A Regenerate Cascadia Hub is a place-based group that represents a discrete landscape. It works to weave together, connect, empower, and support on-the-ground and regenerative work communities to administer a bioregional fund within that landscape. The Hubs work together with a network of hubs in their watershed, ecoregion, and Cascadia bioregion as a whole, with the long-term purpose of regenerating, restoring, and bettering the area they serve for all inhabitants. Each Hub has a Steward Team and at least one Backbone Steward who helps with getting the word out and information on the website. If managing funds, the Steward team is also accountable for basic reporting and administrative requirements and can undertake its projects.
A Regenerate Hub emerges from a Community Group, a place-based group representing a discrete landscape. It works with on-the-ground communities to administer a bioregional fund within that landscape. It collaborates through a network of ecoregional councils and a Bioregional Congress with long-term vision and governance. Each Hub has a Backbone Team accountable for basic reporting and administrative requirements and can undertake its projects.
Each Hub stewards a digital Bioregional Learning Center (responsible for stewarding information around the whole landscape), as well as a network of bioregional learning sites (places within the landscape where bioregional learning happens), responsible for maintaining an information commons for the place that the Hub represents, which works to develop and maintain:
One of the most important activities a Hub can undertake is creating a portfolio of Regenerative Projects within its landscape. These projects will be funded by the bioregional regeneration fund and part of creating a landscape budget. It is important to work with these groups also to create a map of the discrete landscape and to work with all present groups to weave these areas together in the future.
Each hub also contributes to and maintains and informational commons for that place. This is a publicly available archive of information related to the story of place, layers of stewardship, measurements, verification and reporting, and holds the broader vision and budget in a way that is nested, inter-operable, and replicable.
Each Hub will be responsible for administering a portion of a Cascadia regeneration fund to projects within their landscapes, as determined by the regenerative communities in that landscape. They are a key point between larger-level funding and the local communities and projects. This includes mapping regenerative communities and projects, identifying projects that may be missing, identifying needed areas of support, and then weaving together these projects collaboratively into a shared vision and portfolio of projects able to receive funding, draft budgets, and planning on a landscape scale.
Fill out the Regenerate Cascadia Hub Application Form, and have at least 3 Stewards who agree to be the Regenerate Guild Stewardship Team, and identify at least one person as a “Backbone Steward” who will take on the responsibility of making sure events and report backs are added to the website.
To become a Regenerate Hub, Guild, or Project, group Stewards must fill out an application on the website that includes the name of the stewards, the name of the Hub, a basic description of their connection to Regenerate Cascadia’s mission and upload a Group Agreement that lays out and agrees to our terms and conditions for handling people’s data, organizational policies, and the basic requirements of what it means to be a Hub, Guild, or Project, as well as the Backbone Team.
If the group plans to handle money within its first year, it must also agree to basic nonprofit reporting requirements and identify a “Treasurer.”
This all starts with a sensemaking and bioregional mapping process that a group or coordinator undertakes to help determine the frameworks that will be important to include for this place, which will include filling out a template for what that may look like. This will include:
When finished, this document can be used for a broad-based review and opened up to community feedback and critique.
A Regenerate Cascadia Seed Group is created when you have your first Regenerate Cascadia meetup. It can last for as many meetings as necessary until the group has grown, desires to grow, and becomes organized enough to become a Regenerate Cascadia Hub.
If you would like to start a hub or guild and have 3 more people who can serve as “Stewards” for the group, apply to start a Hub.
If you are just getting started, let us know in the application.
We’d love to share an announcement and find people to help get your group off the ground.
After an initial onboarding session, you will be provided a link to the online application and invited to apply.
Is Inactive for more than three months.
The leadership team decides to dissolve the group.
If the RC Admin Team or Board of Directors feels the activities harm Regenerate Cascadia or put other projects or groups at risk.
Upon dissolution, the group’s assets will be archived and held for six months, and as long as the group is in good standing, it can be restarted at any time.
