures, these pathways will expand into a full Bioregional Financing Facility for Cascadia.
A Vision for Regenerative Finance
The Cascadia Regeneration Fund is not a traditional grant-making body. It is a new kind of financial institution designed to serve life at bioregional scale. By connecting organized communities with aligned capital through trust-based relationships and transparent governance, the fund offers a model for how finance can support long-term regeneration across connected landscapes, watersheds, and bioregions.