The call is a community-building space for Landscape Groups to gather and share announcements, events, and stories from their landscapes. It’s also a space for inter-group dialogue and co-learning.
Creating the Conditions for the Emergence of Cascadia Landscape Hubs
Landscape Stewards from across the Cascadia bioregion gathered for the second Community Steward Call—a moment to hear from one another, while slowing down and uplifting what is beginning to take shape through the Regenerate Cascadia Landscape Hub Cultivator (LHC). As one steward put it, “It’s rare to have space like this—to pause in the middle of the work and actually feel what’s emerging.”
The call came at a meaningful point in the first year of the LHC pilot. Still early in the process, stewards are already sensing both the promise and the complexity of what it means to work bioregionally. There is excitement, uncertainty, and a shared willingness to learn together. “We’re not here because we have it figured out,” another steward reflected. “We’re here because we know we can’t do this alone.” This valuable sensemaking is fostering trust, confirming that the stewards are moving in the right direction within their individual group settings.
Embracing the “richness of the learning spaces”
The Landscape Hub Cultivator is a year-long cohort experience designed to support up to ten place-based landscape groups “doing the work” as they explore what it means to function as Landscape Hubs—locally rooted, relationship-centered organizing bodies that can coordinate regenerative action, steward long-term strategies, and help resources flow where they are most needed. Through shared learning sessions, steward calls, mapping exercises, story-based reporting, and ongoing peer exchange, the program creates space for landscapes to learn with one another, hearing narratives similar and resonating, applying lessons learned, unpacking challenges, and celebrating successes.
Rather than prescribing a single model, the LHC emphasizes experimentation and adaptation. Stewards are invited to test practices such as bioregional mapping, collaborative governance, and narrative storytelling in ways that make sense for their place. As one steward shared, “This feels less like a program and more like a container—something that holds us while we figure out what our landscape is actually asking of us.”
Marking this second community call, the 10 landscape groups and roughly 40 landscape stewards, work across diverse ecoregions, The landscapes themselves vary widely—urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, coastal, river-based, and island communities—but stewards are united by a shared commitment to care for place, deepen relationships, and build regenerative systems that can endure. “What connects us isn’t sameness,” one steward noted, “it’s a shared responsibility to the places we love.”
Where We Are in the Landscape Hub Cultivator
Embracing the “richness of learning spaces”
The Regenerate Cascadia team shared how the Landscape Hub Cultivator has moved through its early onboarding and community-building phase and is now settling into learning sessions and inquiry. Rather than rushing toward predefined outcomes, the emphasis has been on a “relational layer of working together” both coordinated and cooperative. So far, this has included:
- Weekly office hours with program administrators for practical questions and support
- A shared online space, Mighty Networks, where stewards exchange resources, stories, and recordings
- Monthly small group steward calls to stay connected across landscapes
What has become clear is that this slower, relational pace is not a delay—it is the work. By spending time mapping relationships, noticing patterns, and listening carefully to place and to one another, the community is laying the foundation for sustainable processes, building generational resources.
Telling Our Stories Together
As the cultivator moves into its next phase, attention is turning toward story-based reporting and preparation for a Landscape Showcase event planned for early February. This will be a chance for landscape groups to share what they are learning and doing, not as isolated projects, but as part of a larger, interconnected bioregional story.
Alongside this, stewards are beginning to explore fundraising and grant opportunities, with a shared understanding that resources tend to flow more naturally when relationships and clarity of purpose are rooted in place.
A Shared Insight: Relationships Are the Infrastructure
What the LHC has identified as paramount is the idea of a “minimum viable process” meaning that by being gentle, kind, and intentional with relations, this process can hopefully avoid the pitfalls that often appear later when things scale rapidly.
Stewards reflected on how easy it is to focus on tools, technologies, or funding mechanisms—and how fragile those efforts can be if the relational layer is missing, naming the importance of slowing down, tending trust, and resisting the urge to skip ahead.
Voices from the Landscapes
Reports from each of the ten Landscape Group Stewards.
South Willamette Valley: Learning Networks and Rural Regeneration
Stewards from the South Willamette Valley spoke from a place of long-standing relationship, with some partners having worked together for more than a decade. Their current focus includes building a bioregional education network and exploring what a regenerative rural economy could look like. The groups’ connections reach across cultural, food systems, permaculture, cooperative business development and high school youth, and also forest and wetland remediation; building leaders for next generations.
What stood out was their emphasis on vulnerability—experiencing grace to form bonds, allowing trust to grow through shared experience.
