Regenerate Vashon met on Saturday, July 25, 2026, at the Vashon Land Trust Building, the first monthly meeting after the group’s open welcome session. Several people were in the room for the first time, so it started with introductions, and the introductions turned out to be most of the point.
Around the table: a fisheries ecologist who now does data work and cares about native habitat restoration and regenerative economics; a geologist who built the Heritage Museum’s Garden of the Ancients and its permanent geology display, spent a career in research at Arco and Shell, and now runs Vashon’s tool library; an architect whose firm works on equitable school design, mass timber, and geothermal; someone with a background in linguistics, anthropology, and urban ecology who has been working on a restoration project in southwest Washington; and JC Graham, who a year ago noticed the Vashon-Maury Community Council had stopped meeting and lost most of its board, got involved, became president, and got it running again.
The Community Council question
That last introduction opened the largest thread of the meeting.
The Vashon-Maury Community Council is a 501(c)(4) organized around the geography of the island. Regenerate Vashon works under the Department of Bioregion, a 501(c)(3). Those two structures can do different things, and the group spent a while working out what that actually enables.
A (c)(4) can lobby and take positions on legislation. A (c)(3) can hold grants, carry insurance, and provide fiscal sponsorship for projects that need a nonprofit behind them. A letter of support from the Community Council attached to a local grant application carries real weight. Several people in the room had run into the same wall from different directions: a good project, a known funding opportunity, identified sites and expertise, and no organization willing to take the lead and receive the money.
The suggestion that emerged was to make it standard practice that local grant opportunities go to the Community Council for a letter of support, and to explore standing committees where the two organizations overlap. A food security committee has been proposed at the Council for some time and has not yet found a convener; regeneration was raised as another possible standing initiative. Brandon Letsinger will introduce Regenerate Vashon to the Council at its meeting on August 20.
What Whatcom did
The group heard a detailed debrief of Regenerate Whatcom’s bioregional mapping workshop, held on July 17 at Rome Grange outside Bellingham, which Brandon and Clare Attwell attended in a support role.
Whatcom ran it as a single day, roughly nine to four, with about twenty carefully invited people: elected officials, regenerative farmers, community organizations, connectors, participation from Western Washington University, and Indigenous participation. Breakfast on arrival, a real lunch built from local farms.
The structure was three rounds of mapping on large printed base maps with transparent overlays. The physical landscape first, then areas of degradation, then areas already healing, then a full social layer. In between came a knowledge fair where people added what they knew to shared sheets, and a round asking who was not in the room and needed to be there next time. The last stretch went to small groups on what conditions would let a genuine shared restorative vision emerge for the Nooksack watershed. Nobody gave negative feedback. People left energized.
Two things carried over into Vashon’s thinking. The first was leverage points: places where a small, well-chosen intervention produces a disproportionate result, and the observation that moments of disaster tend also to be moments of opening. In Whatcom that was flooding. On Vashon, water quality in Quartermaster Harbor came up as the obvious candidate. The second was that a mapping workshop is not supposed to solve everything. It is one day, with a clear output, that can be shared with the community afterward and shown to funders.
October 10
The group set Saturday, October 10, 2026, as the date for Vashon’s bioregional mapping workshop, with a venue being confirmed. Planning is underway: a contact list is being consolidated, invitations are being drafted across sectors, and there was strong interest in budgeting honoraria so that participation is possible for people whose presence matters, including representation from the Puyallup Tribe.
Before that, the group plans a field trip to the Vashon Heritage Museum to look at maps together. Bruce Morser is revising his 1750 map of the island with newly learned material, and the museum’s permanent exhibit committee has been discussing commissioning a map of a future Vashon. The idea of the mapping workshop feeding into that future map, and of a panel asking which future the island actually wants, got an immediate yes in the room.
What regeneration means here
Someone asked for an operational definition, not an abstract one. What would it look like on Vashon if we were actually doing it?
The answers came in sectors. An island that can feed itself: heirloom seed preservation and native seed collection built into shared infrastructure rather than depending on one or two dedicated people; the island’s greenhouse capacity, once twenty-three glass houses growing produce for shipment to Alaska, now foundations being cleared of blackberries by goats; compost and waste handled on island instead of barged off; shorelines, forest, and the water of the Salish Sea; and an economy that keeps value in place.
The group also read back its own vision statement, written earlier and used in the February presentation: a compassionate, multi-generational, mutually supportive, resilient human community and culture integrated into the island ecosystem, living in ways that consider seven generations forward and in recognition of seven generations past, on an island whose ecosystem supports broader bioregional health through clean water, healthy soil, old-growth forests, and resilient, biodiverse food webs.
Where the website comes in
Vashon has had a shared environmental newsletter before. Around thirty groups contributed updates, and it ran until the people carrying it burned out. Green briefs still appear in the Beachcomber. The group has been circling the question of whether Regenerate Vashon should pick that thread back up, and how to do it without recreating the same dependency on one volunteer editor.
The direction is a website where groups can post their own updates and a directory that organizations can add themselves to, rather than a newsletter someone has to chase contributions for. That said, the room was honest that a purely passive system tends to go quiet, and that at some point this needs paid capacity rather than another volunteer. As one person put it, there is enormous demand for volunteers on this island, and anything set up with paid staff will be more sustainable and more effective.
Regenerate Vashon meets on the last Saturday of each month. Everyone is welcome.