A Regenerate Cascadia Hub is a place-based group that represents a discrete landscape. It works to weave together, connect, empower, and support on-the-ground and regenerative work communities to administer a bioregional fund within that landscape. The Hubs work together with a network of hubs in their watershed, ecoregion, and Cascadia bioregion as a whole, with the long-term purpose of regenerating, restoring, and bettering the area they serve for all inhabitants. Each Hub has a Steward Team and at least one Backbone Steward who helps with getting the word out and information on the website. If managing funds, the Steward team is also accountable for basic reporting and administrative requirements and can undertake its projects.
Regenerate Hub, Regenerate Guild, Project, and Bioregional Learning Center or Site is a very specific term used in Regenerate Cascadia as a broader organization and movement, and it offers many benefits. Each of these is a specific program of Regenerate Cascadia and exists under the 501(c)3 umbrella of Regenerate Cascadia, receiving the benefits of being a part of a federally recognized nonprofit organization.
If you are interested in Fiscal Sponsorship for your group or project, we invite you to join us for a board meeting, a staff meeting, or a one-on-one Zoom call with Clare, Brandon, or our program officer – to introduce yourself and the project – and get to know us a bit better as well.
After receiving your document, we will be in touch with you within a week for further review. When ready, your application will be reviewed by our staff and board of directories and the final step will be signing a Memo of Understanding between your project and Regenerate Cascadia.
Before starting this process, people should know that applications can take up to 2 months to approve and must be approved by our board of directors. However, the more familiar we are with your project and the more able we talk through things, the faster the process will be. We thank you ahead of time for your understanding. When you submit, we’ll follow up within the week and can also talk with you a bit more about your schedule.
Before submitting, we highly recommend discussing this application and budget with a Regenerate Cascadia team member. We’re here to answer any questions, and we would love to help you run through your application or budget.
For questions or assistance, contact:
cascadia@deptofbioregion.org
Year 1: Funding A Bioregional Regeneration Strategy: 2024 Sensemaking In The Landscape
Much of what Regenerate Cascadia is trying to do does not currently exist, and we recognize that we don’t have the capacity yet to support what is needed in the landscapes or happening on the ground. Because of this, we are using the remainder of 2024 to work with Regenerate Cascadia Stewards, who have stepped forward to help us sense what is needed to design a Bioregional Regeneration Strategy for those interested in potentially growing:
This includes developing a shared vision, mission, and purpose, identifying core design challenges, principles, values, and a theory of change that can guide our work. This information will all be brought together as part of Regenerate Cascadia’s first-year “Bioregional Regeneration Strategy,” which will help inform our priorities, needs, and funding requests in the future. We also hope it will serve as a basis for similar efforts by groups in the field.
Regenerate Cascadia is allocating a series of micro-grants to potential groups to hire process facilitators (who may be members of that group) to work with those Stewards to anchor the following processes to create a document that will make up a part of our Bioregional Regeneration Strategy and be used to guide our future fundraising requests.
Each Hub monitors and maintains a portion of a Cascadia Bioregional Regeneration Fund. This fund and the governance of it, also called a Bioregional Financing Facility, is still under construction.
Regenerate Cascadia is a social movement and capacity-building organization developing a vision and framework to administer a regeneration fund for Cascadia, a bioregion located along the upper Pacific Rim of North America stretching from Southeast Alaska to Northern California, and as far east as the Yellowstone Caldera. A central goal of Regenerate Cascadia is to grow capacity cohesively across the scales of landscapes, ecoregions, and bioregions—something that currently does not exist locally or globally—as part of a multi-generational strategy for the long-term health of the Cascadia bioregion. Regenerate Cascadia is addressing the complex challenges in funding connected landscape outcomes across a bioregion through a whole systems approach that: prioritizes the central role of place-based stewardship; ensures decision-making is held by those at the local level; develops trust-based networks that hold the integrity of the work; and uses a nested scale structure to facilitate information flow, representation, and learning across the whole system.
