On Saturday, November 7, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific, more than 40 people from across Cascadia and beyond gathered on Zoom for the 2027 Cascadia Kickoff Jam, the first Jam hosted by Regenerate Cascadia. More than 60 had registered. People joined from Humboldt Bay and Mount Shasta in the south to Vancouver and the Fraser Lowland in the north, from Butte, Montana, in the upper Columbia basin, to the islands of the Salish Sea, and friends dialed in from Hawaii and upstate New York.
It was our first open gathering for the wider community since the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress in September, and much of the Congress’s energy was still in the room. We could not be more grateful. Thank you to everyone who came, to those who stayed for all three hours on a Saturday morning, and to those who registered but could not join us. We mapped your locations too, and the spread across the bioregion was a joy to see.
How the day worked
A Jam is a new kind of gathering for Regenerate Cascadia: unhurried, mostly small-group conversation, with just enough talking from the front to share context. Emily McGill, our Community Steward, hosted. Co-founder Brandon Letsinger traced the work back to the 2023 activation tour, when more than a thousand people in 14 communities said the same thing: the regenerative work is already happening, but the people doing it are isolated and under-resourced.
Emily opened with a land acknowledgement for the Coast Salish territories where she lives and invited everyone to share one from their own place. Brandon then read Tijn Tjoelker’s poem “Bioregioning,” which begins with a line many of us carried through the day:
We have maps to everywhere except to our true home.
Four rounds of small-group conversation followed. Where are you, and what are you celebrating? What brings you here? Which topics and places do you want to explore? What are you leaving with? The first three ended with a report back to everyone. During the break we opened a “hallway” room for side conversations, because at the Congress much of the magic happened in the hallways. A recording of the whole-group portions will be shared with participants in the community of practice.
The Cascadian Community of Practice is open
The heart of the day was an invitation. The Cascadian Community of Practice is an online gathering place, built on the Mighty Networks platform, for anyone who shares Regenerate Cascadia’s vision and wants to meet others doing the work. Members share what they are learning, ask each other for help, and find events and groups near them.
It is early. New members see a few open spaces at first, such as a community feed, events and announcements, and more open up as people take part in more of Regenerate Cascadia’s programs. Emily called this the founding foundations stage: the soil is being prepared and the plan is still being mapped, so early members will help shape it. Feedback and glitches are welcome. Join the Cascadian Community of Practice.
In plain words
The words can be confusing, so here is a short guide, from the lightest commitment to the deepest.
- Community of practice: a shared online home for anyone who wants to learn from others working to regenerate Cascadia. It is the simplest way in.
- Seed Group: a small group that gathers around a place. It might host events, map local resources or write down how it will work together, and it can grow into a Landscape Group.
- Topic Group: a group that gathers around an idea, such as water, food, money or learning, and reaches across many places. It might share knowledge, spark collaborations or create resources anyone can use. Topic Groups may one day grow into guilds, a later step Regenerate Cascadia is not yet ready to support.
- Landscape Group: a place-based team that works under the Department of Bioregion’s 501(c)(3) status, so it can receive grants and donations and run projects. No Seed Group is required to take that step.
What we heard when we asked what brings you here
Each room reported back, and a few threads ran through almost all of them.
- Ships that are sailing. One room described moving from feeling aboard a sinking ship to joining ones that are sailing. We do not yet know exactly where we are headed, but we are going together and picking up people along the way.
- Local connection first. Rooms turned up neighbors who had not yet connected. People in Blaine and Bellingham, for example, realized they should be talking, and several rooms said the best connections were the ones close to home.
- Elders and generations. People who have worked on this for decades said Regenerate Cascadia is a good place to practice elderhood, even online, and asked for ways to honor that stage of life and pass knowledge to younger people.
- Funding that lasts. Teams are ready to grow and need funding paths they can trust. People pointed to the risk of depending on a single funder and to groups that have diversified, and asked that those lessons be shared.
- Culture and staying power. Several rooms said the deepest need is to regenerate the culture of living in place, by breaking down silos and rebuilding the social fabric, and to prevent burnout in people who are working on timescales longer than a lifetime.
Six conversations on topics and places
After the break, people proposed ideas and voted, and six rooms formed. Here is what each one reported.
Regenerative finance
How to fund regeneration for the long haul.
- The challenges are long-term, so the funding has to be too, and it should draw on more than one source.
- The room discussed state and municipal banking, with examples from different places, and private investment, and noted the risk of reinventing wheels that others have already built.
- One clear suggestion: bring in a professional project manager to formalize the process, with budgets and forecasts, so the work can attract steady, sustainable funding rather than one-off gifts.
- Two conversations that began at the Congress, one on regenerative economics and one on bringing funders into this work, are already continuing and may merge.
Becoming a Seed Group
A practical room for people ready to start something where they live.
- The first steps are simple: tell us about your place, find your first few people and take one small step in the next month. Nothing is expected of a new group but enthusiasm and commitment.
- People starting groups asked for tools beyond Google Docs, a page for each group on regeneratecascadia.org, meeting times other than midday Wednesdays, and help making connections.
- Over the next three months, our Community Steward will host a recurring drop-in for people shaping a Seed Group or Topic Group.
Regenerative elderhood and mentorship
A room with deep roots in the bioregional movement.
- Participants traced the lineage of bioregionalism through the 1980s and earlier congresses, and how much today’s work stands on it.
- They imagined a wisdom circle or mentorship inside Regenerate Cascadia, so that elders’ hard-earned experience can help newer leaders avoid old mistakes, while recognizing that today’s technology and communication are very different.
- A related conversation suggested a ceremony to recognize elders coming of age and the role they are meant to play as wisdom keepers.
