What Kind of Human Do You Want to Be?

Sonja (Founder of Landdrift, Netherlands) spent a decade in Norway’s wilderness, learning to live without running water or wifi, before a strange twist of fate. Lost books and an accidental conference appearance sent her back to the Netherlands with a question that wouldn’t let her go: What does it actually mean to belong to a place?

The answer was rooted in sandy soil, practical, and dirt-under-your-nails real, far from the spiritual-retreat, ayahuasca-ceremony version many might picture.

That question became Landdrift, a radical experiment in the Dutch countryside combining tiny houses, food forests, and active nature restoration on land once used for intensive farming. But building it means confronting a much bigger tension: the story we’ve all inherited that humans are fundamentally the planet’s problem. Sonja rejects that story entirely. She believes we’re a keystone species: capable of regenerating ecosystems, not just damaging them (if we’re willing to show up differently).

Between planning law that hasn’t caught up with reality, investors who can’t stop sorting her project into tidy boxes, and years of self-funding out of her own savings, Sonja is living out the hardest version of her own philosophy.

This is the story of what it costs and what it might unlock, when someone decides to stop waiting for permission to build a different relationship with the land.

Read the full article here.

When Dandelions Find Each Other

How the European Learning Summit in Romania revealed a regenerative movement hiding in plain sight

There’s a plant most of us walk past without a second thought. The dandelion. It doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. It pushes through cracked pavement and hardened ground, sending roots thirty centimeters deep to loosen soil and draw up nutrients that other plants can’t reach. Wherever it lands, the ground around it slowly comes alive.

In the spring of 2026, 80 of these dandelions found each other in the green hills of Romania.

They were landscape practitioners and bioregional weavers from across Europe, from Portugal’s forests to Scotland’s uplands, brought together for the European Learning Summit. A traditional Romanian wedding dance inaugurated the exchange between all those present before a single slide was shown or formal introductions were made.

Intimate “home groups” of four to six were built for real vulnerability. Slower, embodied ways of learning made room for the kind of exchange emails and tidy action points rarely allow.

What emerged went well beyond a list of next steps for each landscape to take home. Practitioners surfaced a shared recognition: questions of power, capital, and leadership are ground the whole field needs to tend together, not challenges any one person carries alone.

Curious what happens when context is carefully curated in which a group can think beyond the limits of individual minds?

Dive into the details of the European Learning Summit here.

The dandelion metaphor draws on the Dandelion Strategy, coined by writer, fellow weaver Joe Brewer.

A water democracy in action

Water quenches human thirst, and the same water feeds every root, builds every forest, gathers into rain, and stitches the oceans into one body. It also reshapes life and land: the floods that swallow streets, the droughts that empty riverbeds, the rains that arrive all at once instead of in season. We have long treated water as a resource for us. It is life-giving, life-shaping, and life-threatening.

This duality is not new. Our failure to respond to it adequately is what feels new. It is also why bioregions have always organised themselves around watersheds, rather than around the borders we draw on maps.

Venice: A Living Tension

I can think of no better place to sit with that tension than Venice, a city that lives in a permanent balancing act between vulnerability and protection, danger and care, fragility and resilience. Venice has been named the capital of ‘Planet Aqua’, echoing Jeremy Rifkin’s call to recognise that we live on a water planet rather than a terrestrial one. I stood at the heart of these conversations as a co-curator, bringing together voices from grassroots initiatives to global policy tables.

From Crisis to Water Bankruptcy

The signals are getting harder to ignore. For a week, I watched scientists, mayors, commissioners, entrepreneurs and teenagers sit around the same tables and reach the same conclusion: water is no longer an ‘environmental issue’. It is the operating system of everything else.

For decades we have called it a ‘water crisis’. Kaveh Madani’s report for the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health makes clear that we have moved past the crisis into something more severe: water bankruptcy. We are no longer only stretching our annual water ‘income’; we are liquidating long-term natural capital. Aquifers, rivers, and ecosystems are being depleted faster than they can regenerate.

In financial terms, the implication is unavoidable: a global restructuring of water debt is overdue.

Madani’s message cuts through with clarity. It no longer makes sense to invest in restoring an outdated hydrological balance. The task ahead is harder and more honest: managing decline where needed, protecting what remains, reallocating demand, redesigning agriculture and industry, and making sure communities are not left to bear the cost of systemic overuse.

Water Governance in Action

Venice Climate Week became a live laboratory for this shift. It staged something rare: water democracy in action.

The Water Declaration calls for a reorientation, from viewing water as a resource to caring for it as a source of life. It proposes a ‘Blue Deal’ alongside the Green Deal, urging investment in the infrastructures, policies, and cultures aligned with the hydrosphere. Alongside it, the EU’s Water Directive 2026/805 has come into force, tightening standards for water quality and ecosystem protection.

Beyond policy and frameworks, I saw powerful signals of action rooted in place. The Planet Aqua City Awards, developed in collaboration with C40 Cities, highlight the leadership of cities advancing climate adaptation through integrated, inclusive and innovative water strategies. (You can read more on the selected finalists.)

From Vision to Implementation

The question that remains is implementation. How do we turn this new vocabulary and these high-level strategies into something that matters on the ground? One answer emerging from Venice is the idea of Blue Communities: connecting cities with territories, from coastal regions to rural bioregions, to test integrated solutions around water, food, energy, and biodiversity.

The vision is to pilot a small cluster of these communities, linked across regions, so they can exchange knowledge and align investment with real-world needs. (Read more in Planet Aqua: When Water Writes the Future of Cities.)

Paving a New Path Forward

In a world that constantly pushes us to stand out, differentiate, and compete, the real revolution is learning to build together. To take care of one another. To generate value that endures. To leave the world, our communities, and our institutions a little better than we found them.

With care from Cilento,
Sara Roversi
Weaver, BWL Pollica

Follow me on LinkedIn · Read Sara’s Voice on Substack · Explore the work across BWL Pollica

I had the pleasure of introducing Jeremy Lent’s Weaving Session recently and thought it might be interesting to share some of my reflections here.

Jeremy is author of The Patterning Instinct (2017), The Web of Meaning (2021), and Ecocivilization (2026). Through these books, Jeremy synthesises modern science and ancient wisdom to reveal our deep interconnectedness with each other and with the more-than-human world.

To me, this realisation is a profound gift because it expands our awareness from isolated things to include the relationships between things. In other words, it allows us to think ecologically. And beyond only thinking, it allows us to experience the world as the world.

This awareness practice is core to weaving (the practice of connecting people and projects in coherent and synergistic ways). Through the practice, weavers see fragmentation, atomisation and isolation in systems and understand that no single person, organisation, or solution can effect meaningful systemic change. Instead of asking “how might this solution scale?”, they ask “How can we strengthen the social fabric from which many, mutually reinforcing solutions can arise?” Weavers nurture trustful relationships among diverse actors and activities so that resources and learnings flow and coherence emerges across the system.

Take BWL Colina in Normandy’s Orne Watershed. What began in 2019 as conversations with farmers, cooperative leaders, and local entrepreneurs has grown into a cooperation hub of numerous organisations working across food, energy, carbon, reuse, and entrepreneurship. Each strengthens the conditions the others depend on, and together they make visible a portfolio of change that no single organisation could hold alone. That is weaving in practice: strengthening the fabric from which many mutually reinforcing solutions arise.

A second reflection from Jeremy’s session is that, while it may be easier to imagine apocalyptic futures, we do have it in our power to imagine positive (and realistic) futures. And imagining regenerative futures together is surely a prerequisite to moving together in that direction.

An essential weaving practice is therefore helping groups imagine regenerative futures and create shared narratives of how those futures can be realised. This is not to dwell in fantasy. Rather, these narratives become stories of change that allow groups to connect and coordinate real world portfolios of projects that are coherent and that, together, model better ways of living.

I believe that seeing our interconnectedness and activating our collective imagination are prerequisites to creating regenerative futures. Weavers therefore play an essential role, not because they hold the answers, but because they help create the conditions through which shared intelligence and coordinated action can emerge. In a time of fragmentation and apocalyptic thinking, weaving is the practice of embodying today a relational way of living that can lead us to a better tomorrow. Thank you, Jeremy, for helping us see that more clearly.

Jeremy Lent on weaving Eco-civilizations | Weaving Lab

Watch the recording.

Why Regenerative Bioregions Struggle to Get the Capital They Need

Capital for regeneration is not as scarce as we often assume. Around the world, philanthropic foundations, public institutions, banks, and impact investors are committing billions towards climate action, and resilient futures. Yet less than 1% of international climate finance reaches the communities doing the work on the ground. Across Europe’s bioregions, the people restoring landscapes, strengthening local food systems, and stewarding ecosystems keep running into the same question: if the capital exists, why is it so hard to reach?

The answer has less to do with how much money exists than with the architecture it flows through. Conventional finance is built to fund single organisations, discrete projects, and measurable returns. Regeneration works differently. It emerges through relationships, long-term stewardship, shared governance, and the slow weaving together of people, landscapes, and enterprises into living systems; work that stays invisible to traditional funding models.

So what would it take to build finance that fits? Drawing on insights from Natasha Hulst and the development of a Bioregional Financing Facility in the Living Delta in the Netherlands, we explore why so many regenerative initiatives struggle even as investments in sustainability grows, and what becomes possible when we stop financing isolated projects and start cultivating the conditions for a whole bioregion to thrive.

Read the full article here.

Bioregional Financing Facilities in the Dutch Delta

Most bioregions already have plenty of good initiatives at work. People restoring soil, rebuilding local food systems, looking after water systems, setting up community-owned energy projects. There are plenty of good ideas and ambition. The problem often is that capital has no way of seeing these efforts as one connected whole, so each initiative ends up competing on its own for funding.

This comes down to how conventional finance is built. It evaluates single organisations and individual projects, each judged separately on risk and expected return. But regeneration rarely works project by project. Instead, it grows out of people and initiatives working a landscape together, often over many years. The relationship building, the knowledge sharing, and the coordination that keeps all of this connected are usually the parts that matter most, and they are also the parts that funding models tend to overlook entirely.

Natasha Hulst and the Bioregional Weaving Labs, working through the ResiliAnce Partnership with Commonland and WireGroup,have been prototyping a different approach: a Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF), being tested in the Living Delta (the Netherlands). The full article looks at how portfolio weaving brings scattered local initiatives together into something genuinely investable, how landscape-level and Delta-level portfolios support each other, and how blended capital (philanthropic, public, and investment) can be channelled through that structure so a whole bioregion can thrive, rather than just its most visible projects.

Read the full article here.

From Readiness to Reality

What happens when the seeds of transformation are already growing in a place, but the systems designed to nurture them are missing?

For seven years, a small team in Normandy’s Orne Watershed has been weaving together something rarely captured in conventional development models: trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to place. What began in 2019 as conversations with farmers, entrepreneurs, and local organisations has grown into BWL Colina: a cooperation hub connecting initiatives across food, energy, reuse, carbon, and entrepreneurship.

Yet their journey reveals a deeper tension at the heart of regeneration: while communities are building the foundations for systemic change, existing financial systems are often unable to recognise or support the very work that makes transformation possible. The relationships, coordination, and collective infrastructure that hold a regenerative ecosystem together remain difficult to fund.

Through the ResiliAnce Partnership, BWL Colina is now prototyping a Bioregional Financing Facility: an experiment in designing finance around the needs of a living territory rather than forcing territories to fit existing financial models.

This story explores what happens when finance meets a community already in motion, and asks whether new forms of capital can help unlock the potential that places like the Orne Watershed have been quietly cultivating for years.

Read the full article here.

Signals from the Field

Across the field, people and organisations are advancing work that strengthens bioregions and the broader regenerative movement. Here are a few signals worth spotlighting.

Turtle Island Bioregional Congress

The 2026 Turtle Island Bioregional Congress (TIBC11) takes place 15-19 September at Camp Cedar Ridge in Vernonia, Oregon, within the Cascadia Bioregion. It marks the 11th continental gathering in a lineage of bioregional organising that stretches back more than four decades. Convened with leaders including Bill Baue of r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), it brings together 300 place-based practitioners from across the continent. Rooted in ceremony, connection, and collective learning, the Congress aims to grow the movement, build capacity, and align on shared strategy. Together, participants co-create a Bioregional Action Toolkit. You are invited to register, join as a delegation, and help shape this collective moment.

Register.

A day of activation, with Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple

This autumn, Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple bring their European tour to the Netherlands, and Bioregional Weaving Labs (BWL) joins the programme at the Eemlandhoeve on 12 October, hosted by Proeftuin voor Transitieversnelling (Bioregional Learning Center) with DSRE.

In the morning, we share how BWL’s theory of change and six Strategic Pathways come to life on the ground. In the afternoon, we lead two workshops: one on portfolio weaving, one on bioregional financing. Together they open a practical view of how a bioregion builds regenerative economies from the roots up. BWL weaves across bioregions, and days like this are where that practice meets others doing the work.

The day gathers changemakers from across the wider field. If that is your work too, we would love to weave with you.

Read the full programme and register: Bioregional Activation Day

BWL Colina is looking for a Finance Weaver

BWL Colina is introducing a new role into the ecosystem: the Finance Weaver. Someone who helps connect local entrepreneurial realities with the often complex world of finance. Based in the Bocage Ornais, this role is all about weaving together trust-based, place-rooted financing solutions that truly serve the needs of the territory. From supporting members in navigating funding pathways to co-creating a collective financial tool, this is a unique opportunity to shape how capital flows in a regenerative, cooperative economy: a crucial step forward in strengthening local sovereignty and collaboration.

Explore and apply.

Hearth Summit Aegean 2026 | Santorini | 23-25 October

This October, Santorini becomes a place to reconnect with people, place and possibility; the place to ignite bioregional regeneration for the Aegean.

Hosted by Impact Hub Athens with co-creators including Sheila Darmos (The Southern Lights), Melina Dunham (ZYMOSI), Coco Francavilla (Music For the Sea), and Fabio Volkmann (Climate Farmers), the Hearth Summit Aegean gathers an international community of practitioners, researchers, creatives and systems changemakers. Across three days of co-creation, immersive experiences and collective learning they explore wellbeing, ecological regeneration and community resilience, inspired by the communities of the Aegean.

If you’re working at the intersection of wellbeing, regeneration, community and systems change in your territory or bioregion, this is a unique gathering rooted in place and shaped by collective learning.

Discover the programme & register.

From the Field: Rewilding Learning with Ewa Smuk Stratenwerth

At the Ecological Folk High School in the Mid Vistula River Valley, Ewa’s agroecology course offers more than practical skills: it invites students into a deeper process of reconnecting with themselves, others, and the living world. Rooted in experiential learning, the programme supports young people to “learn by doing,” engaging with ecology, community, and personal development as intertwined processes .

Rather than training farmers alone, the course nurtures individuals as active contributors to society, cultivating responsibility, cooperation, and a sense of agency through shared work and reflection.

The school is currently seeking support to keep this transformative experience accessible to youth in Poland and learners from around the world.

→ Read more about the course and student journey (pages 96-142)
→ Explore the pedagogy
→ Reach out to support and sustain this work

A Note from the Collective

Looking back over these past months, it feels a little like watching seeds long held beneath the soil begin to surface. What was once quiet, patient work, often unseen, is now gently finding its way into the light, becoming visible in ways that invite others to notice, to connect, and to join.

This season, we opened a more visible home for the movement. Our brand new website offers a place where the wider field can begin to sense the whole: what we are part of, where we are working, and the Strategic Pathways that are gradually taking shape. Alongside it, our Substack has given the work a living voice, carrying stories, reflections, and learning directly from those inside the Labs.

At the same time, the work has begun to meet the world in new ways. Together with Commonland, we co-held the second European Learning Summit: an invitation into shared learning and a growing sense of momentum for regeneration across landscapes and bioregions. We also brought bioregional weaving into wider conversations at WEF (Davos), ChangeNOW (Paris), Katapult Future Fest (Amsterdam), and Venice Climate Week, opening new relationships and possibilities with partners and funders.

Beneath what is visible, something steady is strengthening. Partnerships are deepening in ways that feel more rooted and enduring. The work around financing is beginning to gather real momentum, with the Bioregional Financing Facilities and the Headwater Flow Fund starting to take clearer form.

Across Europe, the map of Systemic Innovations continues to grow, revealing how much is already alive and in motion. We are beginning to share this through the Portfolios of Systemic Innovations on the website, with the Colina Portfolio as an early, living expression. There is a growing sense that we are part of something much larger than any one place.

And throughout it all, across each bioregion, Weaving Teams and Communities of Action continue to hold the daily work, thus creating the conditions that make all of this possible.

Looking ahead, the next season carries a sense of openness and intention. In early September, the Cilento bioregion will host a threefold gathering, bringing Cohorts, Partners, and Funders together to listen for what wants to emerge next. The work on Developing Financing Mechanisms and the Annual Cohort Program continues, supporting more places to access both the resources and the relationships they need.

And on the horizon, there is a shared orientation: toward 2030, where a growing movement of Labs is nurturing regenerative economies, held and supported by a network of Bioregional Financing Facilities. It feels less like a distant goal, and more like something we are already, slowly, stepping into.

Thank you for weaving with us.

We invite you to explore our new website.

- On behalf of the Bioregional Weaving Labs

If something in this edition stirred a thought or a feeling, we’d love to hear from you — and feel free to pass it on to someone who would resonate.

A New Cycle Begins

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In short, a BFF is a permanent financing structure that pools different types of capital (philanthropic, public, and investment) and channels them toward synergetic portfolios of regenerative initiatives within a bioregion, rather than toward single organisations or individual projects. The rest of this article explains how that structure is being built and tested in the Living Delta (The Netherlands).

The information in this article is based on an interview with Natasha Hulst from the Bioregional Weaving Labs (BWL). Natasha is a Portfolio Weaver in the Living Delta Bioregion, and is working on a Living Delta BFF prototype, in collaboration with the ResiliAnce Partnership (BWL, Commonland and WireGroup). The Living Delta bioregion encompasses many different landscapes. Natasha works with seven landscape teams that are participating in a two year programme called ‘The Harvest of Tomorrow’, a collaboration between Commonland, Academy of Place, BWL, Oogst van Overmorgen, and Frisse Blikken. We will discuss prototyping a BFF on a Living Delta bioregional level, as well as the importance of place-based portfolio weavers (on landscape level), and how capital can actually move through a BFF to fund those portfolios.

It is important to note that the Living Delta BFF is still a prototype: a live experiment in redesigning financial infrastructure, not yet a finished or fully operational fund.

Here is how this article is structured:

1. In section one we start on the ground, in the seven landscapes of the Harvest of Tomorrow. You can read how portfolio weavers bring local initiatives together into a landscape portfolio (portfolio weaving is the foundational, relational work that turns local initiatives into an investable whole).

2. In section two, we zoom out to see the added value of having both landscape level portfolios, as well as a Delta level portfolio.

3. Finally in section three, we look at the piece this article is building toward: how the BFF itself channels different kinds of capital (philanthropic, public, and investment) through that portfolio, and where the Living Delta prototype stands today.

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1. The Living Delta pilots a Bioregional Financing Facility

When introducing the Bioregional Financing Facilities in the Living Delta, it helps to first understand the bioregion it is being prototyped in.

Long before the Netherlands became a nation state, the Living Delta existed as a connected ecological landscape shaped by rivers, tides and watersheds. Today, much of the Netherlands forms part of this bioregion, which also extends into Belgium, Germany and France.

The Living Delta takes its name not only from its rivers and fertile delta landscape, but also from the fact that it is a living bioregion, continuously shaped by the relationships between water, land, nature, and people. For centuries, its inhabitants have co-created the delta through agriculture, water management, trade, and settlement, making it one of Europe’s most densely populated and productive landscapes. Today, the challenge is not simply to protect this Living Delta, but to regenerate it by restoring the ecological, social, cultural, and economic relationships on which its future depends.

The Harvest of Tomorrow

To understand how a BFF can work in practice, it helps to start with the ground it is built on: the seven landscapes of the Harvest of Tomorrow.

The seven landscapes that shape the project of Oogst van Morgen (Harvest of Tomorrow) stretch from the Wadden Sea island of Texel in the North, the river valleys of Mooi Maasvallei in the South, and the agrarian terrain of Mooi Achterhoek in the East. Each landscape has its own ecology and cultural heritage, and each is a unique piece of a larger hydrological cycle: a delta of multiple rivers and watersheds.

In these seven landscapes there are plenty of local initiatives, but what is missing is a coherent system of funding and support. Efforts remain fragmented, with initiatives often navigating disconnected programmes, institutions, and financial instruments.

To address this, a Bioregional Financing Facility is being piloted in the Living Delta as a new form of supporting infrastructure. It focuses on three interconnected areas of change:

• strengthening place-based collaboration

• developing governance systems designed for bioregions and portfolios rather than isolated projects

• creating new financial flows that can move the right forms of capital to where they are most needed

Weaving these three strands of change does not happen on its own. It needs people holding the whole picture in order to connect and weave them together.

