Update from Regenerate Cascadia Staff Meeting February 6, 2025!
Check it out! This update from the February 6, 2025 Staff Meeting is full-from introductions from the growing Regenerate Cascadia team members to a rich update from Brandon on the many layers of traction, current and upcoming, that are happening. Watch the video for all the details, fun and nuances. The summary below offers resources and links to the people and organizations mentioned.
Meet the growing Regenerate Cascadia Support Team!
- Ben Moseley: Role is operations assistant, helping with finances, some systems rollout and generally all being around a good guy! I’m in the Southern Willamette Valley of Oregon, in the Eugene area working with our local community here in Bio-regional development.
- Lisa Bade: I am an artist and illustrator and am developing some simple, highly graphic Zine type materials that convey basic concepts such as what is Cascadia or what is a bioregion? I am developing materials people can use as they organize their bioregional teams and talk with people and organizations in their landscapes. I am in the Salish Sea area, north of Seattle.
- Ron Milam: I’m based here in Seattle on the Duwamish Coast Salish land. I’ve worked in the world of philanthropy for the last 10 or so years and in nonprofit for 10 or so years before that. I’ve had my own organization and network development consulting practice. I am joining the team as a consultant helping to put together a forum on bioregional finance to help answer the question “how do we fund the work in our landscapes?.” Another part of my work is talking to and building out relationships with funders in philanthropy who are funding this kind of work already in the bio region.
- Taya Seidler in Kombumerri Country, Australia. Role: Strategy development consultant. I met Brandon and Clare a few years ago delivering the Edge Prize and we all ended up aligning together to birth Regenerate Cascadia as a joint proposal and won the systems and Governance prize for their incredible systemic vision. So, I’ve been on the journey since the inception. Currently I’ve been working with Brandon and Claire in our weekly meetings offering strategic impact advisory services looking at the whole in terms of what is the long-term impact and how our short term and our medium-term actions and choices and activities continue to fit in with that as well as shift and change as they need to. This year I’ll be focusing very specifically on the storytelling and communications fundraising aspects, across our 2 programs. Watch the video for more details!!!
- Andra Vltavin I just came on as the Cohort Coordinator for the Design School for Regenerating Earth. I will be helping to steward the community in moving through the next learning journey, How to Organize Your Bioregion supporting the Cascadia Cohort through that global course. I’m in the Portland Metro area, which is the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Klowwitz, Clackamas, Fans of the Chinook Tualatin Calculia, Malala and many other tribes. I am also helping Regenerate Cascadia move into a more sociocratic process which has been really, really deeply exciting so that we can have really effective, efficient meetings and assures all voices are heard. Hear more about Andra and see her cute rabbit in the video!
Updates from Brandon
Clare is in the Okanagan, a part of the Salish Sea in BC at the headwaters of the Columbia River. Salmon Nation Collabs is working with lots of community arts-based work there and much more. We are exploring opportunities for activation of landscapes along the Columbia River from the headwaters through Idaho and Washington, with the idea that this is really a bioregional effort.
Clare is meeting with:
- Karla Stevenson, who runs the rural arts inclusion lab, and more work focused on community. Arts BC has a key program, The Pathways Program which we are The Pathways program provides mentorship networks for different community organizations, landscape groups as they’re getting up. Last year they had 70 or 80 distinct groups as part of this project.
Brandon and Clare meetings in BC!
- Polly Orr, from Salt Spring Island Land Trust may step in to help Clare with organizing Regenerate Cascadia in Canada.
- Breony Penn and Robin Hood have been active in the Salish Sea for decades; now doing a lot of bioregional mapping and archival documentation and work with different 1st nations, and now mapping strategic funder networks and opportunities in Canada. They have also launched the Hummingbird Collective Project doing illustration and graphics for different organizations that help clearly explain and communicate different regenerative principles and processes.
- Met with Patricia Parkinson of Open Civics, and Elizabeth May – MP and leader of the Canadian Green Party and just happens to also be a Cascadian advocate!
- Tad Homer Dixon, who runs the Cascade Institute. He is located at Royal Roads which is where the X-men was filmed!
Deepening Relationships across Cascadia
Brandon, Clare and Ron had a deep, in-person 2-day meeting with Donna Morton with Salmon Nation Collabs, Jamaica Stevens with Open Futures Coalition talking about how we might model regional collaboration between our 3 different organizations and figuring out how to interweave the related and aligned threads.
Regenerate Cascadia Organizational Updates
- Newsletters: We are working on getting regular newsletters out soon and then shoot for a monthly cadence. We will be looking for ways on our website, where it’s easy to sign up for the newsletter, to see an archive of older issues, and to share updates that you might want to see included.
- We also have an office now! It is called the 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub, a co-working space on 4th Avenue in Seattle. It is a climate co-working space with more than 50 organizations! Stay tuned-I might try to get our podcasting equipment set up!
- We have a couple of cool people joining us as volunteers, researchers, and other things.
- Chloe Aman, an assistant professor at Cornell, in anthropology. She is curious to learn more about Regenerate Cascadia, Bioregionalism and the Cascadia movement, the processes we are building and modeling.
- Anna Burtmark joining us from the UK, a PhD researcher, very inspired by bio regional mapping, and might help co-develop and facilitate our 5 week regional mapping workshops in the Design School for Regenerating Earth Learning Journey
- We have a GIS (Graphic Information Systems) partnership with the University of Washington. A group of 4 different students will be helping us map planetary boundaries and thresholds within the Cascadia Bio region. We’ll also be looking at different, like, unique context indicators that might be special to this place as well as these, more broad-based kinds of interoperable frameworks. 00:25:04.697 –> 00:25:19.362
- Through the Edge Finance Accelerator that we’re a part of, we’ve started talking with Junko Nagao, located in Tucson and involved with all sorts of different things. She is interested in stepping on and helping us with grant writing and exploring different avenues.
- Bioregional confluences? Congresses? We are talking with R.3.O, the Biofi community, Karie Crisp and David HaEnke who was the founder of the 1st Ozark, Bio Regional Congresses, as well as North American Continental Congress, around the idea of hosting landscape confluences that will bring together groups and or leading into continental bio regional congresses.
- Grant submitted to the VKRF, (V. Can Rasmussen Foundation). Their focus area this year is nature centrism as a lens for organizational behavior and decision making. And we felt like Regenerate Cascadia was a great candidate for this. We worked with the Buckminster Fuller Institute as a partnership where we will be exploring our landscape team development program to get funded. We’ll find out in March.
- Submitted a NoVo Foundation application for the Spring Docket and will hear in early May.
- We are examining submitting for the EPA Thriving Communities Grant program.
Stay Connected with Regenerate Cascadia!
- Telegram is the best place to connect with a person right away – at t.me/regencascadia
- Check our main blog on https://regeneratecascadia.org
- Find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram at /regeneratecascadia
- On Twitter using cascadiadept.
- YouTube as the Department of Bioregion.