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’s structural framework serves several other core functions in supporting landscape leaders, including bioregional ‘Guilds’ made up of knowledge communities responsible for providing tools and resources around specific regenerative topics, and connecting learning and networks across landscapes. Hubs and Guilds undertake their own projects and activities while sharing news, updates, resources, directories, and events for a specific place or topic in a way that is meaningful for all participants. Regenerate Cascadia supports the Hubs and Guilds’ core teams and services by administering a portion of all funds raised, providing opportunities to practice healthy budgeting and governance with small sums of money, and growing their decision-making and governance capacities ahead of receiving larger flow funding. Finally, the non-profit backbone of Regenerate Cascadia is maintained through ‘Bioregional Stewardship Councils’, who directly assist with communications, outreach, fundraising, finance, legal, and reporting requirements—and a Bioregional Congress—an assembly comprised of Guilds and Ecoregional Councils to govern a shared Cascadia bioregional vision.  

Each of the structural components Regenerate Cascadia is collaboratively building are demonstrable templates that are adaptable, replicable, and scalable in other localities. They are significant, not only for a single bioregion, but as a living framework for movements emerging around the world. By connecting and resourcing those doing the work in their communities through the support of core backbone teams of bioregional weavers; providing knowledge and resource sharing through Guilds that weave between landscapes; and co-creating the digital infrastructure for coordination and communication, Regenerate Cascadia enables coordinated, coherent processes for bioregional learning and regeneration. This framework provides a governance model for bioregional funding, enabling capital to flow to where it is needed on the ground and building the foundations for funding the transition to a regenerative economy.