Fraser Lowland: Food, Stories, and Systemic Change
In the Fraser Lowland, stewards are focusing on food resilience in the wake of floods, heat waves, and systemic disruption. This group’s approach weaves together mapping, storytelling, and convening—grounded in the belief that culture and narrative can shape what systems are possible, focused on healing the soil through lifting up leaders to heal communities. Bioregionalism methods can do just that.
By engaging farmers, community members, and impact investors, they are exploring how food systems can become not just resilient, but anti-fragile—capable of adapting and strengthening through change.
Mount Olympus: Culture, Housing, and Rural Abundance
Working in a highly rural and dispersed region, Mount Olympus stewards are addressing the intersections of culture, housing, and farm-based livelihoods. Their work is deeply relational, rooted in bringing people together, bridging separateness, and helping communities recognize the abundance that already exists, even when resources feel scarce.
Cooperative models and shared infrastructure are emerging as ways to support long-term stewardship without losing local identity. Cross generational relation building is integral to their work.
Duwamish River Valley: Listening First in an Industrial Landscape
Stewards shared the complexities of working in an industrial corridor shaped by pollution, environmental injustice, and long histories of harm. Their approach begins with humility—listening to communities and organizations who have been doing this work for decades, including state and local regulating agencies, while working to build trust with the Duwamish Tribe and river-adjacent neighborhoods.
Examining the language being used is a current focus; intentional, speaking with clarity about objectives. Rather than arriving with answers, the group is centering support, connection, and making visible the work already underway.
Whatcom County: Water as an Unifying Thread
In Whatcom County, stewards are drawing on years of collaboration. Water has become a central organizing theme—public events: walks, films, and conversations, inviting people to reconnect with the watersheds which sustain them. This group has built a robust public engagement effort including website development, a recurring newsletter with a good subscriber list, and sharing stories from other groups.
The stewards are asking themselves ‘how do we want to represent ourselves’? The bioregional mapping function will reveal insights, gaps, and opportunities, which is supported by a growing network of relationships.
Skagit Valley: Starting with the a Community of Practice
Skagit Valley stewards described beginning simply: weekly potlucks, structured conversations, and honest check-ins about what support is needed and what people are excited about. These gatherings are helping relationships form organically, creating a sense of belonging that will guide whatever comes next.
For now, supporting small farms and strengthening community ties are at the heart of their work.
Vashon Island: Weaving an Island Story
On Vashon Island, stewards are building on decades of informal bioregional practice—land trusts, watershed restoration, cooperative farming, and food access initiatives. Clarifying a shared story of place is the connective tissue which bridges their preparations to focus efforts toward challenges like housing, transportation, and affordability on the island. The stewards and people on Vashon Island also integrate disaster resilience planning into these efforts.
Stewards are sensitive to the perceived existing silos amongst groups. As this group asks themselves ‘what strategy do we take’? stewards are mindful, taking careful consideration, crafting invitations for conversation; potlucks for cross-pollinating across groups.
Greater Victoria: Knowledge, Memory, and the Salish Sea
Stewards from Greater Victoria spoke with pride to the extraordinary richness already present in their region—from Indigenous knowledge holders to research institutions and ecosystem restoration initiatives. Their vision includes building a living bioregional knowledge commons, preserving oral histories, and strengthening coordination across the Salish Sea.
There was a strong sense that much of what is needed already exists—and that the work laid at their feet is being revealed as a need for slow connection and care. The group predicts that doing the work of bioregional mapping will be transformational for this group.
What We’re Learning Together
Across all landscapes, stewards had points in common: named shared learnings:
- Relationship-building is not a precursor to the work—it is the work
- Mapping and storytelling will help reveal what is already alive and connected, or disjointed
- Long-standing efforts deserve respect and integration, not replacement
Many stewards touched upon the systems-level thinking necessary for their regenerative work to be sustainable, especially as next generations take interest and discover possibility and reckon with need.
Something Is Taking Root
As the call came to a close, stewards offered brief reflections, while expressing gratitude, inspiration, and a growing sense of coherence. While much of the work is still forming, there was a shared feeling that something meaningful is taking root across the bioregion.
The Landscape Hub Cultivator is not trying to lead with certainty or control. Instead, it is creating space—for listening, for relationships, and for emergence. The Landscape Stewards embody an openness as a quiet strength in a time of profound uncertainty.
Join the Regenerate Cascadia Landscapes Showcase events
Over two days in February 2026, Thursday and Friday, 2/5 and 2/6 the public is invited to hear from each of the ten Landscape Groups. Learn more about their efforts to regenerate Cascadia in their respective landscapes.
- Day One (Feb 7): https://luma.com/3lcakuk4
- Day Two (Feb 6): https://luma.com/t93yqfjb
Watch the Community Steward Call 2 on YouTube.