- The clearest ask was a low-friction way to pair elders with newer leaders. We heard it, and we would like to start there.
Bioregional mapping
A room with a long list of ideas.
- Regenerate Whatcom held its first mapping workshop this summer, and 16 of the 17 people who came returned for its follow-up gathering.
- A Topic Group could build a foundations library on what bioregional mapping is, why it matters and its history, which runs deep in Cascadia, along with a practical toolkit and self-guided resources.
- Other ideas: a regular open meeting, field trips, webinars, and partnerships with college geography and mapping programs. One participant mapped her own home and said it changed her relationship to place.
- What comes after the map matters too: storytelling, documentation, ways to tell what success looks like, a festival of what works (and what does not), a bioregional atlas and a shared knowledge commons.
Seed saving
Seeds as a way to tend place and culture.
- Seeds carry stories, culture and history, and they adapt to the places where they are grown. Tending them is tending culture and bioregional awareness.
- They are also a bridge across economies, politics and beliefs, and a way to take power back from industrial agriculture.
- Saving seed is one of the most accessible ways for gardeners to think in cycles and sovereignty. Whatcom County has built seed-saving knowledge for 25 years, and the room talked about helping Vashon Island get started.
- The Salish Seed Guild is looking for its next convener. If that is you, write to steward@regeneratecascadia.org.
Learning hubs
Places where people learn by doing, on the land.
- A hub can be a farm, a living room, a co-housing community or a learning center: a network of in-person places, with online tools that point people to them.
- Young people finishing school or looking for something different are craving hands-on experience, from natural building and seed saving to farming. A network of farms and teachers could offer mentorship and apprenticeship, not just one site.
- Many useful skills are simple, tested and easy to share, and knowledge can travel across distance. Sharing costs time more than money.
- People offered to connect their networks, bridge rural and urban places, and support young people and one another.
More ideas on the table
These did not get a room this time. None are forgotten, and any of them could become a Topic Group.
- Scrappy regenerative agriculture: food and water sovereignty, and farming methods (dryland and tree-based among them) that farmers with no access to cash or credit can use.
- Disaster preparedness.
- Transitional technology: resilient, decentralized tools such as mesh networks, technology that respects privacy, and patient help with technology for people of every age. One reading suggestion from the room: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.
- Shared communications: a simple, common explanation of why regenerative practices matter in any community, so no group has to start from scratch.
Where new groups may take root
Emily showed a map of Cascadia with the Landscape Groups already at work and speculative dots for places where she knows someone who might start a Seed Group or Topic Group. By the end of the day, several of those dots looked real.
- Southwest Cascadia. People from Humboldt Bay, the Mount Shasta area and the Klamath met for the first time, found they had all felt a little left out in what they affectionately call the “back left foot” of the map, and planned to meet in person. Before the call had been over for an hour, the first Seed Group application arrived, proposing a region from Cape Mendocino to the Rogue River and from the coast to the Klamath Basin.
- East of the Cascades. Someone in the Methow Valley is ready to plant a Seed Group. In Spokane, someone looking for neighbors heard a good idea from the room: widen the circle, or begin with a shared concern such as wildfire, which can draw people from across the Inland Northwest.
- The Columbia River. From the upper basin in Montana to the Gorge, people proposed a river-systems conversation that follows the water and the connections between rivers.
- The Salish Sea and its islands. The hundreds of islands share saltwater and many of the same questions, and several people asked for an island conversation, and for one on the Salish Sea as a whole.
- Landscape Groups already at work. Landscape Groups from Whatcom, Whidbey, Vashon, the Duwamish River Valley, the Fraser Lowland, Skagit and the South Willamette Valley were represented, so new groups will not be starting alone.
The year ahead
- Next three months: a pilot for Seed Groups and Topic Groups. Our Community Steward will host a recurring drop-in for people shaping a group. It is currently planned for Wednesdays, and we will confirm times with people who apply, since several said midday is hard.
- Every season: more Jams. “Kickoff” means there will be more, and we hope to hold a gathering like this each season.
- January or February 2027: Bioregional Movement Envisioning. Two open online gatherings in the spirit of an unconference, one for everyone in Cascadia and one for the wider bioregional movement across North America.
- All of 2027: a year of Confluencing, Converging and Congressing. Regenerate Cascadia and the Department of Bioregion will support gatherings that people organize in their own places, across places and together as a movement.
- Mapping workshops: Regenerate Greater Victoria on November 21 and Regenerate Vashon on January 16, 2027.
- Funders and elders: over the year we hope to convene funders into a community of practice of their own, and to begin pairing elders with newer leaders.
How to take part
- Join the community. Join the Cascadian Community of Practice. Questions, or want a hand getting started? Write to Emily at steward@regeneratecascadia.org.
- Pitch a group. Start a Seed Group around a place or a Topic Group around an idea. If you already raised your hand on the call, please fill out the form anyway. It helps us test the process.
- Tell us how it went. If you were there, the two-minute survey is still open.
With gratitude
Thank you to everyone who came, to the volunteers who took notes, and to the Landscape Stewards who shared what they have learned. Thank you, too, to everyone who asked hard questions and everyone who answered them with generosity.
When Emily asked for one word to close the day, the answers included blessed, hopeful, inspired, supported, illuminated, relieved, warm, flowing, encouraged, satiated, motivated, ecstatic, family, web weaving and catalyzed. One person offered “darkly optimistic,” which we suspect many of us share.
Come as you are, bring a neighbor, and tell us what you plant.
Featured image: participants at the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress, Camp Cedar Ridge, Vernonia, Oregon, in September.