Regenerate Vashon met on Saturday, June 27, 2026, for its monthly gathering. The agenda came together in the room, as it usually does, and settled on three things: what to do with the interest generated at the Low Tide Festival, how the group should actually communicate with itself, and how to start organizing a bioregional mapping workshop for Vashon.
Following up on Low Tide
Two weeks earlier, Regenerate Vashon had shared a table at the Low Tide Festival. The group came away with several pages of email signups and, more usefully, a clear sense that the festival audience and this work are the same audience. Citizen science, regeneration, shoreline and Salish Sea health; it lined up almost exactly.
Just as valuable were the conversations with other tables. The Vashon Nature Center is standing up a youth climate justice council and looking for ways to connect young people into it. The Vashon Heritage Museum extended a standing invitation to partner on anything the group wants to do. A project focused on plankton and herring as keystone species turned out to be closely aligned. Several people asked about the Salish Sea specifically, and about connections to other islands in it. More people knew what Cascadia meant than anyone expected.
The question the group kept returning to was what to invite all of those people into.
Deciding how to talk to each other
Much of the meeting went to communication channels, which sounds like housekeeping and is not. The group had a small Google Group serving mostly as a coordination list, a Mighty Network space that nobody was using, and a Regenerate Vashon website in progress.
The decision was to keep it simple: the Google Group becomes the main channel and everyone from the Low Tide signup sheets gets added, with a welcome message going out afterward through the group itself so people learn the channel by using it. The Mighty Network stays available for organizers and can take on more later if the group finds it wants a conversational space. Adding three platforms at once was named as the reliable way to get people to use none of them.
The website came up as the place where things can actually accumulate. Sue Letsinger proposed a series of interviews with people doing work on the island, asking each of them what bioregional means to them and whether they see their own work that way, published somewhere they can live alongside links to the newsletters and green briefs already being written across Vashon. The group liked it as a use of the website that starts now rather than after everything else is built.
Two kinds of meeting
The longest thread was about structure, and it produced the shape the group still runs on. There was a real tension: the mapping workshop needs a small group actually doing organizing work, and the monthly meeting needs to stay open enough that anyone can walk in and find out what is going on. Trying to do both in one room had been making the meetings feel scattered.
What the group landed on was two tracks. The monthly meeting on the last Saturday stays general and open to anyone. A separate working group meets on its own schedule for people who want to organize the mapping workshop. Not everyone has to come to everything, and the people who show up to one can carry news to the other.
The group also agreed to hold one dedicated welcome and information session for everyone who signed up at Low Tide: introductions, a presentation on what bioregionalism and bioregional mapping are, what Regenerate Vashon is trying to do, and an open round on what people want to see.
Mapping
On the workshop itself, the group agreed it was time to move from talking about it to organizing it, and that the next couple of months could reasonably focus there. Sister landscape groups elsewhere in the bioregion were preparing their own gatherings, with Regenerate Whatcom’s scheduled for July, and there was interest in going up to see how another group runs one before Vashon commits to a format.
The framing that stuck came from thinking about the workshop as a permaculture design done at the scale of a whole island: observe what is already working, notice what is not, understand how the pieces depend on each other, and design from there, with people treated as part of the system rather than outside it.
Regenerate Vashon meets on the last Saturday of each month. Everyone is welcome.