Landscape Portfolio Weaving

Before capital can move through a Bioregional Financing Facility, there needs to be something coherent for it to flow toward: That is what portfolio weaving builds. As mentioned in the intro, it is the foundational, relational work that turns a scattering of local initiatives into an investable whole. And it is the first step in the process that eventually connects to Delta-level funding and the BFF itself.

Weavers

In each landscape there are landscape weavers, who in turn are “portfolio weaving” together with support from BWL Delta portfolio weavers Natasha Hulst and Deborah de Groot. The landscape weavers are engaging local initiatives and professional enterprises rooted in place, shaped by local history, navigating current opportunities and challenges, and together working towards a thriving future for that place and its people.

Landscape Portfolio

A landscape portfolio is a carefully composed ecosystem of initiatives, commons and enterprises that mutually reinforce each other and create combinatorial effects. Different initiatives can perform complementary functions: some restore soil and biodiversity, others create new ownership models, others provide knowledge or market access.

Portfolio weaving asks not only which initiatives are promising, but also which functions are missing to create a healthier system, which relationships need strengthening, and how the portfolio as a whole becomes more resilient than the sum of its parts. Together, as part of a portfolio, these initiatives nurture the conditions that enable the thriving of the landscape and its people.

The portfolio enables funders and investors to support the health and resilience of an entire bioregional system, rather than trying to identify which individual project is most likely to succeed in isolation. It also makes visible and fundable the enabling work that is usually overlooked: the relationship-building, governance, knowledge-sharing, and coordination. This work can be part of the portfolio, because together with the other initiatives it becomes a fundable whole.

The role of the portfolio weavers

The ambition is for each of the seven Oogst van Morgen landscapes to have its own portfolio weaver: someone who works closely with local stakeholders to map systemic initiatives, identify gaps in the portfolio, perform needs assessments, and support project owners and entrepreneurs in optimising their models and making them investable.

The work of weavers includes organising small convenings, with new forms of listening and quiet moments that help a system recognise itself as part of one shared ecological and cultural story. It is slow, often invisible work, but it is the foundation essential for an investable portfolio to emerge. Our interview with Jacqueline, weaver in Mooi Achterhoek, goes deeper into this often-overlooked side of the work, and the different challenges it brings.

2. Zooming out: The Living Delta Portfolio

Now that we have visited the different landscapes of the Harvest of Tomorrow, it is time to zoom out again to the bioregion these are situated in: the Living Delta bioregion. We will dive into how these seven landscape portfolios connect at bioregional level and how capital moves through a BFF to fund those portfolios.

Working at a bioregional scale offers four advantages that a landscape working in isolation cannot easily get:

• Learning. Landscape teams can learn from each other, avoid repeating mistakes, and adapt what already works elsewhere to their own context.

• Funding. The Living Delta BFF spreads capital across landscapes while each one keeps its local autonomy.

• Spreading. When something works in one landscape, the Delta-level network can offer a pathway to explore it elsewhere. What travels well is context-specific. This means a model that works in one landscape rarely transfers unchanged, but the network makes that kind of cross-pollination possible, rather than leaving successes isolated.

• Enabling. By identifying recurring systemic barriers across landscapes, the portfolio creates the evidence and collective voice needed to improve the enabling environment for regeneration. Together, landscape teams can engage funders, policymakers, and other institutions to help reshape funding architectures, policies, and governance so that regenerative initiatives can thrive.

In short: a bioregional approach creates the conditions for local flourishing. The Living Delta as a concept creates the conditions for the landscapes that are part of it to learn from each other, collaborate, and attract resources, without losing what makes each of them distinct.

Those advantages only exist because there is something concrete for capital to flow toward. This is the Living Delta Portfolio itself.

The Living Delta Portfolio

Composing a portfolio means weaving together different kinds of place-based projects and enterprises. Broadly, these are:

• Those with strong systemic and demonstration value (proving a different model is possible)

• Those that are scalable, while still adaptable to local context

• Those that are bioregion-bearing and essential to how a specific place functions

These key landscape initiatives are included in a bioregional portfolio for the Living Delta, alongside other systemic innovations from across the wider Living Delta network (beyond the seven landscapes participating in the ‘Harvest of Tomorrow’ program). Together these key innovations strengthen the long-term health and resilience of a whole bioregion.

We regard the local landscape teams as key innovations. Seed funding then flows from the Delta-level portfolio to the individual landscape portfolios, connecting local work to the Delta level and back again. Both the landscape-level and Delta-level portfolios are being collected in a digital database, developed within the Bioregional Weaving Labs, which is partially displayed on the BWL website. Mapping and publishing this work is useful for visibility, inspiration, recognition, and funding.

Not just any initiative becomes part of the Delta portfolio. The focus is on systemic innovations, which are initiatives that create enabling conditions for wider transformation. It includes initiatives with models designed to be scalable or adapted across different contexts. Where a landscape-level portfolio answers the question “what does this place need,” the Delta-level portfolio tries to answer a different one: “which tools, structures, or lessons are worth investing in to scale across the whole bioregion?” A shared legal template, a training programme, or a financing mechanism only needs to be built once, and every landscape in the network can benefit from it, rather than each reinventing the wheel alone.

These different types of categories matter, because each attracts a different kind of capital. Some need investment, others need philanthropic support, and matching the two is exactly what the BFF is designed for. More specifically, initiatives in the Delta-level portfolio tend to fall into four categories:

• Enabler: Strategic partners who enable key initiatives through services, knowledge, or infrastructure.

• Area Catalyst: Acupuncture initiatives that stimulate change within a specific landscape. Some of these can potentially be applied to other landscapes.

• Delta Innovation: Initiatives that generate or contribute to systemic breakthroughs, demonstrating that alternative models are possible, or that build crucial infrastructure for system transformation. Often scalable examples.

• Seed funding: A fund-of-funds to finance area portfolios.

The portfolio logic aims to bring these types of financing together, on the premise that all of them grow faster through collaboration than any one of them would alone.

As Natasha Hulst describes it: “The Delta-level Portfolio is much more than a network connecting landscapes. It acts as a catcher’s mitt, bringing together capital, knowledge, and innovations that individual landscapes cannot easily develop or attract on their own.”

It is also a strategic portfolio of shared assets. Some of them enable innovations like governance models, legal structures, or financing mechanisms, while others produce productive assets that generate long-term income for regeneration itself. Natasha describes it as follows: “Imagine a community-owned wind farm whose revenues help finance land acquisition, ecological restoration, or common infrastructure across the Delta. By combining these kinds of innovations and assets in one portfolio, we create a flywheel: assets generate income, income strengthens the portfolio, and the portfolio increases the regenerative capacity of the whole bioregion and the seven landscapes nested within it.”

3. The Role of Bioregional Financing Facilities: Redesigning where Capital Flows

We have now seen that a portfolio can exist of a system of initiatives woven-together, at both the landscape- and the Delta level. The next question is how money actually reaches it. This is where the Bioregional Financing Facility comes in.

“We often talk about transforming landscapes, but we rarely question changing the financial infrastructure that shapes them,” says Natasha Hulst. A BFF in her view, is an attempt to redesign the relationship between financing and place: instead of asking communities to fit the logic of capital, it asks how capital can serve the long-term flourishing of a bioregion.

Funding that serves the bioregion

A BFF is the mechanism through which capital flows to reach the ground-work of bioregional regeneration. Instead of asking what return the investor is looking for, it asks: what does this bioregion need? So rather than investors picking individual projects off a list, they commit to a portfolio of initiatives, focused on what the bioregion needs.

Natasha Hulst is careful not to romanticize new financial infrastructures. She often uses the metaphor of roads in the rainforest: “they were built in the name of development and benefiting local communities, yet in practice they primarily enabled the extraction of timber, minerals, and other resources. Financial infrastructure is no different. It is never neutral. If it is designed around extraction, it will accelerate the extraction of wealth from places and communities. If it is designed around regeneration, it can circulate and steward value where it is created.”

The same logic applies to a fund that rewards only the fastest-growing and most scalable projects. Even with the best intentions, it can concentrate resources in a few initiatives while extracting value from the wider bioregion. A BFF is an attempt to design financial infrastructure the other way around: to enable the whole bioregion to flourish, rather than funnelling capital to a handful of high-growth initiatives at the expense of the wider ecosystem. Doing so requires a new form of collective governance that can steward capital in service of the health and resilience of the bioregion as a whole.

So, governance decides who steers the capital, and blended finance decides what kind of capital comes in in the first place.

Blended financing

Natasha Hulst: “There is growing consensus in the impact financing world around multiple value creation: recognising ecological, cultural and social returns alongside financial ones. If we are truly serious about multiple value creation, then financial returns will often need to be lower.”

The Living Delta BFF is built on this premise. It is not designed to deliver conventional market-rate returns. Instead, it works with a multiple-value-creation model, in which financial return is balanced alongside ecological, social, and cultural outcomes.

This is why the Living Delta BFF uses blended finance, combining philanthropic capital, public funding, and impact investment. By matching different forms of capital with different forms of value creation, it becomes possible to finance the kinds of long-term regenerative transitions that conventional finance alone is unable to support.

Risk Absorbing and Patient capital

Blended finance solves the question of what kind of capital funds the portfolio. Risk absorbing capital solves the question who takes the first risk when things do not go as expected. Patient capital solves the question of how long that capital needs to stay in place.

Regenerative processes do not run on standard investment conditions and timelines. Agroforestry takes years to establish, and a real shift in land stewardship culture can take a generation. Some projects will not make it, due to a multitude of potential reasons. Standard low risk investment horizons of one to five years are too short for that kind of change.

That is why we envision a ‘first-loss’ layer in the capital stack when designing BFFs. We need to have a pool of committed resources to ensure the continued thriving of the whole synergetic portfolio. We also need a layer of patient capital.

Natasha explains: “Patient capital does not expect returns within one, two, or five years, but is willing to stay involved for ten to twenty years. By working with a longer time horizon, you can invest in building infrastructure and development, and spread risk over a longer period. That makes it not only more logical from an impact perspective, but ultimately more resilient and stable.”

Where the Living Delta prototype stands today

As stated before, the Living Delta BFF is explicitly a prototype. Rather than attempting to finance complete landscape portfolios from the outset, it begins with a Delta-level portfolio that brings together initiatives from multiple landscapes. The Delta portfolio functions as the confluence where different streams of capital meet before flowing through the bioregion. It provides a shared entry point for funders and investors while ensuring that resources are distributed across landscapes according to the needs of the wider portfolio, rather than flowing only to the most visible, investment-ready, or scalable initiatives. Over time, as landscape portfolios and their governance mature, these financial flows can become increasingly decentralized through landscape-level BFFs.

The work remains primarily relational. Landscape portfolio weavers work closely with local stakeholders to engage initiatives and prototype portfolio structures. Natasha Hulst and Deborah de Groot work closely with the landscape Portfolio Weavers, who suggest relevant systemic innovations for the Delta-level portfolio. Family offices, philanthropic funds, and Dutch banks have been invited into the process too, both as potential funders and as co-designers. Together they form a community of practice to figure out how existing financial instruments might evolve to support place-based investing.

One of the current bottlenecks is capacity. Weaving remains underfunded, and landscape teams are understaffed. Philanthropic capital will likely need to come first, funding what Natasha calls the invisible infrastructure: “The weaving capacity, the legal structuring of a BFF, and the time it takes to move from fragmented projects to an investable, values-aligned whole.”

More information on the need for funding this essential humus layer can be found in our concept note ‘Weaving Communities of Action’.

In summary: Bridging the missing financial infrastructure

A BFF represents a different theory of how capital should relate to place and living systems, one that the current system of banks, state-aid rules, and short grant cycles is unfortunately not built to support.

Natasha sums up what the Living Delta Portfolio and BFF ultimately represent: “Like in a river basin where all kinds of water flows come together in a delta, here initiatives from different landscapes come together in one portfolio to build strength. The BFF can shift the flow of capital to finance this portfolio.”

The Living Delta BFF is a way to make this logic visible before the full architecture exists. For impact investors and funders, it offers a model designed from the ground up to make sure money lands where the work is actually happening. The aim is not a better funding programme or even better investment ready pipeline, but financial infrastructure that can keep regenerating the bioregion without extraction: portfolios of strategic assets that let communities steward their own landscapes, continually reinvesting in ecological, social, and economic health for generations to come.

Want to understand how the BFF is tackling the deeper questions of regenerative financing? Our next article looks at the four Discovery Arcs (the design questions the team is working through), that shape how the Living Delta BFF is being designed.

You can also read our Concept Note ‘Shifting the Flow of Capital’.

Without waiting for ideal conditions, it arrives in the most compacted, overlooked ground (the crack in a pavement, or the edge of a neglected field), and begins its quiet, purposeful work. Its taproot drives down, sometimes thirty centimeters deep, breaking open hardened soil and drawing up minerals from layers that other plants cannot reach. As it does, it loosens and aerates the ground, makes nutrients available, and creates the conditions in which other life can take hold. It simply puts down roots, and the land around it, slowly, becomes more alive.

Donella Meadows, the systems thinker, wrote that a system’s paradigm (the shared set of beliefs from which it arises) is the most powerful place to intervene, well above its rules or incentives. Change the story a community tells about what is possible, and everything else can shift. It was Meadows and her Balaton Group who first envisioned a planetary network of Bioregional Learning Centers and it was writer and co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth Joe Brewer who later gave that vision its now-familiar shape: the Dandelion Strategy, a way of seeding regenerative efforts widely rather than planning them centrally, trusting that some will take root in places no one could have predicted. Bioregional Weaving Labs and Bioregional Learning Centers resource and connect change-makers working at the landscape and bioregional scales, and operate like dandelions in exactly this sense. They take root in places. They work with what is there. They break open ground that has grown too hard for new growth. And, like the dandelion, they are pioneers: the ones who nourish the conditions from which a wider ecosystem of plants can emerge and thrive.

A Field Full of Dandelions

Scan Europe today, and you will spot them: in Portugal’s dehesa, Scotland’s uplands, Switzerland’s alpine-lacustrine ecosystem, and all stretching across the continent even in the foothills of the Southern Carpathians. In overlooked rural villages and landscapes drained of both biodiversity and hope, landscape practitioners and weavers are taking root. They nurture networks of community-led experiments, helping both the land and people grow more resilient.

Though each navigates a different landscape and socio-economic terrain, their purpose is shared: to make their home a better place. For neighbors, for the more-than-human species they share it with, and for those yet to come. Alongside their communities, these weavers are rediscovering how to live in harmony with the natural world.

The journey from intention to real visible change is rarely a straight line. It is full of cooperating with different actors, negotiations, and moments of tension. These practitioners move forward without a map, discovering the path by walking it, guided by care, and making do with imperfect tools and insufficient resources.

You know the feeling of venturing down an unfamiliar path. The way forward is uncertain, but you sense your direction and hope to meet someone else traveling the same road. Not to be guided, but simply to share a stretch together. To pause, exchange observations, ask questions, and feel (even for a moment) that you are not making this journey alone.

Regenerative practitioners and community weavers need such companions. Perhaps more than most.

A Different Kind of Summit

Bioregional Weaving Labs and Commonland brought 80+ landscape practitioners and weavers together in the green hills of Romania for a European Learning Summit.

The invitation was a simple one: bring your questions, your uncertainties, and the lessons you have learned. The aim was to create a space where this expanding, scattered, quietly remarkable field of practitioners could finally see itself and, in that reflection, sense the scale and vitality of what is already unfolding.

The joint BWL and Commonland team understood this required care. Attendees arrived carrying the desires of their communities, the ambition of funders, and the needs of the landscapes: the kind of responsibility and weight that builds when you’re pushing for change in resistant systems, often without recognition, and sometimes feeling like you’re the only one holding it. This is precisely why gatherings like the Summit matter: they remind weavers that the weight of the responsibility was never meant to be carried alone.

The design team spent months co-planning, considering not just what participants could learn from each other, but also how they should arrive and what state of being would let them set that weight down, and join with open minds, hearts, and courage. The Summit took place in a setting that did its own quiet work: nestled among lush hills, open to the sky, wrapped in a beauty that silences the noise and invites you simply to be present.

The learning summit, the journey of connection and exchange began with a traditional Romanian wedding dance. Before any slides or agenda items, 80 people moved together, sharing smiles and laughter. It was a ceremonial statement, intentional and heartfelt: we are not just here to exchange information. We are here to step into something deeper, together.

As landscape developer Pieter Ploeg reminds us, do not underestimate the importance of joy. For the leaders, changemakers, and weavers building Communities of Action for systemic transformation at the bioregional scale, the epic Balkan dance party reminded everyone such experiences are not a distraction from the work: it is part of the work.

Experiencing Radical Hope

As systemic thinker Indy Johar says, a good host does not try to control what emerges. A good host creates the conditions: emotional safety, physical beauty, temporal rhythm, and ceremonial markers that allow a group to access its collective intelligence. It is, in his words, “the careful construction of a context in which a group can think beyond the limits of individual minds.”

When the conditions are right, something changes. It is hard to put into words, because it is not mainly a matter of intellect. It is about synergies and emerging relationships. It is something you feel.

Shared stories create opportunities for shared sensemaking. Through various formats, landscape practitioners and bioregional weavers shared stories and experiences: honest accounts of struggle, failure, new experiments, and the change created over time. In hearing another’s story, you recognise your own. The challenges from the different landscapes and bioregions reveal patterns: some are shared, some are systemic, and some point to areas the whole field must address, not just one territory, landscape or bioregion. This creates opportunities for those stewarding community-led, place-based restoration work to learn directly from others’ journeys, or to join hands and step into shared inquiry together

Slower, embodied learning opens different kinds of knowing. Learning here takes many shapes, and as lab designer & facilitator Zlatina Tsvetkova observes, there is a deep hunger for slower, more embodied ways of learning: walking the land together, feeling the soil, sharing late-night conversations after dinner. This kind of exchange goes beyond emails, agenda items, corporate responses, managed conversations, or tidy action points. It makes space for thought that is relational, embodied, unfinished, contradictory, and alive.

Intentional structure enables building dynamics and relationships across scales. The summit allowed participants to shift between different scales through intentional groupings: large plenary sessions to sense the full scope of work, small groups of about 15 for deeper dives into specific themes where participants chose conversations that felt most relevant to the work they are currently navigating, and intimate daily “home groups” of 4-6 to foster the time and depth needed for vulnerability and real conversation.

Shared knowledge, inspiration and a sense of possibility expand collective ambition. What emerged from this time together was more than a set of concrete actions for each landscape to take forward in response to the questions they had arrived with.

It was something far more valuable: a shared recognition that challenges each practitioner had been carrying, around topics like governance and power imbalance, equitable access to capital, and cultivating forms of leadership that do not reproduce entrenched hierarchies, were not individual problems anymore. Instead, they could be discussed and addressed collectively among peers.

This realisation demonstrates the need for infrastructures beyond the transactional: cultivating the relational fabric that builds trust and collaboration, financial systems that support long-term resilience, and knowledge-sharing networks that foster learning across various contexts. Just as crucial, it underscored the need to grow the inner capacities, mindsets, facilitation practices, and ways of relating - required to navigate complexity and guide lasting systems change.

As Jeanne, weaver, reflected afterward: “We didn’t crack the subject. But the mere fact of putting it into words, asking questions together, making things visible… that means we will all carry more into our practical realities than we had before.”

Why the Bioregional Weaving Labs and Commonland Co-Organise Learning Summits

At its heart, the Bioregional Weaving Labs exists to do what its name suggests: to weave. Creating conditions for the field to recognise itself. To grow more connected, more coherent, and more able to learn together across differences and distances.

Since 2022 BWL and Commonland have organised three of these European learning summits; in The Netherlands (2022), in Germany (2024, and in Romania (2026). They have the intention to keep organising these events every other year, in another bioregion.

After such learning summits we still hear from practitioners connecting with those they met in The Netherlands, Germany or Romania. They are the natural blossoming of relationships sown in four days of exchange, resonance and connection.

And the experience does not end with a learning summit. The events are embedded in the pan-European learning network BWL has established and will keep facilitating together with partners like Commonland. Frequent online sessions are being prepared, a chat group is being activated and opportunities for deeper collaboration are being explored. ,

This is the model we believe in: shaping the conditions for bioregional weavers and landscape practitioners to find one another, build trust, relationships, and carry each other’s work forward. Each remains rooted in their own place, yet all are part of a larger, living whole.

Across Europe, communities, farmers, entrepreneurs, and local organisations are working hard to establish the foundations for more regenerative and resilient regional economies. They are restoring ecosystems, creating regional food systems, developing new ownership models, and experimenting with new forms of stewardship and governance. They believe in their bioregion as a unit of change (a bioregion is defined by its natural borders rather than political ones, and is also about rediscovering the cultural historic context of a place).

