Over the past week we sent off three funding requests (one of them only a first intake form), each aimed at a different piece of the same idea: the people looking after Cascadia’s landscapes should have real resources behind them, and a say in the tools they rely on. None of them is decided, and we’ll tell you plainly when we hear. Here’s what we asked for and why.
The first went in on October 15, in response to an early call from a new regenerative finance fund that’s still taking shape. It was an intake form and not a formal application, a way for the fund to build its pipeline, and we answered it as an intermediary: Regenerate Cascadia, working with our Landscape Groups, can help find the places where capital would do the most good locally and connect it to the people already doing the work.
The second went to Kinship Earth, a funder that backs local leaders in the places they live. Its Flow Fund brought us in as a flow funder back in 2024, so we’ve worked together before, and we sent our new request on October 18. It would help us seed new groups and keep supporting the ones we have. Gaya Herrington of Cascadia BioFi helped shape the plan, and Kinship Earth’s committee is expected to take it up soon.
The third went in on October 21, when the Department of Bioregion, together with the First Person Network Cooperative, applied to Communities Leading on AI, the first open call from Humanity AI, a five-year philanthropic initiative focused on making sure artificial intelligence serves the public good. Our proposal starts with a plain question: who is AI working for? The idea is that over three years, stewards in five pilot landscapes in Washington and Oregon would decide how digital tools, including AI, get used in their own communities, and the tools would belong to them. The network would move off platforms we don’t control and into a shared home we own together, any AI would run on open models and hardware the community controls, and whatever we learn would be shared as open source with place-based groups across the country. Humanity AI plans to invite top applicants to submit more materials in December and to announce awards in early spring 2027.
Together they point toward where we’d like to go: small grants to get new groups started, funded teams in more landscapes and, if the Humanity AI request comes through, digital tools that belong to the people using them. Underneath all three is something we’ve said for a while: money moves better once people have a shared picture of their place and a way to decide together.
Thank you to Gaya Herrington and to our partners at the First Person Network Cooperative. We’ll share what we hear.
Featured image: the Thompson and Fraser rivers meeting at Lytton, British Columbia. Photo: The Interior / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
