Forests of the Northeast

Our Initiative in a Nutshell: Bioregional Organizing Team for a Northeast Bioregional Financing Facility

The Northeast Bioregional Organizing Team is a collaborative effort working toward bioregional regeneration of the Northeastern “United States.” Our principle proposed activities include co-developing a regional intertribal alliance for the regeneration of ancestral watersheds, drafting a bioregional regeneration strategy, hosting convenings, and creating a Bioregional Financing Facility to enable systemic and regenerative investments in support of bioregional regeneration. We are a diverse network, co-led by an intertribal alliance, working together to strengthen connections and enable resource allocation across communities in our bioregion.

Our Bioregion, challenges, and opportunities

Our bioregion is characterized by diverse yet related Native peoples that have been unified through their relationships with their ancestral waterways, both riverine and maritime, evidenced by related Algonquin dialects being predominant throughout the region. These relationships have been purposefully fractured by colonization, which has an enduring impact through multiple layers of imposed bureaucracy, siloing of knowledge, and the proliferation of administrative mechanisms preventing the development of holistic regeneration strategies and Tribal self determination. The region has also been a major cradle of industrialization, and continues to have a strong manufacturing base despite an ongoing legacy of industrial decline. While we are possessed of immense financial and intellectual resources, we are also characterized by tremendous inequality in access to decision making spaces and wealth building opportunities. Taken together, these dynamics have resulted in interdependent challenges of ecosystem degradation, rapidly rising costs of often poor quality housing, a lack of self sufficiency in food production, regenerated but fragmented and ailing forests, depleted migratory, freshwater, and marine fisheries, an incomplete clean energy transition, strong car dependence, and extensive brownfields and ongoing industrial pollution. These challenges embody a fragmented dominant paradigm and culture.

These profound challenges are being faced by a multitude of regenerative actors and organizations, presenting as seeds and rooted place based initiatives. These include resurgent Tribal governance and knowledge initiatives, a regional organic food movement and cooperative culture, agroforestry and forestry initiatives, regional and local conservation initiatives, community Justice organizations, a coalescence of bio-based material organizations, and many others.

Source: One Earth

Our Origins and Direction
Our team was born from the impetus to create coherence in the bioregional space of the northeast - weaving together existing bioregional and regenerative organizations in a new formation. Together, we have identified a foundational need to strengthen resurgent Indigenous governance to guide the development of a bioregional regeneration strategy and financing facility.

Our current core organizing team includes representatives from the Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot Tribal Nations, the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, Bio-Based Materials Collective (BBMC), Center for an Ecology-Based Economy (CEBE), Connecticut River Valley Bioregioning Collaborative, Design School for Regenerating Earth, Northeast Healthy Soils Network (NEHSN), Sirius Ecovillage, and Wellspring Commons. We are also actively communicating with and recruiting other key bioregional actors, including through Roberta Hill’s (of CEBE) participation in the Wabanaki Alliance Tribal Coalition. This constellation has significant and deep expertise in social and ecological systems transformation.

This team is supported by network and blockchain finance experts from Bloom Network, Capital Institute, Co-creating Funding Ecosystems for Regeneration (CoFundEco), r3.0, Regen Network. Our members have conventional finance and investment banking experience, including managing DAFs, investment funds, and private placements; finance innovation experience, including DAO governance, community lending pools, federated cooperatives, retroactive public goods funding; and government grants.
To further expand our diverse networks, we are working diligently to expand leadership and peer organizing to fully include the movements we aim to support.

Co-led by intertribal groups, we are bringing together diverse stakeholders to strengthen relationships and create regenerative pathways for people and the planet. Our core goal is to increase coherence among regional actors currently working in largely siloed ways to address the interdependence of our regional challenges through systemic interventions.

Our Guiding Principles:

1. Restore Right Earth Relations: Strengthening right relationships between communities, land, water, and our built environment.
2. Earth Regeneration: Implementing regenerative practices to heal and sustain ecosystems and the communities stewarding them.
3. Allyship (Relationality): Building respectful, reciprocal relationships with Tribal and regional communities across the bioregion and between bioregions.
4. Aligning Resources around Aliveness: Aligning resources to invigorate communities and the natural world.