Despite this, these bioregional initiatives still struggle to survive. Their work is widely recognised as essential, yet the capital they need rarely reaches them in a form that matches the nature of their work. Significant resources have been earmarked for regeneration through philanthropy, public programmes, banks, impact investors, and private wealth. But the challenge is not only how much money is available. It is whether the right kind of capital is available at the right time. Early-stage ecosystem building, portfolio weaving, commons governance, and other forms of enabling infrastructure require patient, flexible, trust-based, and non-extractive funding. Too often, regenerative investments are offered short-term project grants or return-seeking investments that are poorly suited to the work they are intended to support.

This article is based on an interview with Natasha Hulst, who serves as Portfolio Weaver for the Living Delta Bioregion, about the development of the Bioregional Financing Facility. Together with our partners, Wire group and Commonland, we propose a different financial infrastructure, called Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs), to create a funding system better suited to place-based and bioregional work.

To set more context for why these facilities are needed, this article explains two of the main bottlenecks in funding regenerative place-based work. At the end, you will find a short introduction to what BFFs are. In the next article, we explain in more detail how they work, and how a BFF is being prototyped in the Living Delta area of the Netherlands.

Why New Financial Infrastructure is Needed

1. From investing in single projects to investing in a regenerative portfolio of projects, in place

Conventional financing is organised around single organisations, projects, and sectors, with the aim of delivering short- and medium-term financial returns. But the transition to regenerative economies needs more time. It evolves across bioregions over longer periods, through collaboration between many different actors who often depend on one another to succeed. Similarly, regeneration emerges from the interaction of many elements at once, including ecological restoration, innovative ownership models, local food systems, commons governance, and collaboration across entire communities. Funding one part in isolation misses the point; what needs support is the whole web of actors functioning as one system.

Besides the previous point, project-based financing is limited by its own design. Funders know how to finance individual initiatives, but are still learning how to support the ecosystems that allow those initiatives to flourish together. Today’s funding mechanisms rarely recognise “place-based ecosystems” as legitimate units of funding, because the relationships, shared governance, coordination, and long-term stewardship that hold them together do not fit neatly into a grant application or a conventional investment process.

Therefore, Bioregional Financing Facilities treat “a place” (a parcel of land or a community) as the unit of change. This could be a landscape, watershed, foodshed, municipality, or an entire bioregion. At this scale, ecological, social, and economic systems can regenerate together, and an interconnected ecosystem of place-based actors becomes visible.

2. From competition to mutual reinforcement, and capital flowing to impact on the ground

The two mismatches explained above, have an unintended consequence: initiatives that depend on one another are often forced to compete for the same funding, instead of being recognised as complementary parts of a larger whole. For example, a farmer cooperative and a community land trust securing affordable access to land may end up applying to the same funding programme as rivals, even though neither can fully succeed without the other.

There is a further structural problem. Even when large amounts of capital are mobilised for climate action and nature restoration, very little reaches the people doing the work on the ground. Studies1 suggest that less than 1% of international climate financing flows directly to local communities, despite their central role in stewarding land and ecosystems. Instead, funding typically moves through multiple layers, including governments, NGOs, consultants, research institutions, and financial intermediaries, before it reaches a place.

These intermediary organisations can play an essential role: they build the field, develop knowledge, shape policy, attract funding, and coordinate action. But the current architecture also creates distance between capital and place. By the time funding reaches local initiatives, much of the flexibility, long-term perspective, and trust needed for systemic change can be lost.

The Integral Approach of Bioregional Financing Facilities

Starting from Value

So, the challenge is not simply one of raising more money. It is that of bridging different circuits of value. Conventional finance is organised around the creation and circulation of financial value, while regenerative economies depend on living systems that generate ecological, social, cultural, and economic value. These interconnected circuits of value are the foundation of thriving bioregions, yet they are largely invisible to conventional finance.

In the essay Relationalized Finance that Natasha co-authored with David Bollier, they argue that a new financial infrastructure is needed to bridge these different circuits of value. Building on this work, Natasha uses the term transvestment to describe the movement of capital from conventional financial circuits into living circuits of value, where it can strengthen the relationships, stewardship, and enabling conditions from which regenerative bioregional economies emerge.

Connecting Values and Capital through Weaving

A Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF) is therefore not simply a mechanism for moving money. It is a mechanism for translating between circuits of value and connecting them with the appropriate forms of capital. Activities, such as ecosystem building, commons governance, portfolio weaving, and relationship development, require patient, flexible, trust-based capital. This is because they create the conditions for regeneration, rather than immediate financial returns. As enterprises within these ecosystems mature, they may become suitable for loans, guarantees, or non extractive investment. A regenerative financial system therefore needs not only more capital flowing to place, but the right forms of capital that are blended at the right stage of regeneration.

Relationship-building, governance development, knowledge-sharing, and the slow work of weaving people, organisations, and landscapes together form the connective tissue of systemic change. A BFF starts from the premise that regenerative portfolios must first be woven. Relationships, governance, shared vision, strategic assets, and collaborative capacity are not by-products of financing; they are the enabling conditions that allow capital to be deployed effectively. Rather than financing isolated projects, a BFF invests in the ecosystem that lets many initiatives flourish together.

The challenge, then, is not simply to mobilise more capital; the capital available for this work is already there. What is missing is the financial infrastructure that lets it flow more directly to the people, relationships, and strategic assets that enable regeneration at the scale of a landscape, watershed, or bioregion.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Our next piece takes you inside the Living Delta: the bioregion itself, how its portfolios are woven, and how a BFF is designed to get capital moving.

The systems we are trying to change are ultimately made up of people, and that real transformation tends to begin with a shift in how individuals see themselves, their place in the world, and what they are willing to do differently.

So, what we rarely ask is the more personal, more uncomfortable questions underneath:

What kind of human being do I actually want to be? How do I want to live in relation to the land, to other species, and to the place I come from?

Sonja, founder of Landdrift, has been living with these questions for over a decade. It led her on a journey crossing between countries, to eventually establish a regenerative way of living in the Netherlands, in a project called Landdrift. This article is based on a conversation with her, and everything she faces in establishing this opportunity for a new way of living, where human life focuses on actively healing ecosystems to undo past damage, and to create net-positive impacts for nature.

Creating Her Own Path

Sonja grew up in a small village in Noord-Brabant (a region in The Netherlands). She is a daughter and granddaughter of construction builders, however she did not plan to live her life on a similar route. She had an understanding that the village was not the entire world, and that there are other ways of living possible. In 2005, she packed her car and drove to Bergen in Norway, with just a tent and a suitcase.

She stayed here a decade. She worked in energy sector project management, which gave her financial stability and took her across the world. Yet, it was how she chose to live outside of work that made a more significant impact on her. She spent time in off-grid cabins in the Norwegian wilderness in places without running water, wifi, or central heating. Here she learned to use a composting toilet, cook over open fire, and navigate landscapes that had never been domesticated. Norway is a country where wild nature is a backdrop to ordinary life, and that proximity slowly shed her assumption that modern convenience was the baseline for a meaningful existence. “At first I thought, what is this?”, she laughed, while reflecting back on this time in her life. “But eventually I noticed the freedom it gives you.”

She also built a life there, including a long-term relationship. When that relationship ended and her brother’s first child was born back home in Brabant, she felt the pull to come back to The Netherlands to be closer to family. Eleven years ago she moved back and she is happy with this decision: “I’m just a Brabantse (a name for someone from Brabant, a region in the Netherlands). I come from the sandy soils. This is where I belong.”

Lost Books and a Found Vision

Back in the Netherlands, she wrote a book about project management and was invited to a book signing at a conference in Oslo. In a weird spin of occurrences, her books got lost in transit and the signing never happened. Sonja decided to attend the conference anyway as a guest.

On stage was Mac Macartney, who is a British author, educator, and speaker who has spent decades working on the relationship between humans and the living world. He draws on both indigenous traditions and ecological science. Sonja said that at the conference he was speaking to fifteen hundred people; it felt as if he was addressing his words directly to her. She said the main message that grabbed her, was how he spoke about humans not as the planet’s problem (which is the story most of us have been handed), but as a keystone species: beings capable of actively shaping their environment so that life flourishes, if we act from the right relationship. She said about this: “Everything I had been searching for, he said it.”

She walked up to him after the talk and said “I do not know what is happening, but I know I have something to do with you.” This is how she ended up in a mentorship group he had founded, in which she is still participating today. From this group came a series of invitations: “Sleep alone in the woods. Listen to the trees. Find your heart’s song. All things I found deeply uncomfortable,” she says. “But they opened something deeper in me.”

She states this opening was a question that slowly started to form the basis of what would later on be her initiative, called Landdrift: “What does it mean to live as though you are genuinely part of the community of life? And I do not mean this as a spiritual exercise or as a lifestyle brand, but as a practical, sandy-soils Brabantse who wants to actually do something.”

Before getting to what Landdrift does, it is worth sitting with what it is responding to.

Redefining What We Are Here For

During the conversation with Sonja we talked about a more ontological layer, a ‘worldview’ root of how we look at humanity and our role in how we influence life on our planet. Sonja spoke about how most of us have internalised a story in which humans are fundamentally the problem: “There are too many of us, we are consuming too much, and we are disrupting systems that would be better off without us.” It is a story that produces guilt and paralysis in equal measure, and it forecloses the more interesting question: What would it look like if we got our role right?

Sonja does not think that this guilt is empowering hope and change. She believes in us as a keystone species, and how human presence, when rooted and intentional, can actively regenerate rather than degrade. She explains that a food forest does not grow itself, and that nowadays a landscape does not rewild without someone willing to tend it over years and decades. Therefore the question should not be whether humans belong in the picture, the question is whether we are willing to show up differently.

That means, reclaiming something that has largely been lost: a sense of being genuinely from a place. Not indigenous in the colonial sense, but in the more ordinary and more demanding sense: knowing your land, belonging to it, acting from within it rather than upon it.

She calls this the deepest layer of Landdrift. “What does it mean to be indigenous to the sandy soils of Noord-Brabant?” she asks. “Not an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru. Not a vision quest in Spain. What does it mean here, in the actual landscape I come from?” Born from that question and vision, Landdrift was created.

Landdrift

Landdrift combines living, agriculture, and nature creation as a base to reimagine and experiment with what it is to be indigenous to a place. It combines tiny houses for people who want to live close to the land, together with a food forest and agroforestry system, small-scale food production, and active nature creation. This is based on land that is usually transitioning away from intensive agriculture, and is designed around a practical problem that often occurs in The Netherlands’ agricultural setting: How does a farmer who wants to go regenerative fund the seven-year gap before an agroforestry system produces meaningful yields?

Landdrift attempts to show this gap can be bridged. The first location is at Landgoed Eyckenlust, near Beek en Donk in Noord-Brabant. The estate is owned by Jan de Jong, a landowner himself navigating a broader transition for his estate. He is looking to move away from conventional land use towards something more ecologically and socially meaningful. When he encountered Landdrift, he saw a natural fit: a first pioneer on his land that could demonstrate what regenerative development could look like in practice, while contributing to the estate’s long-term future. Together they established a ten-year development agreement, making Eyckenlust the testing ground for a model designed to be replicated on other estates and transitioning farms across the Netherlands.

The 6.5 hectares of former cornland is now slowly becoming something new. The plan is to build a fully functioning ecological and food system over that decade, then step back. What remains is the food forest, the soil, and the productive infrastructure that stays behind as a livelihood for whoever comes next. She says about this: “We are transition makers. We come in, we build it, and then we step back.”

Since February, the market garden at Eyckenlust has been taking shape, and since early June it has been supplying fifteen local families with organically grown vegetables and herbs. A first small group of volunteers has also come together since February, helping out regularly in the garden. Alongside this, Sonja and her team are working on the permit application for the tiny houses, which they expect to submit to the municipality in July 2026, with the hope of placing the first house later in the year.

Despite everyone telling Sonja that it was impossible, she managed to establish Landdrift’s own land fund, which now holds a first loan at 0% interest from a family foundation, intended to finance future locations.

The Obstacles between Vision and Reality

There are two main barriers that Sonja faces at the moment, of which planning law is the first. Every square centimetre of the Netherlands has a designated land use, and while the new environmental law (2024) in principle enables the kind of combined-function development Landdrift requires, legislation and practice are different things. Municipalities say yes, however the state-level government hesitates. The coalition work with institutional players (through Oogst van Morgen and Van Gogh Nationaal Park), is as much a part of the project as the soil work.

Money is the second barrier. The business model ties closely to the tiny houses, which have not been permitted yet. While the land fund covers the acquisition of future sites, the day-to-day development costs at Eyckenlust that extend from soil restoration and planting to coalition-building and legal groundwork, are currently funded largely by Sonja herself, out of her own savings. She continues to take on freelance consulting work to keep things moving in the meantime. The permit for the tiny houses is the key next step: once that comes through, residents paying to live on the land will provide the revenue stream that makes the project self-sustaining. Landdrift is not seeking financial returns for investors, however it is designed to cover its own costs and eventually stand on its own feet.

The deeper funding challenge that ties to this is a way of seeing. Potential investors tend to sort Landdrift into familiar boxes (nature, agriculture, or housing) and miss the point. Sonja states: “They think they understand, but then they are still stuck in the either/or.” When someone gets the full picture, which is understanding that the combination of living, food production, and nature restoration is precisely what makes the model work, then it changes the conversation. It unlocks the possibility of funding based on ecological and social value, rather than financial yield. This means the values are rooted in supporting biodiversity, demonstrating a replicable model, and showing that a different human-land relationship is possible. The first major funder understood this well, and now she is looking for others who see these values as priority as well.

The Invisible Builders

When asked what should be valuable to mention in an article such as this one, Sonja explained the following: “There is always someone who carries all the risk. And that person is completely underexposed. There are nice ideas, great speakers on stage, photoshoots, aldermen in the picture, and then it stops. The person or people who actually carry the whole initiative are invisible.”

She mentions this as a structural observation she has gathered in her experience of ten years of watching rural transition initiatives gain recognition, while the individuals who built them remain uncredited. She is talking about the people that kept going after setback after setback, who did the permitting, the coalition-building, and those who carry the financial risks by self-funding.

At the end of the conversation, Sonja and I were philosophising more about life and the mainstream worldviews in the ‘West’ of the world or the Global North. This led us to another question about whether the way most of us are living is actually how we want to live. And if the dominant story we have been growing up with about what it means to be human, is the only one available. I asked Sonja if she has advice for people who are also questioning this. She spoke from her own life experience: “If you feel a pull toward something, follow it. The world suffers from complacency.” Most people stay in the familiar system, because survival patterns or scarcity thinking keep them there. Most people fill their calendars, go on holiday, and start again, while the systems this all exists within do not support life on our planet. “The world does not get better from sitting on the couch,” she says. “And neither do you.”

Changing our story is something we can do by questioning what truly fulfills us, beyond consuming content or materialism. We can ask ourselves what brings us true meaning and connection, within and without? What stories are inherently ours, instead of put upon us by mainstream beliefs or taken from others? For Sonja this means re-indigenising ourselves and remembering who we are when we live in connection with the land. Becoming humble again to all that we have forgotten and all that is still unknown to us. Sonja invites us to be in our own land in a more grounded and practical manner: “I just feel that this is what I’m supposed to do. And I think many more people have that feeling.”

Landdrift is currently accepting sign-ups from people interested in tiny house living at the Landgoed Eyckenlust location, and is selling vegetables and herbs from the first growing beds this season. Permitting for the tiny houses is expected to move forward later this year.

If you are a funder, landowner, or farmer interested in the Landdrift model, Sonja is actively looking for conversations, particularly with those willing to think in terms of ecological and social return rather than financial yield.

Seven years later, that foundation is becoming something more. BWL Colina, aiming to span the entire Orne Watershed, is now a full member of the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective. Through the ResiliAnce Partnership, a collaboration between the BWL Collective, WireGroup, and Commonland, it is also one of the sites where a Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF) is being prototyped: a blended finance structure designed to channel complementary forms of capital toward the regeneration of a whole territory.

Why the Orne Watershed

The ResiliAnce Partnership assesses landscapes and bioregions across Europe against six criteria, looking for places where a BFF could have the greatest potential, building on existing local processes and embedding into existing networks rather than arriving from the outside.

1. Overall bioregion characteristics: the size, defining features, and key themes of the bioregion, to help identify the types of challenges a portfolio of systemic innovations could address

2. Multi-stakeholder process: the maturity of stakeholder engagement, local buy-in, and development of a shared vision and priorities

3. Team: the strength and expertise of the local weaving team and systemic innovators, including existing knowledge and experience in business development and financing

4. Portfolio: the extent to which an emergent portfolio of systemic innovation already exists, and the potential to expand it for transformative impact

5. Regulatory and government context: whether the local environment is conducive to establishing a financing facility, including precedents for innovative public and private funding

6. Transferability: the potential for learnings from this bioregion to be replicated or scaled across similar bioregions

Across these six dimensions, one quality emerged above all others in this bioregion: a community already in motion. A weaving team has been active since 2019, quietly building the kind of relational infrastructure that takes years of patient work to develop. The idea of a financing facility had already taken root among local actors. The collaboration with the BWL Collective and ResiliAnce Partnership accelerated its translation into practice.

BWL Colina: The Cooperation Hub

Originally rooted in Le Bocage Ornais, the team made a deliberate decision in 2025 to re-scope their work to the entire Orne Watershed, reflecting both the maturity of the collaboration and the scale of the vision. With that expansion came a new name: BWL Colina. The Cooperation Hub now brings together six organisations dedicated to the relocalisation of agricultural, food, energy, and reuse supply chains. Together, they pursue a shared ambition: contributing to living well in the region, at the scale of the watershed. They form the portfolio foundation on which the BFF prototype is being built.

The six members are:

↗ La Coop des Territoires – A cooperative fostering local cooperation and guiding local governments through community mobilization projects and incubation of local social enterprises

↗ Bois Bocage Énergie – An agricultural cooperative transforming hedgerow wood into local renewable energy

↗ Bocage Zéro Carbone – An initiative guiding local companies to act together for the carbon neutrality of the “Bocage Ornais”

↗ Les Fourmis Vertes – A resource recovery center and social integration enterprise developing a reuse sector within the Bocage area

↗ Apidés – A shared workspace hosting a community of about 30 local social entrepreneurs

↗ Rhizome – An agricultural Activity and Employment Cooperative (CAE) enabling individuals to test their business and plan before a guided, phased establishment

Each member addresses a different dimension of the same territorial challenge: energy, carbon, food, reuse, entrepreneurship, and collective action. Each strengthens the conditions the others depend on. Together, they make visible a portfolio of systemic innovation that no single organisation could represent alone.

The Hub emerged from shared needs: to act concretely together, and to pool tools and resources for more cost-efficient collaboration across the territory. It is recognised as a Territorial Hub for Economic Cooperation (PTCE) by the French State. It has been supported through national funding programmes, receiving €100,000 over 2024 and 2025, alongside support from the Normandy Region, the DRAC, and the BWL Collective. Its overall annual budget stands at approximately €120,000.

The Financing Challenge

Despite this strong foundation, member organisations face financing needs that conventional systems struggle to meet. Three gaps stand out consistently.

1. Seed funding for new projects is often considered too high-risk for a risk-averse banking sector.

2. Scaling and securing land requires significant investment, while banks demand guarantees and co-financing that early-stage organisations rarely have.

3. Financing the infrastructure of cooperation - the long-term, ecosystem-level investments that allow the whole system to function, remains stubbornly outside what conventional funding frameworks were designed to support. falls into a category that most funders have no instrument for. The work that holds everything together is precisely the work that gets undervalued.

The BFF is designed to address all three. By combining public and private investment, grants, philanthropy, and citizen capital within a shared governance structure, it seeks to reduce the overall cost of capital for projects with high systemic impact. Crucially, it is designed to leverage what the territory already has: deep local knowledge, established relationships, and the kind of community trust that de-risks projects in ways that conventional due diligence rarely can.

Building the Architecture

The ecosystem around the BFF prototype is being deliberately expanded to include investors, institutions, local authorities, and community actors. This broader engagement serves multiple purposes: challenging assumptions, filling technical gaps, and deepening collective reflection on how the facility can best serve the territory.

Three structures are taking shape, each serving a distinct purpose.

1. The ResiliAnce Partnership Working Group is the ‘engine room’ of the BFF prototype. Bringing together two members of BWL Colina’s weaving team (Igor Louboff & Jeanne Allard), two members of the pan-European BWL support team (Karin Müller & Leon Seefeld), and two members of WireGroup (Michiel Lenstra & Hadewych de groot van Embden), it is laying the groundwork for the financing vehicle itself: exploring the legal structures needed for blended finance, and establishing a governance framework for collective decision-making before any capital enters the system.

