On the evening of August 20, Regenerate Vashon was introduced to the Vashon-Maury Community Council. It was our first formal introduction to the island body that has served as a forum for community concerns on Vashon-Maury for decades, and it marked a step from a small initiating team into a more public conversation about what regeneration at island scale could look like here.
What we brought
The presentation began where bioregionalism begins: with the observation that the boundaries which matter most are the ones the land already draws. Watersheds, ridgelines, tides, and the paths water takes to the sea describe a place more honestly than a county line does. Gary Snyder put the invitation plainly decades ago: find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.
From there the talk moved through the nested scales Regenerate Cascadia works at, from the whole bioregion down through major watersheds and ecoregions to what we call a discrete landscape. A discrete landscape is home: the scale at which people can actually coordinate, make decisions, and take action together. Vashon-Maury Island is one of those landscapes, and it is an unusually legible one. Small enough to know, large enough to matter, and bounded by water on every side.
We also situated Vashon in the wider network. Regenerate Vashon is one of ten landscape groups across the Cascadia bioregion, together holding around thirty-eight landscape stewards across three ecoregions and two nation states. That matters practically, not just rhetorically: what the Whatcom group learns from running a bioregional mapping workshop is available to Vashon before Vashon runs its own.
Where Regenerate Vashon actually is
We were direct about the stage of the work. Regenerate Vashon formed as an initiating team in November 2025 and is now about eight stewards. We are just starting out. Right now that looks like conversations, potlucks, and the first gatherings where people who have been caring for this island separately begin to see each other clearly.
The nearer-term work is a bioregional mapping workshop, planned for this autumn. Mapping in this sense is less about cartography than about attention: gathering what islanders already know about water, soil, forests, food, and the relationships between them into one shared picture, so the island can see itself whole. Priorities follow from that picture, and the beginnings of a shared strategy follow from priorities.
Looking further out, in 2027 we expect to pilot micro-grants and flow funding, allocating modest amounts through a participatory process to work already happening on Vashon. Starting small and participatory is deliberate. It is how a community learns to make funding decisions together before larger sums are at stake.
A question worth sitting with
The heart of the presentation was less a proposal than a question put to the room. Everywhere we look, people and organizations on this island are already doing the work. So how do we come together to visualize, connect, and support what is already happening? How do we grow the relationships, trust, and social infrastructure needed to make shared decisions, set priorities, and move resources as part of a coherent plan, not just here on one island but across the Salish Sea and the wider bioregion?
Regenerate Vashon does not intend to replace any of the good work already underway here. There are more organizations, land stewards, farmers, artists, and volunteers doing it than any one group could catalogue. Our role is connective tissue.
What comes next
We closed by asking what a partnership between Regenerate Vashon and the Community Council could look like, including how a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4) might complement one another, each with a whole-island focus and its own distinct niche. That conversation is open and we are glad it is.
Since the presentation, Council leadership has already begun referring inquiries about island mapping and environmental work toward Regenerate Vashon, which is exactly the kind of quiet connective flow we hoped for.
If you were in the room, thank you. If you were not and this sounds like something you want to be part of, we would like to hear from you. Write to vashon@regeneratecascadia.org, or read more at regeneratevashon.org.