featured image is of Eagle Island, courtesy of Robert Bunge
A little more than a month into the Learning Journey: How to Organize Your Bioregion (it’s not too late to sign up!), we have already seen both individuals sparking with inspiration and groups forming to collaborate in their landscapes.
We currently have 98 active participants from Cascadia in the Learning Journey, and about 40 of them have continued to attend the Cascadia Regional Call live (happening this Friday), which has become a beautiful space of co-created facilitation and shared learning. I know that even more people are watching the recordings!
The regional call is also a great space to get updates on what groups have been doing in their landscapes, and anyone from Cascadia is welcome to join and participate.
How Water Organizes the Landscape
In the Learning Journey webinar for April 1st, Joe Brewer discussed the roles that water plays in determining the (loose) bioregional boundaries of an area. So much more than arbitrary municipal boundaries, water makes it possible to see where life follows the flow of fluid.
As a place to begin, water and watershed organization is a great first consideration for any organizing team to define their scope and the necessary work for a particular landscape.
There are so many ways to start organizing in your landscape, and Joe offered the suggestion that groups could screen the film Water Is Love as a way to start conversations about restoration and bioregionalism in your own community.
Hosting Design Immersions
At the webinar for April 15th, Joe discussed options for creating “design immersions,” which provide your community with an opportunity to start understanding bioregionalism by immersing one’s self in the landscape. This can be as simple as screening the film listed above or taking a walk with a group through a nearby forest. Partner with other organizations in this process to begin building bioregional relationships!
In these immersions, we flow with the energy of the group and discuss what it would look like to operate outside of traditional extractivist systems. How can we bring the natural organization of nature into our restoration efforts? How can we invite partnership between regenerative efforts inside nested scale models of organizing?
This webinar topic has inspired many groups to begin hosting events. Already, Northern Willamette Valley is hosting a land-tending day at Stephens Creek on April 26th, Terri Wilde from Skagit Valley is hosting a forest immersion walk on April 27th, and Lost Valley Education Center + Meadowsong Ecovillage is hosting a Community Experience Week focused on permaculture, sociocracy, and non-violent communication May 11-17th (work trade options and scholarships available, food and lodging included).
Visiting these immersions is a great way to learn about how to organize your own landscape. You have to see it yourself to fully understand the depth of relationship to the land and the power of relational organizing in support of all life. These are magical, potent experiences.
Supporting Healthy Group Dynamics
No matter how successful your bioregional organizing strategy, you don’t have anything if you don’t have a healthy group dynamic. We’re talking about deep and reflective listening, non-hierarchical and prosocial governance models, and conversational turn-taking, which prevents burnout. Here at Regenerate Cascadia, we are doing everything we can to support groups forming on the ground to start with a strong and vibrant foundation.
We’ve come up with this meeting flow guide for how to begin to develop shared purpose with a new group, and we have a bioregional group questionnaire. Please use and share these guides freely. We all benefit from groups that function well, both internally and externally.
For more information about this, please attend our next Cascadia Regional Call! We’ll be discussing sociocratic meeting facilitation and onboarding processes.