2. The Funder Sounding Board widens the circle. It is providing diverse funder/investment perspectives and expertise, challenging the project’s strategic direction and connecting the project to a broader network to advance the initiative. It brings together a member of a regional development agency (Franck Murray/Normandie Participations), an individual with vast experience in impact investing (Anne Gerset/MakeSense) and an expert in private, systemic investments (Iyas Ait Benhiba/ PSBL). They are regularly meeting with representatives of the Working Group.

3. The Colina Steering and Strategic Committee holds everything together. It consists of representatives from BWL Colina. It oversees the workflow and ensures structural integrity across governance, legal structures, and the economic model.

   

For readers interested in how these structures operate in practice, we invite you to explore this page.

An Invitation, Grounded in Place

The weavers of Le Bocage Ornais started with conversations in 2019. Seven years on, those conversations are becoming a financing facility, a collective governance structure, and a growing network of people committed to support regeneration of natural and social ecosystems in their territory.

In the coming articles, we will continue to unpack what this process reveals. We share this work as a grounded example of how a team can build collective governance, allow a specific place and its people to shape both the process and what emerges from it, and move from readiness to reality one careful step at a time.

We invite everyone thinking along similar lines to join the conversation.

📸Images courtesy of BWL Colina.

Invitation: reach out with your questions & ideas, share your own learnings & cases, or connect us with others who should be part of this prototyping journey.

That is when they reached out to Jacqueline. She is a biologist by education and a process designer by practice, who had been deepening her thinking about how meaningful change actually works. Drawing inspiration from Commonland’s Four Returns framework and guided by Theory U, she has been sitting with a question that feels increasingly urgent: what does it really take for a landscape, and the community living in it, to regenerate?

Jacqueline, Arne, and Dyon brought together five people whose skills complemented each other and whose intrinsic values and motivations they knew were closely aligned. Some already knew each other, while others were meeting for the first time.

Together with Evelien, who brings artists and creative practitioners into the conversation; Stefan, who lives in the area and keeps the work grounded and structured; Dyon, who has deep knowledge of agroforestry and can read a landscape like a text; and Arne, who understands biobased supply chains inside out, the five formed the team behind mooi Achterhoek.

Their mission, as Jacqueline describes it: “We are building culture. That is what we are actually doing.”

Listening Before Leading

Jacqueline reflects on the design of the process: “We found that one of the most important things is to give a voice to the people who live and work in the Achterhoek. We also needed to ask ourselves whether we were matching or honoring the energy that already exists. That is what we aim to focus on, from start to finish.”

To honor this commitment, Dyon and Arne conducted thirty interviews across the region with farmers, housing cooperatives, forestry managers, local authorities, and entrepreneurs, aiming to understand where people’s needs and aspirations lie. Three questions, in particular, proved especially revealing.

The first question: How do you imagine the cultural landscape of the future?

Almost everyone spoke of more green: more hedgerows, more trees along field edges, more biodiversity, elements they genuinely missed and wanted to see return.

The second question: What would you pass on to future generations about what constitutes a good life?

Here too, responses converged around being and acting together, around community, and around a quality of shared life that people sensed was quietly eroding.

These two insights shaped everything that followed. The initiative would need to address not only the physical landscape but also the social fabric that underlies it.

A third question proved equally revealing: If you wanted to build this future, what role would you play?

Farmers and entrepreneurs answered quickly and concretely, while local authorities and organizations struggled to respond. Jacqueline found this telling: “It showed us exactly where the energy was, and where it was harder to align future changes with the existing structures. Some people were stuck in their roles.”

Slowing Down

After the interviews, gatherings were organized with the 30 stakeholders who are deeply rooted in the region—whether because they live there, are involved through an organization, or have a business, property, or land use in the area. This is why they are called ‘Streekholders’ in Dutch, a play on words meaning “holders of the region.”

The gatherings took place at the stakeholders’ own sites, often in places like cold barns. The team did this deliberately, believing that moving these meetings out of formal conference rooms and into the environments where Achterhoek stakeholders naturally work created a different, more open atmosphere for conversation.

The first meeting focused on trust and intention. There was no discussion of planning or projects yet; the priority was to get to know one another, build connections, and establish trust. The Streekholders took part in what the team called a listening walk. In small groups, participants explored their personal connection to the landscape and then came together to articulate why they were there and what they hoped to create.

The second meeting delved into history, asking questions about the historical and geographical ground from which they were building. Using maps, the group explored the region’s geological and social foundations: how old community boundaries had been drawn, how livelihoods had shifted over time, and what had been lost. They completed a generational exercise, moving backward and forward in time, reflecting on whose shoulders they stood and for whom they were building.

It was only during the third meeting that the group began discussing what they actually wanted to do. Four working groups formed entirely on their own. The team had been tempted to pre-structure the groups, by geography or theme, but ultimately decided to take a different approach:

“We just let it happen. We wanted to see what emerged from the people who actually live and work here. And it was because we did not assign the groups beforehand that space opened up for questions, needs, and interests that might never have been heard otherwise.”

↗ Landscape-Inclusive Farming
The first group grew out of a question from a dairy farmer who had transitioned to arable crops. Curious and eager to learn, he asked:

“How could I bring my neighbors along to do the same? I don’t want to be in the spotlight or become a loner. How can I share my process and contribute to community building with the farmers around me?”

He wants to demonstrate that there is another way to farm, even as he continues to learn it himself.

↗ New Revenue Models

The second group is exploring how to make new crops, such as nuts, fruit, and biobased plants, economically viable. They are also investigating ways to involve tourists and recreational visitors in caring for the land, rather than having them pass through it.

↗ A local timber value chain

Hedgerows and tree lines have largely disappeared from the Achterhoek landscape, and the reason is simple: they had no economic function. Bringing them back requires creating one. For this reason, a third group is exploring how harvested wood could be used in biochar production, composting, local heat generation, and regional timber construction.

↗ Future farmsteads

The final group is rethinking what happens to farmyards being vacated as the agricultural transition continues. Many of these sites are bought by wealthy individuals and turned into private estates, disconnected from community life. This group is developing a vision for what they call “flexible, connected farmsteads”: shared, multi-household spaces where the land is collectively stewarded and people of different incomes can live alongside each other. Remarkably, two of the three farmsteads have since been selected for a provincial pilot programme on future rural estates, something no one had anticipated when the group first formed.

The Work That is Hard to Fund

What makes Mooi Achterhoek possible is precisely what the current funding landscape has yet to learn to value.

The most vital part of what Jacqueline and her team do, bringing stakeholders into relationship, holding space for a process without directing it, making room for something to emerge without needing to own the outcome, remains stubbornly outside what conventional funding frameworks were designed to support.

Governments and institutions will commission specific outputs: a value chain analysis, a farmstead development pilot, a study on landscape heritage. What they struggle to fund is the work that makes any of those outputs meaningful in the first place: trust-building, listening, and the patient facilitation of a community discovering its own energy and direction.

“It is a profession,” Jacqueline says. “It is not something that’s ‘nice to have’(a weaver). It is a prerequisite for change. But in Western societies, because we focus on outputs and tangible products, this work gets undervalued. It doesn’t fit into a specific box in the current system.”

The irony is structural. A farmer buried in debt and daily operational pressures cannot step back and reimagine his situation alone. He needs someone to lift him out of the daily rush and give him the time and company to think. That conditions-creating work has no line item in most funding frameworks. For now, the team sustains itself on a mix of project commissions and a family foundation donation, putting in far more hours than they are paid for because, as Jacqueline puts it, “we cannot let the region fall out of our hands.”

A Thirty-Year Horizon

Mooi Achterhoek does not have a fixed end date. Jacqueline describes it as a generational undertaking, perhaps thirty years to build a genuinely regenerative culture around land, community, and economy in the region. That timescale is not pessimism. It is realism rooted in history: the Achterhoek has its own deep tradition of noaberschap, looking after each other, working together toward something, and ‘het Rijnlands Model’. These are not romantic references. They are proof that a different culture is not only imaginable here, but has existed before.

In the near term, she hopes to see something concrete emerge from each working group this year; an investment that helps a farmer make a transition, a timber value chain beginning to take shape, a farmstead development model with something tangible to show. By 2030, she hopes some of it will simply be normal practice.

The longer horizon is harder to define, and she seems comfortable with that. It is about a shift from transactional relationships to reciprocal ones, from managing a landscape, to genuinely belonging to it again.

Getting there will take time, sustained attention, and people willing to do work that does not always show up in progress reports. Mooi Achterhoek is, for now, one of the places where that work is quietly happening, and not the only one.

About Harvest of Tomorrow

It is part of Harvest of Tomorrow (Oogst van Morgen), a programme initiated by Commonland together with the Akademie van Plaats, Oogst van Overmorgen, Bioregional Weaving Labs, and Frisse Blikken.

The programme brings together farmers, communities, governments, and organisations to develop landscape plans that are both actionable and financially viable. The seven participating regions span the Netherlands, from the Wadden island of Texel to the river landscapes of Rivierenland and the Maasvallei. Each region works from its own character and context, while sharing knowledge and experience across boundaries through a joint learning network.

The programme runs across four phases over roughly two years, moving from building partnerships and exploring potential, through to developing investable landscape plans and mobilising the financing to carry them out. Participating teams also have access to a youth programme called Oogst van Overmorgen, which offers young people between twenty and forty the opportunity to develop leadership skills and contribute forward-looking ideas to their regions.

Harvest of Tomorrow is itself part of a larger global network, the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, which supports regenerative landscape initiatives across Europe and beyond.

Learn more about mooi Achterhoek.

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Weaving a Landscape of Tomorrow: mooi Achterhoek

In a barn somewhere in the Achterhoek region of the Netherlands, thirty farmers, landowners, artists, and civil servants recently sat together on a cold afternoon, with no presentation slides and no formal agenda. Just people, a shared landscape, and a question: what do we want to leave behind for those not yet born?

Jacqueline is one of five freelancers who together formed the team behind mooi Achterhoek. A biologist by training and a process designer by practice, she describes their work simply: “We are building culture. That is what we are actually doing.”

The project began with a question from Stichting Building Balance and the Dutch Ministry of the Interior about what new biobased crops might mean for the landscape of the future. And how to actually realise this, beyond drawing up maps. Jacqueline and her colleagues, Dyon, Evelien, Stefan, Arne and Ben, pushed back. If you truly want change to take root, they argued, you cannot begin with your own agenda. You begin by listening.

So before any meetings were held, thirty people from across the region were interviewed. Two themes kept emerging: everyone wants more green, more hedgerows, more biodiversity. And everyone values doing things together, a quality they sensed was quietly disappearing. Those two findings became the compass for everything that followed.

The gatherings that emerged were deliberately unhurried.

The first was about trust and intention. The second explored the landscape’s history: soil, water, old community boundaries, how livelihoods had been built and what had changed. Only by the third meeting did the group begin talking about what they actually wanted to do.

Four working groups formed entirely on their own. One is exploring how farmers can transition to new crops, including nuts, fruit, and biobased plants, and how to weave tourism into their land in a way that genuinely involves visitors in caring for it. Another is building a local timber value chain, reconnecting the harvesting of landscape elements to regional construction. A third is rethinking the future of rural farmsteads: how freed-up farmyards can become shared, community-rooted places to live rather than private estates. That last group has since been selected for a provincial pilot programme on future rural estates, something nobody had planned for when they first sat down together.

In Dutch regenerative practice, the kind of work Jacqueline and her team do is also called weven, which means weaving. It is the creation of connective tissue between people, institutions, and landscapes, being present in a process without directing it. It is also, she notes, very hard to get funding for. Governments are willing to commission specific outputs, but not the patient groundwork that makes those outputs meaningful. “It is a prerequisite for change,” she says. “But because we think in outputs and concrete products, it gets undervalued.”

Mooi Achterhoek is part of the Harvest of Tomorrow (Oogst van Morgen) programme, a Commonland initiative bringing together seven regional landscape partnerships across the Netherlands. We explore this initiative further in our upcoming Substack post, where we unpack how the team designed their listening process, what the four working groups are actually building, and why the most important part of this work is also the hardest to fund.

👉Learn more about Mooi Achterhoek.

Participation as Infrastructure

In Pietrari, a small town tucked into the foothills of Romania’s Mountains, there is one library. It has one librarian. And somehow, over the past 35 years, it has become the beating heart of community life.

We hear the term community often. But where does it actually begin? And how is it built in practice?

Community doesn’t appear all at once. Sometimes it’s like a nebula lighting up, a big moment of collective energy. More often, it’s quieter and smaller: a series of frequent, modest interactions, like synapses firing in a nervous system. These moments of contact, borrowing, teaching, sharing, asking, listening, form the living tissue of a community. Over time, they create an ecosystem of exchange and relationships.

This is participation. Not the loud or performative kind, but the slow, recurring kind. The kind that makes a place feel alive. The question, then, is not whether participation matters, but what conditions make it possible and what happens when those conditions are carefully nurtured.

You are not creating a community or holding a container from nothing: you are becoming a vessel for something that already wants to exist.

— Patricia Mou

That quote points to something Crina Popescu seems to have understood instinctively. She didn’t set out to build a movement. She just kept showing up, kept listening, kept saying yes and something that already wanted to exist found a place to grow.

Across our work at Bioregional Weaving Labs, we often speak about changemakers and systemic innovators. To make this tangible, we invite you into the world of Crina Popescu, the sole librarian in Pietrari, Romania, for nearly 35 years.

A library is typically seen as a place to borrow books, a quiet space for individual learning. Crina reimagined it as something much more: a truly enabling third space. A place where people of all ages feel safe, welcomed, and inspired to explore their curiosity. In a small rural town, she transformed an ordinary building into a living universe of discovery.

Under her care, the library became a hub for STEAM workshops, robotics, programming, astronomy, sewing, VR experiences, and eco-reading clubs. Children didn’t just consume knowledge; they discovered talents, built confidence, and developed skills for the future. Parents gained trust. Young people found belonging.

What Crina built is more than a library. It is a form of participation infrastructure.

This brought Crina to the simple but radical question: If people can borrow books to grow, why can’t they borrow other tools to become more?

From that question, a Library of Things emerged — cameras, sewing machines, telescopes — making access possible without requiring large, one-time purchases. What began as a gesture of equity became a sustainable system of shared use.

The library now hosts youth volunteers teaching younger children, local seamstresses passing on skills, and elders knitting, storytelling, and connecting. Crina continuously listens, running surveys, updating resources, securing grants, responding to evolving community needs. She hasn’t just created a room filled with things; she has cultivated a network of trust, exchange, and care. One person, acting like a banyan tree, creating shelter for many others to grow.

Participation infrastructures, both tangible (spaces, tools, platforms) and intangible (relationships, norms, trust, facilitation), are the foundational building blocks for thriving communities. When they are strong, communities don’t just receive change; they generate it.

Crina’s library reminds us: creating the conditions for participation isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the infrastructure that allows communities to move, contribute, create and share.

👉Learn more about her story here.

Where Belonging Begins

When we speak about place, community, or cooperation, the words can begin to feel abstract — almost atmospheric — as if they float above us in a fragile mix of ideal conditions. We invoke them easily: collaboration, gathering, place-based work. Yet each of these concepts shifts meaning depending on context. What cooperation looks like in one setting may look entirely different in another.

Every gathering has a location. Fewer have a soul. The Good Harvest Seminar in Gryzbow, Poland, offers a lens to explore the distinction between space and place, and what the infrastructure of belonging looks and feels like.

A space can be physical — a hall, a field, a conference room. It can be designed, booked, organised. But a place is something else. What we call “place” can refer to geography, to identity, to memory, or to relationship. A place is imbued with meaning. It carries memory, atmosphere, relationship. A place is where people feel seen. Where they feel that they belong.

Perhaps the most significant system innovation available to us today is not a new policy, nor a new technology, but the intentional creation of such places for reflection, where learning, connection, and imagination can flourish across boundaries.

This is the power of the Good Harvest Seminar.

For twenty-two years, weaver Ewa Smuk-Stratenwerth and her team have organised the Good Harvest Cooperation in Organic Farming seminar for Polish farmers. Over time, it has become more than an annual event. It has become fertile soil — a place that re-energises farmers, replenishes their batteries, and strengthens the connective tissue of the organic farming community.

Ewa describes the atmosphere as rich, nourishing, and distinct — the very quality that has sustained the seminar’s success over decades and continues to draw increasing participation. But this atmosphere does not emerge by accident. When I ask what makes it so special — why it does not simply become a space for complaint — her answer is precise: here, farmers feel respected.

Farmers are often positioned near the lower end of the social hierarchy, despite performing the essential function of feeding society. At the seminar, their knowledge and contribution are recognised. That sense of respect is intentionally designed into every detail — from the structure of the programme to the choreography of interactions, from the way discussions are facilitated to the care with which tea is served. Respect is communicated not only in words, but in gesture.

The seminar functions as a place of inquiry. A place for exchange, debate, and expression. A place capable of holding opposing views without collapsing into polarity. Scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and farmers — individuals who may hold divergent political perspectives — come together with organic farming as their shared language.

Ewa speaks of the importance of simple moments: sharing coffee, eating together, exchanging small stories from the field. These informal interactions — the energy in the room, the swapping of seeds, the quiet peer-to-peer advice — generate forms of connection unlikely to occur in purely scientific or institutional contexts. Relational capacity is built in conversation as much as in formal panels.

Belonging as Infrastructure.

Crucially, the seminar holds space for disagreement. Discussions do not always aim at resolution. Sometimes the purpose is simply to speak, to listen, and to be heard. In a culture often shaped by binary thinking — right or wrong, aligned or opposed — this practice is necessary. Some conversations evolve into collective action. Others do not. But the act of holding space builds trust. And trust is cumulative.

We all carry the imprints of the systems in which we were raised. Our fears, beliefs, and inherited narratives shape how we approach cooperation. For many Polish farmers, histories of political transition and systemic instability have complicated trust and therefore hinder collaboration.

“Yet, today there is a visible shift. A desire to connect amongst farmers from different lands . A movement toward cooperation amongst those who take part in the Good Harvest Seminar”, she says.

Creating spaces of belonging may be our most essential work.

These are places where people from different parts of a system gather to sense together and co-create. From such gatherings, something living emerges — not forced or engineered, but arising organically, like mycelium beneath a forest floor. Each initiative retains its own identity and impact, yet contributes to a wider ecosystem rooted in regenerating landscapes, communities, and economies.

Trust is the bridge.

The work of building better futures is already underway. It has been for decades, carried quietly by farmers, organisers, and communities committed to regeneration. But if we are to move faster and further, we must move together.

And to move together, we must first create places where belonging can take root.

The Mycelium of Change

After more than 15 years at Danone - leading circular economy and open innovation strategy across Europe, North America, and beyond - Merijn Dols has spent his career at the intersection of business, ecology, and systems change. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an advisor to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Food Advisory Board, and co-founder of the Future Economy Forum. He joined the BWL Collective in January 2026 as Portfolio Weaver. In this piece, he shares the lens that brought him here.

Both engineering school and the boardroom trained me to see the world as a complicated machine. When a system failed, the answer seemed obvious: analyse the parts, find the inefficiency, re-engineer for better output. For years, this was how I approached food systems and finance alike - as problems to be fixed.

Two decades later, moving from the boardroom to the field, I’ve come to see how limited that lens was. The crises we face - ecological, economic, social - are not malfunctions of an otherwise sound machine. They are the direct output of a worldview that treats living systems as resources to be extracted rather than relationships to be tended.

As Donella Meadows argued, the most powerful place to intervene in a system is not at the level of rules or incentives, but at the level of the paradigm - the shared assumptions from which the system arises. To shift the system durably, we have to be willing to question the mental models we most sweetly hold.

Seeing the Whole

The physicist David Bohm spent his life pointing to something we tend to forget: that fragmentation is not reality, it is a perception. Wholeness is what is real. Our tendency to break systems into isolated parts - separating ecology from economy, community from governance, inner from outer - is not a discovery of how things are. It is a habit of mind, reinforced by industrial-age institutions that benefit from that fragmentation.

To counter this, I’ve found the concept of the “macroscope” useful - not a tool that magnifies the small, but a way of holding the complex. Where reductionist analysis breaks things apart to understand them, the macroscope asks how the parts relate: what flows between them, what patterns emerge, what the system as a whole is doing that no single part can see.

This shift - from parts to patterns, from analysis to synthesis - is not just intellectual. It changes what we notice, what we fund, and what we build.

The Mycelium Beneath

If centralised power is the hallmark of the machine view, community is the cradle of something far more adaptive. When we expand our sense of identity - from individual to community, from community to living system - a different kind of agency becomes possible.