Regenerate Cascadia’s living structural framework can be viewed as a system for the coherent flow of resources (educational, financial, inspirational, and cultural) that supports ongoing bioregional regeneration outcomes and learning. The framework enables capital to be distributed from a large bioregional fund into smaller landscape-level funds that deliver resources to decentralized projects according to the needs of ecoregions and landscapes. This ensures governance power is held by those closest to the work through trust-based networks of relationships that connect and align diverse projects within a landscape-level vision and strategy. The framework provides a comprehensive intermediary between local communities and funders. This enables effective cooperation, coordination, and governance across the bioregion to optimize strategic outcomes. A key tenet is the commitment to the representation of diverse voices at all scales, including those of ecosystems and keystone species, ensuring feedback loops from across the whole system enable collective intelligence to inform future actions. This supports the whole system to see itself (co-sense), learn (co-presence), and iterate (co-create), enabling connected and concurrent local and bioregional agency to solve problems at the appropriate scales. Regenerate Cascadia’s structures are built with one of the movement’s core goals in mind—to prototype a series of replicable transformational templates that return ‘right relationship’ to the Earth as a central organizing premise for finance, while evolving how we live and work together cooperatively across scales.
A core foundation of Regenerate Cascadia are ‘Regenerate Hubs’, which hold the governance capacity to manage a fund for a discrete landscape across diverse stakeholders. Regenerate Hubs operate in several ways, including: (a) working with local communities and weaving relationships to develop a long-term vision aligned with the overall bioregional vision of Regenerate Cascadia; (b) identifying and engaging voices that need to be present; (c) maintaining a portfolio of regenerative projects within their defined landscape areas; (d) stewarding an annual landscape budget; and (e) maintaining team coherence. Each Hub has a core team that facilitates conditions for cooperation and trust and is accountable for administrative and reporting requirements. Each landscape features Bioregional Learning Centers that facilitate the cocreation of place-based frameworks and serves as foundational education space for sense-making and decision-making in the community. These centers monitor, evaluate, and manage the dynamic flow of an information commons using shared metrics for social, cultural, and ecological impact that supports robust fund reporting and continuous learning. Hubs primarily collaborate with members of
Regenerate Cascadia from within a particular landscape, and are represented by a network of Ecoregional Councils—governance bodies responsible for creating ecoregional budgets that maintain the connections between local and bioregional scales.
Regenerate Cascadia is creating a funding ecosystem so that groups can receive funding immediately and begin to grow our governance as a group and organization.
Outside of this, Hubs, Guilds, and Projects maintain their own budgets, payroll, and staff.
We believe the people living in a place are the best suited to take the lead on issues affecting that area. Through our work, we connect projects, organizations and groups together, and work to strengthen each by providing services such as outreach, website support, fundraising, legal support, and anything else we can do to empower their success.
We sponsor and support any work that builds greater understandings of bioregions, promote place appropriate technologies and policies, provide direct funding for community projects, and support the creation of centers to determine the carrying capacities and regenerative frameworks for each watershed and bioregion we live in.
No matter what, if your work aligns with ours, we would love to:
If you would like sponsorship, we also can help by:
Upon dissolution, the group’s assets will be archived and held for six months, and as long as the group is in good standing, it can be restarted at any time.
Project Leaders are expected and empowered to coordinate all aspects of their project, including organizing all project activities and raising funds independently to support the project.
Please advise Regenerate Cascadia ASAP of any upcoming project events or milestones. The more notice we receive, the more visibility we can lend to your awesome project achievements.
Inside the United States:
Regenerate Cascadia is building an integrated website, network, and platform for regenerative projects and communities within the Cascadia bioregion. This includes:
The digital platform includes a structural framework (see Figure 1) that prioritizes on-the-ground, community-led work within a landscape while thoughtfully aggregating place-based work into larger coordination structures.
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