Join our 2025 Bioregional Activation

Regenerate Cascadia is a 501(c)3 social movement and capacity-building program 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. 

Announcing our 2025 Bioregional Activation

Now, almost exactly one year later, we are announcing our second bioregional activation, which we will facilitate and help host from January to March 2025. We are inviting groups to self-organize who want to host initial gatherings and meetings to begin to form bioregional regeneration teams. From this process, we will identify the stewards, teams and groups we will work with over the upcoming year.

Our goal is for groups to form organically around places or issues that people think are important for the long-term regeneration of our bioregion and start to have initial meetings.

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 Bioregional Activation?

1) Host a Community Activation.

• For place-based groups: Invite Regenerate Cascadia to host a one-day public event or potluck for a community that wants to get active. The envisioning session is intended for 5-30 people and will include a presentation followed by a community conversation and brainstorming session. Once the date and location are set, we will share them on our calendar and in our email newsletter.
• For Issues and Topics: If a team wants to form around a specific topic or issue they find important (such as Seeds, Permaculture, etc.), they will be invited to host an online digital community envisioning session. 

2) Host a Bioregional Mapping Workshop.

• Regenerate Cascadia will provide $3,000 to groups to host a weekend-long mapping workshop in their community. The goal of this workshop is to create the first draft of a bioregional regeneration strategy to identify important frameworks and layers of stewardship, a portfolio of regenerative projects, who could support this work, and what voices are missing and begin to create a long-term landscape vision. They will identify projects they might be interested in for the next 1-3 years, and a budget for what a team would need to hold these processes. 

3) Bioregional Regeneration Team and Federated Grant Application.

• After hosting a bioregional mapping workshop, groups will be invited to officially form a bioregional regeneration team, which will receive stipends and support, and join our following federated grant process for Regenerate Cascadia to receive funding starting in 2026. We also want groups to be able to use this as a way to begin fundraising and getting active in their communities. It will be from these groups that we will continue to work with for the upcoming year.

Our goal is for these groups to sense what needs to be supported, create the indicators for what needs to be monitored, and direct funding into their communities while leveraging and mobilizing more extensive networks of support as part of a clear regeneration strategy, which does not currently exist. Ultimately, these groups will bring this learning back to our broader communities so we can continually update and adapt as needed. Bioregional Regeneration Teams will be invited to share reportbacks as part of an online Cascadia summit and an in-person bioregional financing and funding ecosystem conference in 2025. We also aim to provide groups with initial funding to regrant into their communities.

If you want to be on a team stewarding your watershed or region, a guild, or a learning center, please apply by December 1st.  Everyone is welcome to apply (no existing group is needed). The activation 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.

How we will support this process

To support this activation, Regenerate Cascadia will be meeting online and in person with applicants, provide biweekly information sessions, share updates into our newsletter and calendar, and organize a learning journey that all participants will be invited to, where members can 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.