The mycelium beneath a forest floor offers a useful image here. Those fungal networks do not control or direct the trees above them. They create the conditions for exchange: nutrients, signals, resilience. The forest’s health depends not on any single organism, but on the quality of connection between them.

This is how I understand the work of bioregional weaving. My role as Portfolio Weaver in the BWL Collective is, in part, to strengthen that mycelium - resourcing labs to nourish local trust and exchange, and to create what I think of as migratory paths: carrying adaptive insights from one bioregional context to another, the way birds carry seeds.

Indirect Work

There is a temptation, when you believe in a direction, to push hard for it - to arrive somewhere with answers, to accelerate change by sheer force of conviction. I am learning, often the hard way, that this is a trap.

My mentor, Carol Sanford called this “indirect work”: developing yourself to resource others, rather than defining the path for them. We are not here to tell communities what regeneration should look like in their place. We are here to resource the unfolding of their own innate capacity - to hold the conditions in which something new can emerge, much as a gardener tends soil without dictating what grows.

This means resisting what might be called the crusader impulse: the instinct to fix, to solve, to export a model. The shift we need is not a better blueprint. It is a different relationship to the complexity of living systems - and to the communities that inhabit them.

It is time, I believe, to stop funding the fixing of symptoms and start resourcing the shift in consciousness that makes a new system possible. Not because the problems aren’t urgent - they are - but because urgency without a change of lens will only produce faster versions of what already isn’t working.

The mycelium does its most important work invisibly, beneath the surface, over time, lifting up the forest. See you in the soil.

Coming Home to Place

Something is stirring. Across six continents - from the river valleys of Scotland to the cloud forests of Colombia, from Catalonian hillsides to the watersheds of Hawaii - practitioners, ecologists, farmers, artists, and community weavers are turning back toward the land they inhabit. They are asking not just how to protect it, but how to live in genuine relationship with it.

Isabel Carlisle has been quietly doing this work - rooting people back into place - for nearly a decade.

It is perhaps no accident that Isabel came to this work through the arts. Before founding the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in South Devon in 2017, she spent two decades in the London art world - writing as a critic for The Times, curating exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, and ultimately directing the Festival of Muslim Cultures, a nationwide programme of over 120 events designed to build bridges of understanding between cultures.

That experience - using art to shift perspectives and bring people into relationship - turned out to be exactly the preparation bioregioning required.

A Practice of Relationality

For Isabel, bioregioning is never merely a technical endeavour.

“Bioregioning is a practice of relationality,” she says. “Indigenous people live in relation to place. It’s a two-way exchange between place and people and in many ways, that’s what bioregioning is trying to get back to. We’ve lost so much of that sense of belonging.”

This shapes everything BLC does. Rather than applying a fixed methodology, the organisation works from a set of guiding questions: does this project truly resource the bioregion and its people? Does it work at the scale of whole systems? Does it build long-term vitality and capacity? And is knowledge being shared?

At the heart of all of them is a simple shift: not treating place as a resource to manage, but as a community to be in relationship with.

Building that kind of relationship takes time. “Trust takes five or six years to build,” Isabel says plainly. Relational depth cannot be invoiced by the hour. BLC spent its early years practising what she calls “bioregioning by stealth” - embedding values into external projects, seeding approaches quietly - until the work could stand in its own light.

From Local Roots to Global Reach

South Devon is BLC’s home ground - defined not by political boundaries but by water: the sweep of rivers from the Tamar to the Teign, the high moorland of Dartmoor, and the coast below.

One of its most significant projects has been coordinating a shared strategy for climate adaptation and nature recovery across more than 50 organisations - including farmers, port authorities, ecologists, local councils, fishermen, food banks, and housing groups - who now meet regularly to align efforts and take action together.

Over time, this work has extended beyond the region. In 2022, BLC hosted an international conference on bioregioning that helped reconnect and energise a field that had been relatively quiet for decades. Today, it works alongside networks such as the Ecoversities Alliance, the Regenerative Communities Network, and Ecolise - contributing to a growing ecosystem of practitioners advancing place-based approaches across contexts.

This work, Isabel says, is nothing less than ‘reanimating democracy’ - creating space for civil society to shape the future of their own landscapes.

Art as a Way of Sensing Place

If bioregioning is a practice of belonging, art is one of its most powerful languages - And one that the BLC team is actively evolving.

During three years of leading a salt marsh restoration project, BLC brought in a DJ, a painter, and dancers - not as decoration, but as part of the work itself. Through sound, movement, and image, people were able to sense the place in ways that data alone cannot offer.

“The knowledge held in the body, in image and sound and movement, is knowledge that data cannot capture,” Isabel explains. “To sense a bioregion fully, you need to let it move through you - not just map it.”

Learning journeys extend this approach: groups travel together to meet farmers, community-run health centres, local councils, walk landscapes, share meals, and hear stories firsthand. In this way, understanding a bioregion becomes not just intellectual, but lived and felt.

Resourcing the Resourcers

When asked what she would say to those beginning this kind of relational, systemic work, Isabel is direct: you cannot resource others if you are not resourced yourself.

Perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the work: that the outer landscape and the inner one are not separate. To heal a place, you must also be willing to be changed by it.

Bioregioning, at its most honest, is not a strategy for saving the world. It is an invitation to finally, fully, come home.

Go Deeper →

Want to experience bioregioning from the inside? BLC has two opportunities in 2026:

Bioregioning in Practice Hosted by Gaia Education. A 10-week online series running March - June 2026, with themed learning sessions, invited speakers from around the world, and open group conversation. 90 minutes per session.

Bioregional Learning Days 2026 BLC’s residential courses - an invitation to taste, hear, and feel South Devon from the inside. Bring your own bioregion with you, and leave with what you need to take your next step.

How Discovery Arcs take shape in our quest to redesign the finance system

The challenges in regenerative finance are both technical and relational. They raise questions about whose knowledge counts, how power is shared, and whether the communities closest to the land can genuinely shape the systems designed in their name.

That is the territory the ResiliAnce Partnership set out to explore.

Alongside the design of Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) across three bioregions, the team turned to a set of deeper, underlying questions. Because bioregional finance is not only about directing more capital into bioregions - it is about re-designing how that capital flows, how decisions are made, how risk and value are shared, and how different forms of capital relate to one another. .

Rather than rushing toward answers, the team began by gathering the questions.

On a Miro board, uncertainties were mapped and clustered. Patterns began to emerge. Through discussion and prioritisation, four central questions surfaced as the most generative places to begin.

These became known as the Discovery Arcs.

Rather than a fixed research track, a Discovery Arc is a structured field of inquiry — a way of exploring a complex question through research, dialogue, and iteration. The arcs help organise exploration across different aspects of BFF design, allowing insights to emerge gradually through shared learning.

The Four Discovery Arcs

Together, the arcs explore four fundamental dimensions of Bioregional Finance Facility design.

1. Allocation Governance - how decisions about capital are made, and by whom

2. Catalytic Capital- how early-stage or risk-tolerant capital can unlock broader investment

3. Risk & Value Sharing - how financial and non-financial value are distributed across actors

4. Poly Capital Returns - how ecological, social, and financial returns can be recognised together

The intention was never to produce a static research paper. Instead, the work was designed to open up inquiry, to clarify how BFFs might take shape in specific contexts while contributing to a growing global conversation around bioregional finance.

Learning Through Iteration

The methodology that emerged reflects this intent. Each arc begins with what is already known. Initial insights are expanded through research, then tested and refined through internal dialogue — a space where assumptions can be challenged and thinking can evolve without the pressure of premature conclusions.

From there, the circle widens. Conversations with external practitioners bring in new perspectives, which are then reintegrated into the process. Knowledge moves outward and folds back in again.

One early turning point came when the first draft of the work was shared internally. It focused heavily on critiquing financial systems, but failed to explain how those systems actually function. The assumption that others shared this understanding proved incorrect.

If the goal was to build bridges between worlds, the structures of finance first needed to be made visible.

This insight reshaped the work.

A Question of Participation

As the arcs developed, another challenge came into focus: participation.

Many of the people working directly within bioregions — those stewarding landscapes and building community initiatives — are already stretched thin. Engaging in complex financial design processes can feel like an additional burden.

Yet their participation is essential.

Without local voices helping shape how capital flows and how decisions are made, there is a real risk that even well-intentioned initiatives reproduce the same extractive dynamics they aim to transform. Increasing the volume of funding alone is not enough. The design of the system — the how — must also be shaped by those closest to the ground.

Bridging this divide between financial expertise and lived, place-based knowledge is one of the central tensions the Discovery Arcs explore.

The proposed path forward is not primarily ideological. Rather than trying to convince financial actors to step outside the constraints they operate within, the work focuses on creating new spaces where different forms of knowledge can meet and collaborate in practice.

Creating the Conditions for Better Questions
The Discovery Arcs are not designed to produce definitive answers.

• they structure collective inquiry

• they deepen reflection and critical thinking

• they bring different worlds into conversation

• they make financial systems more visible

• they enable collaborative design

In that sense, they are less about solving a problem than about creating the conditions for better questions — questions that can be explored together – by financiers, practitioners, and bioregional actors alike.

This piece draws on insights from an interview with Leon Seefeld.

👉 Read Discovery Arc #1 (Governance for Place-Based Investing)

👉 Read Discovery Arc #2 (Capital Allocation Governance in Bioregional Financing Facilities)

👉 Subscribe to our Bioregional Financing Substack

👉 Join the wider conversation across our BWL network

Seasonal Rhythms

A Guide to Attuning with the Ecological, Cultural, and Inner Cycles of Your Place

What if time weren’t something to manage, but something to inhabit?

Meander Magazine Volume 2 explores how we live inside natural cycles and each season offers its own form of rest, renewal, and return.

In Seasonal Rhythms, editor Tom Greenwood and bioregional educator Ken Lassman offer a practical guide to creating a seasonal wheel – a slowly gathered tapestry of knowledge weaving personal observation alongside knowledge already held in the land, by long-time residents, naturalists, and indigenous knowledge keepers.

“This practice is less about building a perfect record and more about cultivating belonging”

Read Seasonal Rhythms in Meander Volume 2.

Order Volume 2 Now

Signals from the Field

Across the field, people and organisations are advancing work that strengthens bioregions and the broader regenerative movement. Here are a few signals worth spotlighting.

🦋 Shape the Experience at Katapult Future Fest
Katapult Future Fest (KFF) is looking for volunteers in Amsterdam, May 27–29, 2026. KFF brings together impact investors, founders, and changemakers to build a regenerative future. This year’s theme, Enter the Metamorphosis, invites volunteers to step into the heart of the experience - connecting, co-creating, and supporting transformation from within..

🚀 Apply or share

🌍 Will you be at ChangeNOW this year?

ChangeNOW 2026 brings together innovators, leaders, and changemakers from around the world working on our planet’s most pressing challenges. Over the years, it has become a key global convergence point for climate, regeneration, and systemic transformation.

March 30–31 and April 1, 2026 @ Grand Palais, Paris

👉 Get your ticket

👁️Bioregioning Ireland: Weaving Ecological Passion into Collective Action

Join practitioners across Ireland restoring land, culture, and communities to explore Ireland as an island of Bioregional Potential. The event will connect an emerging Ireland-wide network and deepen understanding of high-quality bioregional practice.

🚀 Apply or share

📜Creating Financing Ecosystems for Transformational Impact

Across the field, financial innovators are recognising that financing systemic transformation requires more than traditional funding models. Emerging ecosystems bring together multiple forms of capital, local partners, intermediaries, and stewards to coordinate how capital is blended, deployed, and aligned around long-term social and ecological goals. This shift reframes finance not as a series of transactions, but as a system designed to enable transformation.

📖 Read more

A Note from the Collective

As we move from winter into spring, we find ourselves in a phase of activation and alignment. What has been seeded over the past years — relationships, shared practices, and a collective direction — is beginning to take an increasingly tangible form across the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective.

The start of the year has already brought important milestones. Early January, we launched the first phase of our new website — a shared home for the stories, people, and practices emerging across the network. On January 19th, close to 350 people joined our annual online Bioregional Hope gathering: a moment of connection in the depth of winter, energised by concrete examples of systemic innovation and by the growing sense of a field finding its footing.

The implementation of our 2026–2030 strategy has also begun — not as a separate layer, but as something lived. It is shaping how we collaborate, learn, communicate, and organise. Across the Collective, a shared database of Portfolios of Systemic Innovations is taking shape. Learning materials are being co-created for publication this spring. Weekly Open Office sessions continue to create space for Weaving Teams to exchange. And closer alignment on storytelling and fundraising is helping to connect efforts across the network. In the coming months, we will begin to unpack the strategy more openly through our LinkedIn channel — sharing the thinking and the practice behind it.

The horizon ahead is full. We are preparing to welcome new Weaving Teams across Europe, each bringing their own context and relationships into the collective work. We look forward to the Learning Summit we are co-organising with our partner Commonland, hosted by the BWL in Oltenia de sub Munte — where we will meet with 80 practitioners in the Romanian bioregion this April. And we are preparing a dedicated track on bioregioning at Katapult Future Fest in Amsterdam this May.

If the past years were about weaving the foundations, this period feels like one where the work is settling into practice — becoming more visible, more connected, and more coherent.

We are grateful to each of you who holds this work: those who show up to practise it, those who follow it with curiosity, and those whose support makes it possible to keep going. We step into this season with a clear sense of direction and a growing field of possibility.

— On behalf of the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective

If something in this edition stirred a thought or a feeling, we’d love to hear from you — and feel free to pass it on to someone who would resonate.

A New Cycle Begins

Subscribe to receive our upcoming Seasonal Weaving: From Spring into Summer newsletter, and learnings on our work on prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities

Subscribe now

Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective

Connecting and strengthening communities of action to regenerate bioregions.

When these intelligence agencies analyze threats through a security lens, they finally state what scientists have been warning about for years: cascading food shortages, mass migration, resource conflicts, and pandemics.

But there is a critical insight in what the report does not say: the very systems we have built to organize our economies (how we finance projects, price land, measure value, and produce food) are fundamentally incompatible with preventing this collapse. We cannot solve a systemic crisis with the same economic logic that created it.

At the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, we want to make visible which systems are no longer fit for the transformational change that is needed. We support innovations that create new systems, aligned with the health-generating principles of life and the Earth’s natural regeneration processes. In this article, we zoom into the Netherlands (the part that we refer to as the ‘Living Delta’ bioregion), where this clash between old systems based on extractive principles and new systems aimed at creating a nature-positive economy is playing out in real time. You will read about the experience of changemakers working to transform the Dutch food system, even when everything is designed against them.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

The Netherlands is one of the world’s most fertile regions, but is also struggling with a huge nitrogen crisis, water pollution and biodiversity decline (Wageningen, 2024). Despite a high number of innovative initiatives trying to build climate-resilient, regenerative food systems these enterprises/cooperations are collapsing one by one over the past year. This is not because their models do not work, but because the economic rules of the game are not designed for a regenerative future.

The canary in the coalmine took its last breath when Jongerius, one of the biggest organic plant nurseries and supplier for the organic horticultural sector in the Netherlands, faced bankruptcy in late 2025. This news hit the sustainable food movement hard. Although the company was rescued in early 2026 through a restart under investment company Larendael, the bankruptcy itself revealed deeper systemic vulnerabilities. At the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, this raised deeper questions for us: What does this say about a food system in which precisely those players pursuing to align with Earth’s regeneration are so vulnerable? Why do initiatives working for a better future find it so difficult to survive?

We posed these questions to four Dutch changemakers: Geert van der Veen (founder of CSA network ‘Herenboeren’, regenerative Hub ‘Plaats de Kleine Aarde’, and community land trust ‘Aardpeer’), Alex Schreiner (chair of the Community Supported Agriculture network), Natasha Hulst (Delta Portfolio Weaver for the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective and co-initiator of the commons ‘Voedselpark Amsterdam’), and Sebastiaan Huisman (organic farmer and holistic agriculture advisor). Their answers point to systemic failures rooted primarily in economics and in our assumptions about what a healthy economy looks like.

As Geert puts it: “When you see that De Lokalist (major short-chain supplier for local food) was going bankrupt (currently trying to make a restart), and that an established company like Jongerius is not making it on its own, then it is not just hitting the small concepts alone. It runs through the whole sustainability sector.”

An Economy That Punishes Regenerative Practices

The most fundamental problem is that mainstream economic systems actively penalize those who want to make change for the better. “If you do the right thing, which does not come at the expense of the earth and the health of people and animals, then you do not earn money,” says Sebastiaan. “The economic model actually punishes you if you follow nature’s principles or if you try to protect nature.”

The numbers tell the story clearly. Sebastiaan points to his experience on a 2,000-hectare organic farm in Poland: making compost costs 30 to 50 euros per ton, to produce a single ton containing roughly 7 kilos of nitrogen. The same amount of nitrogen can be bought cheaply from conventional suppliers. Those who invest in soil health and biodiversity simply cannot recover their costs through the market.

Meanwhile, the real costs of the current system remain hidden. Groundwater pollution, health damage from artificial fertilizers, and environmental degradation are borne by society, instead of the companies that cause them. “The profits are privatized and the costs are passed on to the community,” Sebastiaan states.

The Wrong Kind of Financing

Even when sustainable initiatives attract funding, the structure of that funding works against them. “The way financing is done is not in line with the realistic margins that currently exist,” explains Natasha. “Those are paper-thin with these kinds of initiatives. A loan or investment that’s too large and demands continued interest payments and repayments can very easily cause an initiative to collapse.”

Traditional loans demand fixed repayments and prioritize growth. But regenerative food systems operate with thin margins, variable yields, and long-term investments in soil and community—values that cannot be all translated into euros.

The Covid period briefly seemed to offer a window for change. Consumer interest in local food surged, and many projects were able to secure new loans to further grow their enterprise. But as Natasha notes: “The aspiration of the consumer and the reality of the consumer, even the green consumer, are simply too far apart.” When everything went more or less back to “normal” and consumers turned to the supermarket again, the post-Covid landscape quickly proved inhospitable, and those loans became a burden for those pioneering initiatives.

Land, Scale, and the problem of Centralization

The Netherlands has one of the highest agricultural land prices in Europe—surpassed only by Malta (Nieuwe Oogst, 2026). Natasha explains: “When land prices are this high, and you then also have to carry the bank charges that come with them, it becomes virtually impossible to farm sustainably and still make a viable living. What takes its place instead is speculation-driven monoculture like lily cultivation and tree nurseries, things you cannot eat, often grown with heavy pesticide use.”

Adding to the challenge of getting access to land, is a deeper tension between reaching scale and resilience. Jongerius was effectively the only accessible source for organic plant material in the Netherlands. Its initial threat of bankruptcy exposed a significant gap in system resilience. This centralization itself was a consequence of the dominating market model: with such thin margins, operators are forced into large-scale efficiency, leaving no room for the diversity of smaller initiatives a resilient food system requires.

As Natasha summarizes: “Resilience cannot grow out of monopoly. When everything is centralized, dependency becomes dangerous.” Food system resilience depends on distributed interdependence — networks of smaller actors that are connected, mutually supportive, and not structurally dependent on a single dominant player. The current economic model works against this logic.

Policy Made for the Wrong Outcome

Dutch agricultural policy reinforces these dynamics. It is designed to support large-scale operations, and smaller scale local food initiatives fall through the cracks. “Almost all subsidy opportunities start counting at higher amounts,” says Alex. “A small CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) business of half to one and a half hectares has little use for a subsidy that begins at 500,000 euros.”

The incentive structure is also perverse. Subsidies reward farmers taking steps toward sustainability, and not those who have already arrived. “A regular farmer who takes a few steps toward organic scores better than an organic farmer who’s actually already doing very well,” Alex explains. “In that way, you also somewhat punish the pioneers.”

While policy making could be a lever for change, political will is currently lacking. “The government doesn’t dare to make good choices,” Alex observes. There is no clear policy framework in which organic farming or shorter supply chains are recognized as part of a long-term agricultural transition. The agricultural lobby, with short term vested interests in the status quo, keeps the focus elsewhere.

The Rules of the Game Must Change

Geert states the conclusion plainly: “I don’t think you can realize sustainability with today’s rules of the game. We’ve used the instruments of today’s economic system to try and establish something sustainable and future-proof. And I think that just doesn’t work.”

His own experience bears this out. Herenboeren, the cooperative CSA model he founded, grew to 24 farms with 15,000 members, which made him at one point the largest farmer in the Netherlands. In 2024, its founding body had to declare bankruptcy, due to unpredictable government policy and difficulty to access land. This made further growth impossible while the loans were based on a growth model. And yet the movement did not collapse because the farms were organised as a cooperation. The farms are now continuing independently, maintaining the community bonds that proved stronger than the financial setback “Organizing differently builds resilience,” Geert says. “Bottom-up approaches work.”

