On Tuesday night, Regenerate Cascadia held the last classroom of the Landscape Hub Cultivator’s first year, closing out a year of Tuesday nights on Zoom. Much of the evening was people saying thank you, and Regenerate Cascadia would like to say it here as well.
Clare Attwell opened with three breaths (one for our own bodies, one for the neighborhoods, trees and birds around us, and one for the wider world that sustains us) and a short reading from the late Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese about fire, evening light and being alive. Then the group did what you do at harvest and looked at what grew.
That is the slide the evening opened with: ten Landscape Groups, 38 Landscape Stewards, three ecoregions (the Salish Sea, the Columbia River and the Willamette Valley), and a community of about 600 members that reaches roughly 150 regenerative groups, organizations and businesses. The legend also lists $80,000 distributed to Landscape Groups and $30,000 in flow funding to landscape projects. Regenerate Cascadia is proud of every one of those numbers, but the names around the tree tell the real story.
Co-founder Brandon Letsinger went back to the question that started all of this: what does it take to regenerate a watershed, and then a whole bioregion? When Regenerate Cascadia traveled around the bioregion on its activation tour, listening to people in their own landscapes, the same lessons kept coming up. The regenerative work is already happening. It almost never has funding behind it, though, and a lot of the people doing it are volunteers close to burning out. People doing nearly identical work a few miles apart, sometimes for decades, had never met, and islands facing the same wildfire and water questions were each solving them alone. What was needed was a way to connect people and help them see each other’s work, with real support behind it.
The Cultivator was Regenerate Cascadia’s attempt at that missing layer: a place where stewards could learn from each other across watersheds, map where they live and build the teams that can hold the work, with the longer goal of a funded core team in every landscape. Regenerate Cascadia calls that goal a Landscape Hub and is still on the way to it. This first year was about the steps that come before it: telling the story of a place, holding a bioregional mapping workshop, and testing small amounts of flow funding to see how trust travels. Regeneration strategies are next.
The year did not go exactly as planned. The program was built around a funding timeline that changed, and money expected in the spring arrived later and in a different shape. Because Regenerate Cascadia is a program of the Department of Bioregion, the work could be carried through those months, and the stewards carried it too. It was said on Tuesday night and is worth repeating here: we are proud that we are still here, and proud that you are still here.
What the stewards told us
Participants broke into three rooms to talk about the year, and what came back was specific. Whatcom’s mapping workshop was a big one for them, and they see it now as the start of the follow-through. Whidbey Island’s team reported that their water guide was headed for a second printing before it had even officially launched. Greater Victoria is getting ready for its own mapping workshop, with new people stepping up to form a core team. In the South Willamette Valley, stewards have spent the year building relationships across the food sector, and a team of students has been exploring a town. Skagit named the shared values that have come out of the process, and the pleasure of working from whatever enlivens you. And Whidbey and Vashon have each become a place on their island where neighbors from different projects meet.
The gaps were useful too. People want more funding, of course. They want practical help with mapping workshops, including time with groups who’ve run one, to hear how they handled the logistics and the data and got from interviews to an actual document. A number of teams are skeleton crews and want wider circles around them, and one room asked for better ways to reach neighbors beyond the people who already show up. Most of the stewards said the community itself was what mattered most, because it kept them from feeling isolated.
The next season
Emily McGill, Regenerate Cascadia’s Community Steward, laid out what comes next, and Regenerate Cascadia is excited about it. Support will be shaped to each Landscape Group instead of one size for all: one-on-one sessions, office hours, a Landscape Group Handbook, and a resource page in the community of practice. We will help groups promote their events, starting with ones Whatcom and Whidbey have coming up. The goal is that by the new year, any group that wants a flexible shared home for its files and tools has one.
Regenerate Cascadia will keep cultivating Seed Groups, Topic Groups and the Cascadian Community of Practice, the wider circle where new volunteers find their way in. In midwinter we will take up questions about regeneration strategies and BioFi governance together, and in December we will close out the year with a circle.
Groups also said they need better ways to tell their story to neighbors, so we are working on short printed materials and tabling kits. We are also pulling together how fiscal sponsorship through the Department of Bioregion can work for a Landscape Group that wants to accept grants and donations for local events. Everyone is welcome at the 2027 Cascadia Kickoff Jam on November 7, where Seed and Topic Groups start to take shape.
Closing reflections also turned to cryptobiotic soil crust, a subject familiar to anyone who has been to office hours. Emily McGill had framed the evening with mycelium, and the crust offered a second image from the Southwest: the living layer that gives seeds and roots something to hold when there is almost no water, and keeps the soil from blowing away as dust.
The evening ended with one sentence from each person. People talked about gratitude, about being surprised that a year had gone by, about how good it is to know everyone else is out there, and about the folks who held the space. Clare Attwell closed with a message worth repeating: Regenerate Cascadia is not going away, and neither are the stewards. To everyone who showed up on Tuesday nights this past year, thank you.