On July 30, 2026, the South Willamette Valley Landscape of Regenerate Cascadia submitted a letter of inquiry to The Rising Foundation, requesting $20,000 through the foundation’s Youth and Education Program. The request would fund a one-year planning and partnership-building initiative to create a shared strategy for experiential learning and workforce development across the South Willamette Valley. The foundation’s board reviewed inquiries on August 1.
The proposal was written and submitted by Clare Strawn on behalf of the landscape’s stewards team.
A coalition, not a single applicant
The initiative is led by three nonprofit educational organizations that together make up the South Willamette Valley Landscape Stewards Team: Lost Valley Education Center, the Center for Rural Livelihoods, and the Prout Institute. Each brings an existing network of organizational relationships, including partnerships with Indigenous programs.
Lost Valley Education Center has been teaching the practical application of sustainable living skills since 1989, taking a holistic approach that engages students in ecological, social, and personal growth. Participants from around the world have come through its Permaculture Design Course, Holistic Sustainability Semester, Social Forestry Camp, natural building courses, farmers markets, and retreats.
The Center for Rural Livelihoods has been a center for innovation since 1981, offering youth education and workforce training with a mission to create and strengthen pathways to rural livelihoods that harmoniously advance social, economic, and ecological resilience.
The Prout Institute contributes experience in integrative economic development from international work, along with expertise in adult education and program evaluation.
The gap the proposal names
The application grows out of conversations with educators, nonprofit leaders, farmers, builders, conservation practitioners, and community organizations across the region. Two things came up repeatedly. Organizations with genuinely shared goals are not coordinating with one another. And there is no clear path between training and a living.
Many residents want skills in regenerative agriculture, ecological stewardship, natural building, and community resilience. Few coordinated systems connect that learning to long-term economic opportunity. The longer-term ambition behind the proposal is to support cooperative enterprises and other community-based economic models that keep wealth in the region.
What the planning year would do
During the planning year the coalition would convene educational institutions, nonprofits, community groups, practitioners, and employers to build a shared framework for regional collaboration, exploring where they can share curriculum, infrastructure, outreach, and administrative support while each keeps its own mission.
A Bioregional Mapping Workshop supported by Regenerate Cascadia sits at the center of the effort. That process would identify educational assets, workforce needs, existing resources, and partnership opportunities across the region, the same whole-system approach now being used by landscape groups elsewhere in the bioregion.
Organizations being engaged as prospective partners include the Upper Willamette Soil and Water Conservation District, Food for Lane County Youth Farm, Kalapuya High School, Heart-Culture Farm, and the Black Cultural Initiative, alongside other groups serving communities affected by food insecurity and limited economic opportunity.
Grant funding would support five outcomes:
- Convene at least twenty organizations and community stakeholders through facilitated planning sessions and partnership development.
- Develop a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the framework for a regional regenerative education consortium.
- Complete a regional asset map documenting educational programs, workforce needs, curriculum gaps, and partnership opportunities.
- Create a curriculum outline based on projects already in place and an aspirational direction for development.
- Agree on a shared evaluation and implementation framework for the network’s next phase.
Built to be borrowed
By the end of the grant period the coalition expects to have engaged a broad cross-section of regional partners, completed a shared partnership framework, produced a regional educational asset map, and developed a strategic implementation plan for a coordinated learning ecosystem. A phase one report will be distributed online and across the Cascadia bioregional network.
That last part matters. As with the rest of the work happening through Regenerate Cascadia and the wider bioregional movement, the aim is to build models other communities can pick up and adapt rather than one-off successes that stay put.
The proposal describes its alignment with The Rising Foundation’s values in plain terms: innovation emerging through collaboration, by connecting organizations that usually work independently toward common goals; and transparency, reflected in participatory governance through Sociocracy, open-source learning practices, and shared evaluation processes that allow continuous adaptation.
Between them, Lost Valley, the Center for Rural Livelihoods, and the Prout Institute have the facilities, the expertise, and the community relationships to run this. All three will contribute staff capacity, facilitation, outreach, and technical expertise, and provide meeting and training space.
What they are building toward is a durable framework for place-based learning and regenerative economic development in the South Willamette Valley, one that connects educational providers, community organizations, employers, and underserved communities to each other, and that outlasts any single grant.