This points toward what is needed: financing structures, land governance, and policy frameworks designed not around profit and scale, but around long-term ecological and social value. Sustainable food initiatives need their own instruments: patient capital, shared risk, collective ownership, place based financing mechanisms and collective governance models that protect against dominating market pressures. Despite the structural obstacles, pioneers are already building alternatives for a new system based on these values. However, until the economic logic changes the pioneers will keep paying the price. At this moment, the question is not whether change is possible, but whether we will support these emerging nature-inclusive solutions before more initiatives will collapse.

What We Can Do

The situation is complex, but there are starting points for transformative change, both individually and systemically.

As a Citizen: Buy Local

Become a member of a CSA or buy local organic. Alex: “A very practical one is: look for a CSA garden near you and become a member. Go see how you can get your own food as locally as possible.” She states the importance of creating a different relationship with food: “With a CSA, you just know: I can literally walk to the place where my food comes from,” Alex explains. “You can talk to the farmer and see what he’s doing. That makes it immediately much more transparent.”

Support community land trusts. Natasha points to a crucial action: “Free up land for regenerative agriculture. Aardpeer, Lentenland, Land van Ons, Grond van Bestaan. Those are all initiatives that free up land to be stewarded by the community. If the land charges are removed, then you have a more level playing field. And you can also determine what happens on that land for eternity.”

Grow yourself. Geert: “At De Kleine Aarde, we’re now starting with an approach to make every square meter edible. Because why can’t you have free food? You can actually grow it yourself on a square meter on your balcony, in your garden. It takes some effort, but finally you have free food. You buy a tomato once, you put a seed in the ground, and off you go.”

Systemic Changes

Beyond individual action, systemic changes are needed to create the conditions where regenerative practices can thrive.

Organize regionally. After the bankruptcy of Jongerius, the CSA network in The Netherlands has intensified knowledge sharing about self-cultivation, cooperation, and sharing transport costs. Alex emphasizes the importance of collective self-reliance: “We were already looking at how we can give people more autonomy by cultivating more themselves. Transforming into a cultivation business through a cooperative model, more regionally focused.”

Build distributed networks. Natasha emphasizes the need for distributed networks rather than relying on single central actors: “The strength of such networks is that if one node fails, the whole continues to function.” This resilience becomes truly strong when infrastructure is locally and collectively owned. The bankruptcy-threat of Jongerius shows what can go wrong when such a vital infrastructure is not collectively anchored. Without shared ownership and protective governance, even widely supported initiatives can succumb to increasing debt or market pressures. While Jongerius was ultimately saved through a restart in February 2026, the episode highlighted the fragility of relying on single actors. In response to this centralised approach, new initiatives are emerging to strengthen the network: alternative organic nurseries like De Koster and Wunderlich are expanding across the Netherlands, and a new cooperative growing business, Kiemkrêft, is launching in Northern Netherlands in early 2026 (CSA Netwerk, 2026). De Lokalist is also making a restart.

Finance for multiple values. Natasha advocates for financing that is almost interest-free, designed not around profit but to create social and ecological values. Sebastiaan is working on these kinds of new structures through Eco-val: “We’re not going to look at the outcome, but at the performance of that farmer. What does he have to invest in the landscape? How much money does he need to maintain that annually? You can assign a value to that performance.”

Put nature on the balance sheet. Make natural values visible in accounting. Sebastiaan: “We need to look at expenditures differently. There are costs and on the other side values are created. If I have built up 1% humus in my soil, then I have created value. Instead of the accountant only seeing costs and the money is gone, I say no, the money isn’t gone, it’s invested and it’s well invested.”

Performance-based subsidies. Sebastiaan advocates for a fundamental revision of agricultural subsidies: “We need to make the agricultural subsidies that are now paid per hectare, performance-based. If you perform for ecosystems and social values, then you get more subsidy per hectare. And not because you’re a big farmer and you pull your cultivator through.”

Bioregional Finance Facilities. To support these distributed networks and new value systems, there is a growing recognition that regeneration requires not just new practices on the land, but new financial infrastructure. Through the ResiliAance partnership (a collaboration between Wire Group, The Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective and Commonland), work is underway to develop Bioregional Finance Facilities (BFFs). Unlike traditional funds focused on returns and scale, a BFF operates from relational principles: it connects capital, bottom-up governance, and cooperation to the long-term needs of a bioregion. Since 2022, various European Weaving Labs have been active, and in 2025 ResiliAlliance explored where conditions are ripe to prototype the first BFF. These prototypes focus on qualities like trust, initiative coherence, shared landscape narrative and portfolio. BWL Colina in Normandy is now experimenting with a BFF as a living prototype, where local partners, investors, and financiers together explore how capital can serve what’s already growing. This marks a shift from fragmented project financing to an integrated, place-based financial infrastructure that is slow, relational, and rooted in place. Also in the Netherlands such a BFF prototype is being developed in collaboration with the Oogst van Morgen program. More information on Bioregional Finance Facilities can be read in this article on our substack.

Shift from transactional to relational. Geert points to a fundamental shift needed in how we organize economic relationships: “Every contract seems transactional. I will give you money if you give me this back. That has nothing to do with relational anymore. How do you treat each other? What do you need? How does that work?” This shift from transactional to relational economy is essential for a sustainable food system. In practice, this might mean cooperatives where workers share decision-making power, or supply chains built on long-term partnerships rather than lowest-bid contracts. Natasha Hulst co-authored an article with David Bollier, a renowned author and activist known for his work on the commons as a new paradigm for economics, politics, and culture. The article explores the importance of Relationalized Finance for generative living systems and bioregions in greater depth. It can be read here.

Create best practice places. Sebastiaan emphasizes the importance of visible examples: “Stone in the water, a ripple effect. That you create places, everywhere in the world, where best practices are. Where people can come. Where they see: it can be different after all. That’s very important. Because people just don’t believe it, or can’t imagine it.”

Adjust policy. Alex says about this: “We need to acknowledge that groups of small growers exist, and look at how you can stimulate them. Look at what’s needed for those farmers who are already doing it differently, to keep doing that.” This means subsidies that work on a small scale, regulations that align with the practice of organic growers, and lease legislation that rewards pioneers instead of punishing them.

Lobbying and political pressure. Alex advocates for more people to help with lobbying and organizes opportunities for this at the Federation of Agro-ecological Farmers.

Bioregional Weaving Labs. The challenges facing local food initiatives are too large to solve in isolation. That’s why the role of connecting networks is crucial. Our work at the Bioregional Weaving Labs brings together pioneers, local initiatives, and knowledge partners to learn from each other and develop joint solutions. Instead of focusing on one central solution, we focus on strengthening regional ecosystems that are connected to each other. Our aim is to share knowledge, experience, and resources between regions, which allows local initiatives to benefit from each other’s insights, jointly experiment with new financing models like the Bioregional Finance Facilities, and together form a voice toward policy.

These approaches that go from individual food choices to new financial infrastructure, are not separate paths but interconnected strategies for transforming our relationship with land, food, and each other. Each reinforces the others: local food purchases support regional networks, which require new financing structures, which in turn enable the shift from extraction to regeneration.

A Different View of Security

We stand at a tipping point as the current food system will change inevitably. The only question is whether we consciously shape that change, or whether we wait until ecological collapse forces our hand.

Geert puts it sharply: “Where do I feel safest? In a system I know is finite? Or does my security lie in searching for alternatives?”

The initiatives that have been forced to stop are not failures. They are pioneer projects that clash with a system fundamentally not designed for what they are trying to do. Their struggles show exactly where the blockades are: in financing models that reward destruction, land prices that serve speculation instead of food production, and policy that favors large-scale thinking while resilience requires diversity.

But this pain also points the way forward. As Natasha states: “Changing the food system doesn’t start with corporations, not with politics, and not with policy. It really starts with keeping these kinds of local initiatives afloat. And somehow we must decide together, as a community, that we want to make local food production possible.”

The Choice Before Us

The knowledge and technology to become sustainable exist. What is missing are rules of the game that make doing the right thing possible instead of punishing it. Changing those rules requires more than technical adjustments. It requires a different way of looking at value, security, and what an economy should actually serve.

For Geert, this shift is both practical and profound. His message is to bring inspiration back into ourselves, to remember that the earth is a living whole. “She’s not a mechanical machine with controlled inputs and outputs, but a wonder that brings life, with plants, animals, and people who carry a soul within them.”

This remembering is a necessity, because we are heading into an uncertain, turbulent time. The change has already begun. Now it is about us joining and reimagining our systems. There is still time, if we start now.

Want to know more?

• Alex Schreiner: CSA Netwerk NL

• Sebastiaan Huisman: Eco-Val and COMPLEX EARTH

• Geert van der Veen: Plaats de Kleine Aarde, Aardpeer, Herenboeren

• Natasha Hulst: Voedselpark Amsterdam, Grond van Bestaan, and Schumacher Center for a New Economics

• CommonLand and Oogst van Morgen

• Bioregional Weaving Labs

  Thanks for reading Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective! We advance bioregional regeneration by supporting communities of action. 🍃

19 January · Online (Zoom)

Across Europe’s bioregions, systemic change is taking root — not as theory, but as lived, place-based practice.

On 19 January, Bioregional Hope 2026 brings these stories together.

This year’s gathering focuses on systemic innovation across bioregions in Europe, with presentations from 7 Bioregional Weaving Labs. Each bioregion will share how innovation is emerging through land, water, food systems, governance, finance, and community — shaped by local ecology, culture, and long-term care.

Rather than scaling solutions outward, we explore how change deepens in place.

What to expect

• Short presentations from 7 European bioregions

• Parallel breakout rooms — one per bioregion — with space for dialogue

• Shared harvesting of patterns, insights, and questions

• A brief journey into the future, guided by Rob Hopkins, inviting us to sense what these bioregional pathways could become as they mature

Not prediction.

Not prescription.

But collective orientation.

🗓️ Event details

Bioregional Hope 2026

🗓 Monday, 19 January 2026

⏰ 19:00–21:00 CET

🌐 Online (Zoom)

🔗 Register here

Participation is free, but registration is required.

Register via Zoom 👇

Register here

After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email with your personal access link.

This gathering is for practitioners, system thinkers, community builders, and anyone curious about bioregional approaches to living well within planetary limits.

If this invitation resonates, you’re warmly encouraged to share it with others who may wish to join.

Hope, here, is not a feeling.

It is a practice.

—

Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective

Some of you arrive here with deep familiarity with bioregional frameworks and place-based approaches to regeneration. Others are encountering this language and terrain with fresh eyes. This article is written with both in mind.

Consider it an invitation to walk together.

Within the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective (BWLC), our work is guided by a Theory of Change made up of six interrelated pathways that together support systemic transformation across bioregions. This exploration of Bioregional Financing Facilities sits within Pathway 4: Developing Financing Mechanisms – a pathway concerned with evolving financial infrastructures that can genuinely support long-term, place-based regeneration.

Rather than treating finance as a purely technical domain, this pathway understands financing as inseparable from relationships, governance, and the lived realities of bioregions. It asks what kind of financial structures are needed when the work is relational, slow, ecological, and rooted in place.

In this article, we’ll unpack the idea of Bioregional Financing Facilities through our own lens — offering entry points into concepts that are expansive, layered, and still evolving. Think of this as the first clearing in a forest. We’re not mapping every tree, but we’re helping you find your footing so you can walk confidently into the woods.

What is a Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF)? 🌿

Imagine a river system. Water doesn’t flow from a single, distant dam controlled by engineers. Instead, it gathers from countless springs, tributaries, and underground aquifers, each responding to the landscape’s unique contours, each nourishing the ecosystems it touches.

A Bioregional Financing Facility works in much the same way.

At its heart, a BFF is a place-based financial infrastructure designed to channel resources, capital, knowledge, and relationships into the specific needs and opportunities of a bioregion. Rather than imposing solutions from above, it emerges from below, shaped by the people, ecosystems, and communities that call that place home.

A BFF is a collaborative vessel and a bridge. It brings together diverse actors: farmers, citizens, indigenous knowledge holders, local entrepreneurs, conservation practitioners, philanthropic partners, and investors, each contributing their unique perspectives and resources.

Crucially, it is not controlled by a single entity. Governance is collective, ensuring that decisions reflect the intelligence, priorities, and long-term health of the whole system.

Why the BWLC began prototyping BFFs?

The idea of Bioregional Financing Facilities has been shaped over many years by people across the regenerative field — from indigenous practitioners who have modelled place-based stewardship for generations, to collaborators and peers at Ashoka, Dark Matter Labs, BioFi Project, Capital Institute, TWIST, TransCap, 1000L, r3.0, Design school for Regenerating Earth, Metabolic, FEST, and others whose work continues to expand what is possible in regenerative finance.

BWLC’s decision to begin prototyping BFFs emerged from a shared observation across the bioregions we work in.

Across landscapes, powerful initiatives are already restoring, protecting, and regenerating land- and seascapes. Yet many of these initiatives struggle to reach scale or become part of the mainstream. A major systemic barrier is access to financing that matches the nature and time horizons of regenerative work.

We see a persistent gap between what is happening on the ground — what ecosystems and communities need to become resilient — and what dominates the financial system, where attention often centres on carbon markets or narrowly defined “green” instruments.

Our working hypothesis is that a missing layer exists within the financial architecture: one capable of connecting these two worlds in a regenerative way.

Rather than waiting for this layer to emerge elsewhere, we chose to prototype it ourselves.

BFF prototypes are our way of testing this hypothesis — exploring how place-based financing facilities, grown from multi-stakeholder landscape processes, might unlock the long-term, blended capital that regenerative work requires.

When is a Bioregional Weaving Lab ready to prototype a BFF?

Since 2022, the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective has supported the emergence of communities of action across Europe — each rooted in a specific bioregion and convening diverse actors around a shared purpose: regenerating that place and their communities. Over time, it became clear that while all Bioregional Weaving Labs work toward this common aim, they do so from very different starting points.

Each bioregional community carries its own history, relationships, levels of trust, and degrees of organisational maturity.

In early 2025, the ResiliAnce partnership — formed by The Weaving Lab, Wire Group, and Commonland, in collaboration with the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective — undertook a focused inquiry to understand where the conditions might already be present to begin prototyping a new financial infrastructure layer.

Rather than looking for scale or financial readiness alone, the assessment focused on less visible qualities: relational trust, coherence among actors, and the depth and quality of systemic innovations already emerging within the bioregional portfolio — alongside the maturity of existing landscape processes.

One of the bioregions identified through this process was Le Bocage ornais in Normandy, France. Within this bioregion, BWL Le Bocage ornais, together with its local partners, is exploring the prototyping of a Bioregional Financing Facility.

This initial high-level assessment formed the basis for a more in-depth Needs Assessment, which the BWL Support Team is currently developing together with local partners. We’ll share more on this process and what is emerging from it in a future article on this Substack.

A Living Prototype: BWL Le Bocage ornais

In Le Bocage ornais, the work over several years of local partner La Coop des Territoires has helped cultivate a dense fabric of cooperation and co-creation among local initiatives, cooperatives, civic actors, and practitioners working on food systems, land stewardship, and territorial resilience.

What makes this context particularly compelling for a BFF prototype is not the presence of a ready-made financial solution, but the strength of the relationships and shared intent already in place across the bioregion.

Here, the guiding inquiry is not whether regeneration is happening — it is — but how a Bioregional Financing Facility might support and amplify what is already alive.

• How can place-based financing integrate with an established landscape vision in Le Bocage ornais?

• How can financial instruments be shaped to serve local entrepreneurship, collective governance, and long-term ecological care, rather than distort them?

To explore these questions, a Sounding Board has been established, bringing together local Portfolio Weavers, funders, impact investors, the BFF project lead from Wire Group, and a representative of the pan-European BWL Support Team.

In this context, the BFF is approached as a learning vessel, explored by BWL Le Bocage ornais and its partners. It is a way to test how capital, governance, and collaboration can be woven together in service of the bioregion’s long-term vitality.

What’s Next

This article marks the beginning of a deeper exploration into Bioregional Financing Facilities.

In the next piece, we’ll share insights into the process of co-creating the selection criteria, and why Le Bocage was chosen to prototype the BFF.

From there, we’ll move further into practice — examining what is emerging on the ground, what is being learned, and how these early experiments are shaping the next iterations of bioregional finance.

For Further Exploration

If you’re curious to explore Bioregional Financing Facilities more deeply, the resources below offer a strong companion to this series.

BioFi Project

BioFi (Bioregional Finance for Planetary Regeneration) is a global community supporting bioregions to design, capitalise, implement, and evolve Bioregional Financing Facilities. They provide tools, guides, case studies, an ecosystem of partners, and a comprehensive book on bioregional finance.

🌐We recommend exploring the BioFi resource garden.

TransCap Initiative

This article introduces systemic investing—an approach that focuses on using capital to transform whole systems rather than funding isolated projects. If you’re interested in systems change, sustainability transitions, or rethinking how finance can drive long-term social and environmental impact

🔎Read the article.

Dark Matter Labs

This paper on Systems Investing and Systems Finance, explores how to build the financial, governance, and value infrastructure required to run bioregional financing facilities in practice.

📖Explore

Invitation: reach out with your questions & ideas, share your own learnings & cases, or connect us with others who should be part of this prototyping journey.

Sources

With life
8 Principles of a Regenerative Economy
Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis

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👉 Read Discovery Arc #1 (Governance for Place-Based Investing)

👉 Read Discovery Arc #2 (Capital Allocation Governance in Bioregional Financing Facilities)

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👉 Join the wider conversation across our BWL network

Get in touch with Tom Greenwood via https://meandermagazine.substack.com

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This article is the first edition of a new Substack series dedicated to sharing The Learning Series of Prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities in Europe, by the BWL (Bioregional Weaving Labs) Collective and partners. It will act as a living, recurring narrative, following how prototype projects in different bioregions in Europe move through different phases of development, while serving as both a tracker of progress as well as a space for storytelling and exchanging knowledge.

The journey will unfold across various dimensions including:

• Exploring what a BFF is and how it works

• Sharing details of the bioregional prototypes with their maps, emerging portfolios of systemic innovations, identified opportunities and challenges

• Tracing the early development of BFFs within the BWL Collective with roles, workstreams, aims, and objectives

• Highlighting pilots and experiments across the partnership and the regions, including the weaving of systemic portfolios, developing collective governance models, designing the legal set-up of BFFs, and the formation of poly-capital communities

• Answering deeper discovery questions to test our assumptions, together with our Sounding Board groups

• Sharing challenges and celebrating successes along this journey

• Documenting emerging partnerships, guiding learning questions, and early commitments

Stories will hopefully feature tangible outcomes, case studies from local actors, and insights for replication in other bioregions.

The Urgency for bioregional financing

Across Europe and beyond, the urgency to regenerate landscapes and communities is becoming impossible to ignore. Climate instability, biodiversity loss, and social inequalities are converging in ways that threaten the resilience of the very places we depend on. At the same time, billions in capital continue to flow into short-term, extractive models that undermine rather than restore life.

Restoring a wetland or regenerating farmlands takes decades, not funding terms of two to three years. A river runs across many communities, not just one project site. Finance must therefore be long-term and place-based, supporting the interconnections in ecosystems rather than isolated interventions. If regeneration is to take root, we need financing mechanisms that match the local region, the landscape scale, and the long timelines that ecosystems need to regenerate.

This is where bioregional financing comes in. Instead of scattering funds across disconnected projects, it grounds investment in the living foundations of places: at the scale of soils, watersheds, and communities. By working at this scale, capital can align with the long-term health of regions and create conditions where ecosystems and economies thrive together.

Exciting news:

On March 10, 2025, Commonland, Ashoka, The Weaving Lab, and WireGroup have established the ResiliAnce partnership, “where finance and resilience meet”. Together with local BWL partners we are prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) in three European bioregions: The Delta (the Netherlands), Altiplano Estepario (Spain), and Le Bocage ornais (France).

This is a vital and ambitious step in systems transformation toward accelerating regeneration across Europe. By designing financing mechanisms at the bioregional scale, this partnership seeks to transform how regenerative initiatives are supported and sustained.

What do we mean by bioregions?

Bioregions are defined beyond geographic maps. They are living systems shaped by natural boundaries such as watersheds, soils, climate patterns, and ecosystems. They are also shaped by the people, cultures, and histories that have co-evolved with these landscapes.

Unlike political or administrative borders, bioregions reflect the interdependence of ecological and social systems. For example, a river basin is not only a hydrological unit, it is also home to farming practices, communities, and species whose futures are deeply interconnected. Regeneration only makes sense at this scale, the scale of life itself.

What are Bioregional Financing Facilities (and why do they matter)?

Image credit: BioFi Project. Retrieved from https://www.biofi.earth/what-is-a-bff.” We are inspired by the book ‘Bioregional Financing Facilities’, written by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld (visit: https://www.biofi.earth) for a free download of this e-book.

At their core, BFFs are locally governed financial structures that blend different sources of capital: philanthropic, public, private, and institutional. They are designed to move away from fragmented, short-term project funding and toward long-term, holistic mechanisms that enable entire landscapes and communities to thrive.

In the BWL Collective we bring three essential approaches together; bioregioning, weaving and holistic landscape restoration. In upcoming articles we will dive deeper into these concepts, and especially how we use weaving to help orchestrate the work bottom-up and top-down, and to connect the two worlds. We are inspired by the 4R Framework, to work towards resilient bioregions and communities that can generate Four Returns:

🌱 Natural: restoring ecosystems and biodiversity
🤝 Social: strengthening communities and livelihoods
💰 Financial: supporting sustainable local economies
✨ Inspirational: renewing hope and cultural connection

Current funding approaches often fall short. They are scattered, time-limited, and rarely match the scale of ecological and social challenges. BFFs are different because their ability to invest at scale depends on weaving bioregional portfolios of projects, initiatives, and businesses that work together to create holistic impact and contribute to systemic transformations in a region. Without these integrated portfolios, a BFF cannot channel capital effectively or sustain investment at scale. By anchoring finance at the level of living systems, BFFs aim for capital to flow into the long-term health and regeneration of places, rather than isolated initiatives.

Looking ahead

Over the coming months, this Substack will share stories from the prototypes, insights from our partners, and reflections on what it takes to design financing mechanisms for regeneration. Readers will have the chance to learn alongside us as we explore what it means to fund life at the scale of bioregions.

What’s next

The first BFF prototypes are being co-created in bioregions in the Netherlands, Spain, and France. Each facility aims to secure a minimum of €5 million in seed funding, with the potential to grow to €50 million or more per bioregional portfolio. Beyond mobilising and blending various forms of capital, these prototypes aim to:

• Build locally owned governance models that keep decision-making and resource allocation rooted in place

• Demonstrate how blended finance can serve regenerative economies and create resilient communities and landscapes

• Document best practices that broaden the concept of value to include cultural, environmental, social and intangible benefits

• Generate practical lessons for scaling bioregional financing across Europe and beyond

Invitation: reach out with your questions & ideas, share your own learnings & cases, or connect us with others who should be part of this prototyping journey.

Many beautiful things have been unfolding this summer — both within the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective and in the bioregional field at large.

Read all about it in this short (but sweet) summer newsletter 🍯

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“Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure & relationship that will sustain the restored land”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

🌍 Bioregional Weaving Labs News

📍 BWL Delta Bioregion, the Netherlands

• Weaving the Future of the Delta 🌊 Dutch partners — Commonland, Akademie van Plaats, Frisse Blikken, Oogst van Overmorgen, Ashoka (NL), and The Weaving Lab — have joined forces in De Oogst van Morgen. Together, they are co-creating a two-year Landscape Leadership Lab to support 8 landscape teams in regenerating their local landscapes and the wider Delta bioregion. Guided by the 4 Returns Framework, teams will work on building communities, shaping visions and plans, and developing portfolios and financing mechanisms to mobilise capital for long-term regeneration.

  

  Read more on De Oogst van Morgen

• Financing Innovation in the Delta 🧪 We’re working together with 8 landscape teams to identify the most urgent systemic innovations and prepare them for investment. These will come together in a Delta Portfolio, with support on governance, business models, and more. To mobilise capital, we’re also exploring a Delta Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF). Updates will soon be shared via our Substack newsletter.

  Subscribe now

• Co-creating a Regenerative Vision for the Delta 🔮 In June, BWL partner Ashoka brought together a collective of more than forty Changemakers to shape the first version of a Delta Narrative. Drawing on experiences from the field, they mapped systemic barriers, enablers, and innovations driving change. This collaborative journey will evolve into a shared systems analysis and bold regenerative vision for the Delta, enriched by contributions from all 8 landscapes over the coming months.

  

  Learn more about the Delta Narrative

📍BWL South Veluwe Watershed, the Netherlands

Watch the South Veluwe Watershed Film

• Rooting Deeper in South Veluwe 🌱 30 and 31 May the South Veluwe Watershed hosted the Rooting Deeper Festival — bringing together artists, farmers, musicians, and community members for bike tours, music, spoken word, storytelling, workshops, live podcasts, crafts, and children’s activities. The festival celebrated peace, freedom, and the deep connections between people, food, and land.

Learn more about Rooting Deeper festival

📍BWL Altiplano Estepario, Spain

Watch the Altiplano Estepario Film

• Financing Pathways for the Altiplano 💵 Together with our partners, we’ve completed a 4R Landscape Finance Assessment to map the funding needs of projects and enterprises in the Altiplano Estepario. The results highlight what’s needed — from grants to impact loans — and set the stage for a joint finance strategy with our partners. Next up: recruiting a Coordinator and exploring bioregional financing mechanisms to unlock diverse capital streams.

• Alliance for Regenerating the Iberian Peninsula 🤝 Eight landscape initiatives and five strategic partners across Spain and Portugal launched La Red Ibérica de Territorios Regenerativos — a cross-border alliance accelerating holistic landscape restoration to regenerate the Iberian Peninsula. Alvelal and Aland are two key members of this Iberian Network, serving as a lighthouse in the implementation of the Four Returns framework, showcasing how holistic landscape restoration can create lasting impact across ecological, social, economic and inspirational dimensions.

  

  Learn more about La Red

📍BWL Laconia, Greece

Watch the Laconia Film

• Bioregional Transformation in Action 🌱 In April 2025, 50+ participants from across Europe gathered at The Southern Lights regenerative farm for TRANSFORM — a two-week Erasmus+ training blending systems mapping, leverage points analysis, holistic landscape development and bioregional finance.

Learn more about TRANSFORM

📍BWL South East Ireland

Watch the South East Ireland Film

• O-Mapping: Weaving Art and Place 🗺️ Bioregioning South East Ireland is pioneering O-Mapping — a creative and communal mapping process that blends bioregional data with art, culture, poetry, and music. Instead of extracting information, O-Mapping invites people to paint, weave, write, and create their own “deep maps,” expressing lived connections to place.

  

Learn more about O-Mapping

• Exciting Portfolio Updates 🧩 Check out the latest Bioregioning South East Ireland newsletter to learn more about Our Farm at Bushy Park, Groundswell, Bioregional Finance and much more.

  

  Read the latest newsletter

📍 BWL Le Bocage ornais, France

• Le Bocage ornais on the Investor Stage 💼 Weaver Igor Louboff shared the bioregional regeneration approach for Le Bocage prnais at the annual seminar of BWL partner Wiregroup in the Netherlands. The session sparked strong interest from impact investors and entrepreneurs, leading to a lively Q&A on developing Bioregional Financing Facilities to support systemic innovations in the bioregion.

Learn more about the partnership

• What Will We Eat Tomorrow in Le Bocage? 🥕 Le Bocage ornais has published results from its five-year experiment, highlighting key obstacles and levers for shifting collective catering and distribution channels toward more organic, local, and seasonal food systems.

Read the full report

📍 BWL Oltenia de sub Munte, Romania

Watch Oltenia de sub Munte Film

• Fireflies Light Up Oltenia 🪲 From July 3–6, 2025, Oltenia de Sub Munte hosted Romania’s first Firefly Festival — an intimate gathering of 150 guests celebrating the magical spectacle of fireflies. The festival blended nature’s wonder with hands-on workshops, creating a unique experience of learning, connection, and light.

  

  Learn more about the Firefly Festival

• Stories from the Mountains 🏔️ BWL Oltenia de sub Munte launched its short BWL film People of Oltenia de sub Munte with four days of screenings hosted in the protagonists’ own homes. Around 200 people gathered to see their stories come alive on screen, alongside films from Greece and Spain — celebrating local voices in a truly bioregional showcase.

  

  Watch People of Oltenia de sub Munte

📍BWL Middle Vistula Valley, Poland

Watch the Middle Vistula Valley Film

• Art for the Vistula: “We Are From Here” 🎨 This summer, the Middle Vistula Valley is inviting locals to take part in the “We Are From Here” art competition (June–September 2025). The call is simple: paint, write, or take a photo — and share your place on Earth. The competition celebrates the beauty, nature, history, and people of this unique bioregion, with the Vistula River at its heart.

  

  Learn more

🌍 BWL Pan-European Weaving Team

• New Bioregional Systems Change Course 🌐 BWL partner Ashoka has launched a free, self-paced online course: Systems Change for Bioregional Changemakers. The course helps participants craft their own systems change strategies in the context of Bioregional Weaving Labs and similar landscape development approaches.

  

  Join the course for free

• What is Commonland? ▶️ BWL partner Commonland has released a powerful new video showing how their work helps restore landscapes, revitalise communities, and drive systemic change worldwide. It’s an inspiring look at how people and organisations are coming together to regenerate land and society.

  Learn more about Commonland

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🕸️ The Bioregional Movement at Large

• Meander Magazine — Returning to Place 📰 Meander is a new magazine dedicated to bioregional culture, slow living, and regenerative futures. Its first volume — Returning to Place — is nearly finished, exploring how we reconnect with land, seasons, and cultural rhythms.

  

  Subscribe to Meander

• Dark Matter Labs x Bioregions ⚗️ BWL colleague Leon Seefeld and the team at have launched a poetic new website exploring bioregional governance, finance, and metrics. Through essays, tools, and provocations, it invites us to reimagine how systemic change can be rooted in place.

  

  Visit website

• The First Trans-Bioregional Coordination Circle 🤝 The BioFi Project recently hosted its first Trans-Bioregional Coordination Circle, bringing together bioregional organising teams from different landscapes to foster collaboration, share learning, and strengthen capacity for organising across many places.

  Watch video

• r3.0 Conference — Braiding Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration 📅 September 9-11, r3.0 hosted their 12th International Conference “Braiding Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration: Learning to Reinhabit Earth Together”. The conference featured parallel Bioregional Confluences — autonomous local gatherings that engaged with the content while pursuing their own bioregional development, creating a network of simultaneous conversations across the globe.

  

  Learn more

• Pando: A Whole-System Approach to Bioregional Funding 💰 The Bioregional Pando Funding Ecosystem, developed by the Design School for Regenerating Earth, takes a “whole system” approach to resourcing regeneration. Local laboratories in each bioregion experiment with context-specific funding models, while portfolios of projects cluster around five key themes: governance, economy, ecological regeneration, education, and health. At the sub-continental level, regions collaborate through scale-linked patterns, creating shared frameworks and local foundations. Together, they connect into a global network — with the Earth Regeneration Trust funding bioregions on five continents.

  

  The Bioregional Pando Funding Ecosystem

• Bioregional Mapping & Planning Guide 🗺️ Félix de Rosen from The BioFi Project created a comprehensive Bioregional Mapping & Planning Guide. The guide offers a practical “how-to” for communities and organisers who want to move from mapping their landscapes to developing a Bioregional Regeneration Strategy — and eventually setting up Bioregional Financing Facilities. It highlights mapping not just as technical cartography, but as a way to uncover the stories, relationships, and identities that make each bioregion unique.

  

  Bioregional Mapping & Planning Guide

• Leading From Place — Catalysing Conditions for Life📍 The Really Regenerative Centre CIC is inviting senior place-based leaders into Leading From Place — a community of practice and learning journey designed to accelerate the capabilities needed for regenerative leadership. Participants explore how to lead “in right relationship with life” weaving together economies, cultures, and ecosystems that enable places to thrive. With tools, peer learning, and systemic practice, the programme helps leaders catalyse the conditions conducive to life in their own bioregions.

  

  Learn more about Leading From Place

• Everything is Connected — Regeneration in Barichara ▶️ This beautiful short film by Joe Brewer takes us to Barichara, Colombia, where the community is restoring dry forests, reviving water cycles, and nurturing a new generation of environmental stewards. It’s a moving glimpse of bioregional regeneration in action.

  Barichara Regenerative Education Fund

• Place-Based Regeneration — Capabilities for Change 🦋 The Really Regenerative Centre CIC has released a powerful new report on Regenerative Capabilities for Transformative Change. One of its key insights is that regeneration is not just about projects, but about building the deep capabilities — such as systems thinking, collaboration across differences, and working in right relationship with place — that allow communities to design lasting change.

  

  Read the Full Report

• Regenerative Communities Fund — Open Call 💰 ECOLISE has launched an Open Call for 15 established Community-Led Initiatives (CLI) across Croatia, Finland, France, Portugal, and Spain. Selected initiatives will join the new Regenerative Communities Fund as demonstrators, helping to showcase how community-led action can accelerate the transition to regenerative futures.

  

  The Regenerative Communities Fund

• Sparks of Regeneration — Call for Systemic Innovators ✨ Sparks of Regeneration by Unearthodox is an open call for innovators, disruptors, and changemakers with bold ideas for systemic change. Selected initiatives will receive funding, mentorship, and join an 8-month incubation journey starting in January 2026.

  

  Learn more and apply

  Fellowships for Regional Resilience 🌐 The Regional Resilience Fellowship by Open Future Coalition is a year-long program supporting community-rooted organisations and networks advancing resilience in food systems, ecological restoration, community wellness, and the built environment.

  

  Become a Regional Resilience Fellow

• The Great Wealth Transfer — Funding Regeneration ⏭️ In “The Great Wealth Transfer”, a film by the Be The Earth Foundation, wealth holders and visionaries share how inherited wealth can be reimagined to regenerate ecosystems and communities. The story explores new models of philanthropy and investment rooted in care, equity, and the flourishing of life.

  Learn more about Be The Earth Foundation

🍂 A New Cycle Begins

Subscribe to receive our upcoming Autumn newsletter and learnings on our work on prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities 💡

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“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

—Anaïs Nin

With the thaw of winter and arrival of spring, The Bioregional Pulse evolved into a seasonal and cyclical newsletter.

So with lots of bioregional joy, we proudly present the Bioregional Weaving Labs Spring Newsletter 🐝🪻

We tried to make it short, sweet and beautiful. To read the full newsletter, click on the link below 👇

Read Our Spring Newsletter Here

Teaser — What to Expect

In this newsletter, we highlight impact stories of 9 Bioregional Weaving Labs.

We share updates from the Pan-European Weaving Team.

And finally, we synthesise key news from the Greater Bioregional Movement.

This newsletter represents the tip of the iceberg of our bioregional work — to dive deeper, make sure to click on the links 🔗🤿

Read Our Spring Newsletter Here

Would you like to be featured in our next newsletter or weave together bioregional collaborations?

Get in touch with Tijn Tjoelker 🙏

PS: Follow us on LinkedIn for more frequent updates ♾️

“Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bringing about what we hope for. Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.”

—Joanna Macy in Active Hope

Thank you for joining the Bioregional Hope event on 20 January 2025. You truly turned “Blue Monday” into a remarkable day of Active Hope!

With more than 400 people participating (and 850+ event registrations) you were part of an extraordinary demonstration that positive energy and honest connectivity can lift us all up!

Let’s keep growing the mycelium of weavers and changemakers to protect, restore, and regenerate our bioregions!

Below you’ll find:

• The event recording, pictures and videos 🎥

• The Bioregional Weaving Guide ✨

• Key takeaways and learnings 💡

• Links that were shared in the Chat 🔗

Watch The Event Recording 🎞️

You can watch back the recording of the main room on YouTube 👇

Explore The Bioregional Weaving Guide 📃

To support the growing bioregional movement, we created an overview of vital resources to help Changemakers get started with Bioregional Weaving 👇

The Bioregional Weaving Guide includes:

• Three essential resources to help you get started 🚩

• Map and database of 150+ initiatives 🗺️

• 6 Books, 14 courses, and 20+ articles and videos to dive deeper 🤿

• Call to actions to support bioregional weaving work ✊

• And much more!

Explore The Bioregional Weaving Guide

Event Pictures 📸

Here are some pictures of the wonderful evening 👇

Living Room Videos 🍷🍿

Here are some living room videos from Bioregional Hope participants 👇

In The (Social) Media 🐝

Thank you for generously sharing your appreciation and reflections on social media after the event 🙏

Share Bioregional Weaving Labs

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Key Takeaways

As we were not able to record the break-out room sessions, we played around with Claude.ai to synthesize key insights, learnings, reflections and questions based on the meeting chat and AHA Slides Harvest 👇

Explore the Harvest & Insights

Key Insights

Resonance

Actionable Learnings

Key Questions

Links you shared in our event Chat 💬

As per popular request, we created an overview of all the links that were shared in the chat during the event 👇

Bioregional Organizations & Networks

• Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective

• Bioregional Earth

• BioFi Community

• BioFi 2025 Cultivator

• Bioregional Earth Organizing Guide

• Design School for Regenerating Earth

• 4 Returns Community

• Global Earth Repair Foundation

• r3.0

Regional Initiatives

• South East Ireland Bioregion

• Oltenia de sub Munte (Romania)

• Laconia Initiative (Greece)

• The Southern Lights

• South Veluwe Watershed (Netherlands)

• La Ferme sur Besorgues

• Regen Mornington Peninsula

• Switzerland bioregion info

• A Biosphere Project

• DrinkableRivers

• EcoLaunch

• Project Biome

• Zoop Earth

Resources & Media

• Nate Hagens Bioregioning 101

• Bioregional Finance Book PDF

• The Bioregional Conversations

• What is a Bioregion?

• Water Literacy Resources

  • Regenerating Life Film

  • The Biotic Climate and the Soil Sponge

  • Climate Water Project

  • Water in Plain Sight Book

  • Water Policy Brief

Social Media

• Oltenia de sub Munte LinkedIn

• Oltenia de sub Munte Instagram

• Oltenia de sub Munte Facebook

• BWL Collective LinkedIn

• Commonland LinkedIn

• Joe Brewer LinkedIn

• Design School LinkedIn

• A Regenerative World Newsletter

Event & Project Links

• AlVelAl Territory Manifesto

• AlVelAl Newsletter Signup

• Youth Exchange in Catalonia

• Bioregional Pasts & Futures - David Haenke & Daniel Wahl in Conversation (Part II)

• Histories of Bioregioning Open Dialogue

• South Mediterranean Article

Festival & Cultural Links

• Ostria Festival Facebook & Instagram

• Cinema of Monemvasia Instagram

Help Us Improve ♾️

Now looking back, we’d love to hear your thoughts. This form has three quick questions to gather your feedback. Your input helps us improve and make future events even better. It won’t take more than a minute—thank you for sharing your perspective!

Fill in the 1-minute form

If you have any further questions or feedback, please leave a comment 🙏

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Thank You 🫶

We’ll take some time to integrate our learnings from the event.

See you at the next one!

We hope you have experienced that the bioregional movement of changemakers that protect, restore, and regenerate the places we call home, is on the rise.

To support this emerging movement, we created an overview of vital resources to help ‘Changemakers’ get started with ‘Bioregional Weaving’.

“A bioregion invites us to inhabit a place in a way that is full of relationship. Seeing where the natural boundaries of our bioregion are, we can then see the many ecosystems and human systems alive within it. All of these systems like fresh water and biodiversity or transport and health are connected.

There is also a connecting story that starts in deep geological time, shows up in the landscape and soil and then in human culture. Bioregioning is the collective practice of bringing vitality to these connections, angling the systems towards regeneration, and taking actions for a climate resilient and biodiverse future.”

—The Bioregional Learning Centre

“Weaving is the practice of connecting people and projects in synergistic ​and purposeful ways. Weaving involves connecting people to each other and to a ​shared purpose; fostering collaborations for systemic impact; facilitating collective learning and iteration; and embodying the change we wish to see.”

–The Bioregional Weaving Labs Insights Report

“A changemaker is someone who imagines a new reality, takes action and collaborates with others to bring that new reality into being for the good of others.”

–The Bioregional Weaving Labs Insights Report

This Guide Includes

• Three essential resources to help you get started 🚩

• 6 Books, 14 courses, and 20+ articles and videos to dive deeper 🤿

• And much more!

This overview is incomplete and will continuously evolve. If you know any other valuable resources, please leave a comment on this post, or add suggestions to this Google Docs, and we’ll make sure to include it 🪄

⚠️ Please note: not all sources below directly involve bioregioning, weaving or changemaking. Yet, through experience, these sources have proven to be conducive to bioregional and regenerative development ♾️

Looking at your bioregion, you are looking at your true home. The river is your blood, the soil is your body, the rain and fog are your breath. When you care for one, you care for all.

—Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh

Start Here 🚩

1. Listen to The Future is Local: Bioregioning 101 by from with Daniel Christian Wahl, Isabel Carlisle and Samantha Power. It’s a great introduction to bioregioning 🎙️

The Great Simplification

The Future is Local: Bioregioning 101

The past century has been marked by the rise of globalization in every sense of the word - through production, culture, agriculture, consumption and more. This trend has brought great wealth and opportunities to many people - but what have we lost and forgotten through this process…

Read more

2 years ago · 7 likes · Nate Hagens

2. Explore The 4 Returns Framework in Practice by Commonland. It’s a practical guidebook for holistic landscape restoration that everyone can understand and use 📑

3. Find your community through the Bioregional Mycelium 🗺️

The Bioregional Mycelium Map

To support the growing bioregional movement, we’ve mapped 150+ initiatives working on bioregional regeneration, so that you can find your bioregional tribe. We highly recommend to join already existing communities like Design School for Regenerating Earth and The BioFi Community of Practice 🤝

Do you know any bioregional initiatives that are missing in the overview?

Add initiatives and make changes to the map by editing this public database, or simply leave a comment on this post, and we’ll make sure to include it 🪄

The Bioregional Mycelium Database

Dive Deeper 🔎

Books 📚

• Bioregional Financing Facilities – Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld.

• Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl.

• Regenerative Development and Design – A Framework for Evolving Sustainability by Pamala Mang, Ben Haggard from Regenesis Group.

• Regenerative Leadership – The DNA of life-affirming 21st century organizations by Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm.

• The Biosphere and the Bioregion – Essential Writings of Peter Berg by Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel.

• The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth by Joe Brewer.

Courses 🎓

• A Business Approach to Sustainable Landscape Restoration by Erasmus University Rotterdam and Commonland.

• Capra Course — a systems thinking course by Fritjof Capra.

• Design School for Regenerating Earth — the learning network for regenerating bioregions By Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple.

• Designing Resilient and Regenerative Systems (DRRS) by ETH Zurich Systemic Design Labs and MonViso Institute.

• Gaia Education — a leading provider of holistic education in sustainability, regenerative practices, and community development.

• Leading Multi-Stakeholder Collaborations by CoCreative and Ashoka.

• MA Regenerative Design (MARD) by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

• Power of Place by Really Regenerative CIC — a collective learning journey in regenerative placemaking.

• RegenIntel Foundations Course — an immersive program to go beyond sustainability and build holistic regenerative solutions.

• Regenerative Economics, Finance and Organizations by Capital Institute.

• Regenerative Leadership By Regenerators Academy.

• Systems Change for Bioregional Changemakers by Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective (to be launched 🔜 keep an eye out in our Newsletter!)

• The Regenerative Practitioner Series (TRP) by Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice.

• u-lab by Presencing Institute — the basics of Theory U and how to apply it to your own context.

• Water Stories Core Course — learn how to rejuvenate landscapes and waterways through water cycle restoration.

• Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Plum Village — nurture insight, compassion, community, and mindful action in service of the Earth.

Events 📅

The Regeneration Calendar by Global Regeneration CoLab (GRC) is a public, shared calendar of regeneration-related events happening online and in-person around the world.

Add the Regeneration Calendar

Add events to the Regeneration Calendar

Videos ▶️

The Bioregional Hope event was a celebration of the inspiring changemaker films we created with the support of Woka Foundation and in collaboration with bioregional weaving teams in Austria, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain, local filmmakers and Brechtje Smidt from Dutch Picture Industry.

These films highlight the unique challenges faced by different landscapes and cultures, while weaving together concrete, regenerative practices 🧬

We asked the local weavers for three call to actions to support their bioregional weaving work, which are listed below the videos 👇

South East Ireland

1. Listen to our Manifesto and watch more films: ‘Multi-Species Sward (sand art)’; and ‘Innovating Finance and Community Finance’. All on bioregion.ie

2. Exercise your bioregional mindset: act local, join hands across Ireland through the Bioregional Weaving Alliance Ireland, and contact us: Sarah Prosser (sarah@bwl.ie) and Keeley O’Brien (keeley@bwl.ie).

3. If you have ideas for mutually beneficial partnership opportunities with Irish BWL, get in touch. We’re building a Landscape Alliance, working with thematic concept circles and regenerative businesses, making bioregional maps, and designing a finance mechanism.

Altiplana Estepario, Spain

1. Sign the Manifesto for a regenerative territory in the Altiplano Estepario bioregion.

2. Come to the AlVelAl territory in June 2025 to celebrate the Cinema and Rural Culture Festival (subscribe to the AlVelAl Newsletter to stay updated about the dates and logistics).

3. Celebrate the tenth anniversary of the AlVelAl Association at an Open Day to be held in November 2025.

Oltenia de sub Munte, Romania

1. If you have the opportunity, come visit us to explore the wilderness and the culture of Oltenia! Stay in touch with our events and activities on our platforms: www.discover-oltenia.ro, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

2. Let’s grow together and amplify our impact through partnership! Oltenia de sub Munte is a continuous learning journey. We are designing and piloting innovative projects to address local systemic challenges. While we excel in many areas, there is more to discover, learn, and improve in our work. Let’s explore how we can collaborate to build stronger, healthy communities together. Contact us via Gabi Poina (gabriela.poiana@discover-oltenia.ro) or Simina Sirbu (simina.sirbu@discover-oltenia.ro)

3. Support your local bioregions in any way possible, by visiting, buying local produce from them, and by spreading the word!

Laconia, Greece

1. Join the Ostria fest from June to September (and sometimes beyond) and spread the word. These are musical festivals in the South of Laconia. It is an ideal occasion to get to know the bioregion from an authentic angle and exchange with locals.

2. Visit the Cinema of Nomia during the whole year in our bioregion, to watch unique independent European movies, curated by the association of the cinema. Get the chance to visit a lively cinema located in this remote village close to Monemvasia.

3. Visit the Southern Lights website or social media channels to look out for unique educational opportunities around systems change, regional development, civic engagement, sustainable living and regenerative agriculture, and support our initiative Regenerative Farming Greece.

South Veluwe Watershed, the Netherlands

1. Visit our bioregion, for example during our May 30-31 Festival Rooting Deeper. Go to our website stroomgebied.org for more events.

2. Contact us with all your exciting ideas for collaboration, contact Janneke Bruil (janneke@cultivatecollective.org) and Edo Cáceres Salgado (edo@masnewen.com).

3. Remember your role as caretaker of life in your own territory. Be courageous!

Thermenlinie Wiener Becken, Austria

1. Participate in our activities. On our website, you’ll find a schedule of volunteer opportunities where you can assist with landscape conservation efforts—whether on weekends or during the week, out in nature. Additionally, we offer free guided tours that allow you to learn more about the natural environment and the surrounding area. Contact the team via: office@landschaftspflegeverein.at

2. Check out our CSR Initiatives for Companies. Businesses can book a conservation project with us as part of their "Social Day." These activities not only make a valuable contribution to nature preservation but also help strengthen team spirit and reinforce corporate values.

3. Transform corporate grounds into ecologically valuable habitats for wildlife and plants. We assist companies with setting up a volunteer program in enhancing their properties by greening their spaces. From planning to implementation, we help transform corporate grounds for the ecological enhancement of green spaces in our bioregion. So we can create green corridors!

Vistula River Valley, Poland

1. Explore the Polish bioregion. What, from your external point of view, is the most interesting and exciting in our bioregion? Check the website of the Ecological Folk High School that is organizing the Bioregional Weaving Lab, and let us know via Anka Wiklińska (anka@grzybow.pl).

2. Co-create a Bioregional Magazine. We are creating the „Wieści znad Wisły” (News from Vistula) Magazine. Please join us in writing content - what is the greatest achievement in your Bioregion, in 2024? - share a short note and some photos via Anka Wiklińska (anka@grzybow.pl).

3. Make the bioregion attractive for young people. How to encourage young people to stay in the Bioregion? Share suggestions of methods and topics for the course we’d like to design for youngsters here in the bioregion. Curious to hear your ideas, contact us via Anka Wiklińska (anka@grzybow.pl)

Watch all bioregional changemaker videos

Further Reading & Watching 📃

• 3000-year-old solutions to modern problems | Lyla June | TEDxKC

• Articles by Brendon Letsinger

• Articles by Daniel Christian Wahl

• Articles by Joe Brewer

• Articles by John Thackara

• Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health by Nate Hagens and Daniel Christian Wahl

• BIOREGIONAL PLAN 2030: Ecological Transitions for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters of Ecuador and Peru by Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative

• Bioregional Quiz by Regenerative Design Institute

• Bioregioning and Learning Centre by The Bioregional Learning Centre

• Bioregioning by Future Observatory Journal

• Changemaker Activation Strategy by Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective

• Circular cross-scalar governance spiral: Designing for bio-regional regeneration. By Tobias Luthe, Haley Fitzpatrick and Daniel Christian Wahl

• If nature could draw a map of the world | Karl Burkhart | TEDxPorto

• Lifeshed: History of the Idea and Term by Carol Sanford

• One Earth Navigator

• The BFF Glossary by The Biofi Project

• The Regenerative Community Design Canvas by Atolye and Josine Bakkes

• What is a bioregion? by Karl Burkart from One Earth

• What was Donella Meadow’s vision for Bioregional Learning Centres? By The Really Regenerative Centre CIC

• Where do you draw the boundaries of home? by Carlita del Sol

Enrich this Overview

Are there any resources missing that guide you in bioregioning, weaving or changemaking? 🌍

Let us know in the comments below, or add suggestions to this Google Docs, and we’ll make sure to include it 🪄

“Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure & relationship that will sustain the restored land”
–Robin Wall Kimmerer

“[Bioregion] refers both to a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.”

—Peter Berg

“We cannot save the world, we can only save places. The regeneration of planetary health can only happen ecosystem by ecosystem, or bioregion by bioregion.”
— Daniel Christian Wahl

“Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bringing about what we hope for. Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.”

—Joanna Macy in Active Hope

From nation-states to bioregions 🌍

Coinciding with the inauguration of the Trump presidency in the US, the 20th of January symbolises a new political era, in a world that looks more and more divided. That’s why on this day we want to bring the larger bioregional community together around an alternative vision for the future — a vision of Bioregional Hope.

What if we moved beyond nation-states and began organizing ourselves bioregionally — to reconnect with the unique landscapes we call home, while being part of a larger, interconnected whole?

Premiering 7 bioregional films 🎞️

During this event, we’ll premiere 7 short films, each featuring 3 bioregional changemakers, brought together by Bioregional Weaving Labs across Austria, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain, who are protecting, restoring, and regenerating their lands and seas 🌍

We invite you to virtually travel to at least two bioregions, watch their films and interact live with the changemakers. There will also be inspiring guest speakers and we’ll end with a clear call to action to get involved in the larger bioregional movement 🌱

Celebrate the growing bioregional movement 🥳

Come join us on the evening of January 20th from 7:00 - 9:00 PM CET, bring your regenerative popcorn and wine 🍿🍷 a cup of tea or coffee 🍵☕ to transform Blue Monday into a celebration of Bioregional Hope ✨

Let’s rewrite the story of Blue Monday—together 👇

Register for Bioregional Hope

PS. Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter on Substack. Here we’ll premiere the films one by one, and update you on the upcoming event.

PPS. You can already have a sneak peek at the videos on Vimeo 🎞️

Watch the short films on Vimeo

Brought to life by the Bioregional Weaving Labs (BWL) Collective, a growing collective of system-changing people, projects and places that orchestrate geographically grounded, multi-stakeholder partnership processes to enable transformative change​ towards regeneration at a bioregional scale 🌐

In this newsletter we weave together threads of art and awe, Bioregional Financing Facilities, the Scaling of Systemic Innovations, the Art of Gathering, Narratives of Active Hope, and much more 🌍

"I wanted to teach people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are children of the earth, part of the cosmos."

—Hermann Hesse

Magic, Awe, and Gratitude

The Power of Film 📽️

We believe that co-creating captivating films can serve as powerful tools to inspire and activate bioregional changemakers. Art and awe have the unique ability to help a system "see and sense itself" by making the invisible visible and the implicit explicit.

That is why with the support of Woka Foundation and in collaboration with Brechtje Smidt from Dutch Picture Industry, we are working with bioregional weaving teams in Ireland, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Greece, Romania and Austria to capture inspiring changemaker stories.

These films are co-created with local filmmakers, highlighting the unique challenges faced by different landscapes and cultures, while weaving together practical insights about regenerative practices. Keep an eye out on our LinkedIn.

Follow us on LinkedIn

Discover Oltenia

A prime example of the power of film is "Discover Oltenia", which was recently launched by BWL Oltenia de Sub Munte in Romania. This 17-minute cinematic journey by renowned filmmaker Charlie Ottley, offers viewers a glimpse into the heart of this beautiful region and its geo-cultural heritage.

Watch Discover Oltenia

Multi-Species Sand Art

Meanwhile, in the South-East Ireland bioregion, Sean and Miranda Corcoran of The Art Hand created the 'Multi Species Sward'. The 150m long sand art at the Copper Coast Geopark was a response to working with multi-stakeholder groups feeding into a national initiative considering the future of sustainable dairy farming in Ireland. It celebrates the diversity and beauty of nature in Irish bioregions — and the importance of preserving them.

By making abstract ecological concepts visible and emotionally resonant, the multi-species sward sand art project serves as a powerful tool for helping "systems see and sense themselves".

“No art or film with the title 'Multi Species Sward' would have been made without some special farmers' daily dedication to finding nature-friendly ways of working with the soil and animals they care for.”

–Sarah Prosser, Weaver South East Ireland Bioregion

Honouring the Pains

Funding Weaving Capacity 🧶

While in many bioregions an abundance of regenerative projects and initiatives are surging, the capacity to come, learn and do together is often missing, as Michel Bachman experienced while exploring the possibility of a "Bioregional Weaving Lab" in Switzerland. 

“In Switzerland so much is happening already, yet people are so busy that many don't have the capacity to engage with each other beyond their own projects. So most are just doing their own thing.”

–Michel Bachman, Weaver in Switzerland

Read the preliminary study

How might we overcome this time and resource constraint to facilitate the "cross-weaving" of siloed efforts?

The newly emerging field of Bioregional Financing Facilities might hold an essential piece of that answer…

Bioregional Financing Facilities 📖

Besides other innovative bioregional initiatives, the BWL approach and Bioregional Weaving Lab South East Ireland have been an important source of inspiration to the book “Bioregional Financing Facilities” by Samantha Power of The BioFi Project and BWL Backbone team member Leon Seefeld from Dark Matter Labs. 

“Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) are a new layer in the global financial architecture that can drive the decentralisation of financial resource governance, design of project portfolios for systemic change, and the transition to a regenerative economy at the bioregional scale.”

Rather than reducing finance to legal and financial architectures to make finance flow, the book holistically weaves together governance, finance, economics, philosophy, technology, culture, and Indigeneity.

Both Dark Matter Labs and The BioFi Project offer resources, capacity building, training, and thought leadership for Bioregional Organizing Teams intending to design, build, and implement their own Bioregional Financing Facilities, inspired by this book and beyond. 

Read Bioregional Financing Facilities

Join the BioFi Community of Practice

Systemic Innovations: Why Reinvent the Wheel? 🛞

When working on the systemic challenge to protect, restore and regenerate the land and seascapes you care about, it can often feel like you need to reinvent the wheel. Yet, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

For the last year, we’ve been curating a living collection of Systemic Innovations: a careful selection of scalable innovations that have proven to systemically contribute to inspirational, social, natural and financial returns.  

We hope that this collection can serve as a source of inspiration for bioregional changemakers, and enable learning and potential replication across different contexts.  

Go to the Systemic Innovation Collection

Scaling Learning Journey

An expression of this approach was when a delegation of weavers and changemakers from the South East Ireland bioregion and the Vistula River Valley bioregion in Poland came together in The Netherlands in April 2024.

The intent of the field trip was to learn more and get inspired by two Dutch innovations, founded by weaver and serial social entrepreneur Geert van der Veer: ‘Herenboeren’ as a scalable model for community-owned and nature-inclusive farming, and ‘Plaats De Kleine Aarde’ as a scalable model for a regenerative hub. 

Since the visit, the Irish delegation has taken the idea further and is currently undertaking a feasibility study. They now receive support from the BWL Backbone Team to see if the principles of the Herenboeren model might have relevance and replication potential in the South East Ireland bioregion

This type of cross-pollination between regions and innovators is what we hope to fund and facilitate more often 🌺🐝

Read the Irish Learning Journey Report

Ashoka's Replication & Transfer Course

Seeing with new eyes

The Art of Gathering 🪄

Gathering is an art. With every gathering, we try to cultivate spaces of belonging – spaces that help cultivate deep and meaningful relationships to each other, ourselves and our bioregions. 

Read Spaces of Belonging by Commonland

Bioregional Learning Journey

After the wonderful Commonland summit this year, a handful of funders, friends and weavers from Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Romania and The Netherlands came together for a BWL learning journey at Plaats De Kleine Aarde (Place the Small Earth) in the Southern Sandy Soils region of the Netherlands, guided by Ashoka fellow Geert Van Der Veer. 

We learned about the interdependent web of concepts and initiatives that aim to transform the food system into a sustainable and ultimately regenerative one, like Aardpeer, Herenboeren, Caring Farmers and Stichting de Plaatsen. 

Learn more about out visit

Bio-cultural Restoration Ceremony

“If you take care of place, place will take care of you”

— Eduardo Cáceres Salgado and Janneke Bruil

The following day, weavers Eduardo Cáceres Salgado and Janneke Bruil, took all of us through a wonderful bioregional learning session on their 'bio-cultural' approach in convening people around a shared purpose and sense of responsibility to restore and revitalize the South Veluwe watershed.

Through a beautiful ceremony, which is a key pillar of their bioregional work, they showcased the symbiotic relationship between three vital elements for fostering bio-cultural resilience: 1) Places (where we are), 2) Cultures (who we are), and 3) Economies (what we do).

By re-connecting cultures and economies to place, and taking the principles of agroecology as a starting point, we can take deeper root in the places where we live, and co-create cultures of collective care.

Learn more about the ceremony

Going Forth

Weaving together a Regenerative Meta-Narrative 🔮

With BWL partners OpEpa, Together Institute and Matters we co-created a comprehensive changemaker activation strategy, weaving together best practice insights from weavers and landscape practitioners, Ashoka’s Climate Changemaker Playbook and the Community Weaving Framework by backbone team member Michel Bachmann from Together Institute. 

Changemaker Activation Strategy

As part of this exploration, together with Luis Camargo from OpEpa we researched principles and best practices for an effective meta-narrative that can serve as a guiding compass for the growing network of Weaving Teams and BWLs to tell stories that mobilise Changemakers. 

Inspired by Joanna Macy’s spiral in the Work that Reconnects, we envision ways to build unique local narrative to express each bioregion’s voice and, at the same time, resonate with a larger regenerative movement.

Considering the expression of each context, culture and natural environment is unique, bioregional narratives express the plurality of regenerative cultures.

Learn more about our meta-narrative

We’d love to hear from you 👂

We feel a larger bioregional movement is on the rise.

Are you a bioregional changemaker and do you have stories of active hope to share? Or would you like to write a guest post for this newsletter? ✍️

Feel free to get in touch with Tijn Tjoelker, or leave a comment below 👇

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This will be a living place where we’ll share our progress, reflections and learnings on mobilising 1 million changemakers to restore, protect and regenerate 1 million ha of Europe’s land and sea.

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During our (awesome) 2023 Learning Summit, we co-created the following principles that guide our work 👇

Bioregional 🌍

• We are in service of creating thriving bioregions, centring the Earth and its communities.

• We see bioregions as complex wholes and seek to weave regenerative relationships between people, and the land. 

• We honour the local context and strive to include all relevant stakeholders to bring forth a transformative vision that is locally owned and actionable.

• We focus on weaving and generating 4 returns: inspirational, social, ecological and financial.

Weaving 🧶

• We strive to move from ego- to ecosystem awareness; we cultivate mindset and systems’ shift.

• We believe in place-based knowledge and learning: most of the answers are already there but may need to be woven together. 

• We practise deep listening to self, others, the collective, the context and earth, with curiosity and gratitude. We embrace our synergies and hold our differences as creative polarities. 

• We focus on nurturing trust-based relationships of mutual empowerment, care and belonging to create community and build energy. Alone we can go fast, together we can go far.

• We believe everyone can be a changemaker and has a role to play. We create inspiring narratives for all stakeholders to engage; we identify principles that are overarching.

Labs 🧪

• We practise an open mind, heart and will to learn what’s needed. We learn and share from the heart; about how to do collective work wisely; we uncover the less-known in landscapes; we share struggles and ‘failures’.

• We develop collective awareness of group, organisational and interpersonal power dynamics. 

• We create brave and supportive spaces within which we trust each other’s positive intent, and that encourage constructive dissent, and allow for healing. We consider our own work of healing, growing and taking agency vital; we commit to hosting ourselves.

• We take a non-dogmatic approach and focus on what works: we are willing to look at our blindspots and to change. 

• We learn globally, connect regionally and act locally.

We hope these principles will be the fertile soil that creates the conditions for regenerative systems change 🍀

What principles are guiding you towards regenerative transformation?