Our Work To Date and at Present:
Over the last several months we have established relationships of trust across diverse existing networks, secured $25,000 in initial funding, and have agreed upon principles to guide our work and collaboration. We are working on developing a strategic vision including priority directions, alignment between our members, and securing commitments of time and resources to develop and implement our bioregional regeneration strategy. We share an intention for systemic transformation of capitalism, and feel our bioregion is truly ready to catalyze this, with the assistance of members in this organizing team who have decades of experience managing network finance across a wide array of traditional and innovative mechanisms, alongside deep facilitator and convener skill sets.

Funding Governance (r3.0) and CoFundEco

Our Identified Needs for Holistic Bioregioning
We are working toward a comprehensive strategy to regenerate our bioregion. In support of translating our work from our principles to actionable interventions, we have identified overarching needs in the following sectors. These take as a common root the need to protect and regenerate our ecological lifelines and respect the agency of Earth and more than human life for its own sake.

• Ecosystem Health: Mapping and understanding our ecological lifelines in order to protect and regenerate our ecosystems and biodiversity for their own health and wellbeing; respecting the agency of Earth and more than human life for its own sake.
• Water: Source water protection, accelerating dam and barrier removal, restoring floodplains and wetland complexes, scaling regenerative wastewater and stormwater systems, addressing watershed scale water quantity/flood management and quality improvements through decentralized and integrated approaches by working across other sectors below along with exploring sustainable monetization strategies for coastal and inland ecosystems.
• Energy: Implementing genuinely regenerative energy solutions, focusing on demand reduction/elimination, community-owned renewables, and innovative applications like solar concentration, and integrated parking lot, building, and roadway systems. Supporting novel energy storage systems.
• Manufacturing: Promoting bio-based and regenerative manufacturing platforms, developing the missing middle of value added food and biomaterial processing, building regional and local supply chains, and cooperative business models, and facilitating urban regeneration.
• Food and Agriculture: Scaling organic and regenerative production, expanding agroforestry systems, reviving Indigenous agro-ecologies, and enhancing regional food production including regeneration of inland and marine fisheries. Foodways is also where financing a bioregion comes into direct contact with the ground, and facilitates building relationships and shared experiences.
• Housing: Developing affordable, non-toxic bio-based housing and building technologies in support of rural and urban regeneration through education, policy work, workforce development, processing capacity and infrastructure, and building sustainable supply chains.
• Transportation: Expanding active and public transit integrated with green infrastructure, scaling electric aviation and light rail, eliminating car dependency.
• Health: Aligning environmental restoration with improved healthcare outcomes to reduce lifetime costs and foster well-being, expand self care and mindfulness practices at the individual, community, and enterprise level, explore a regenerative health insurance model coupled with quality of life bonds for states and municipalities.
• Finance: Stewarding a phase shift in our ability to gather, store, and allocate financial capital in service to the regeneration of our bioregion, based on the idea that regenerative outcomes require a regenerative approach to funding governance. Creating fractal self determined and self sustaining financial mechanisms.

What's Next and What Must Be Overcome:
Our coherence and movement building must address that challenge that we are modeling a more collaborative and decentralized approach to bioregional finance, against a backdrop of pre-existing regional networks in the Northeast. This takes more time and is more complicated, though it offers tremendous value to the bioregional networks movement as we become able to share examples. Acknowledgment of this fact by the bioregional funding networks in terms of time pressure and support for the additional layer of coordination overhead, will ensure our success in what we have to share, and help us build regenerative experiences together as we do this path-forging work.

We will continue to build relationships internally and across our bioregion in support of developing a cohesive bioregional regeneration strategy. We envision a truly just transition to a thriving, regenerative future for all inhabitants, reweaving the tapestry of the lands and waterways of Northeast.

The funds raised from this grant will support organizing and strategic planning, toward the following next steps:

• Form a clear vision and mission statement for focused, coherent coordination.
• Establish governance structures in partnership with regional intertribal alliances, providing a framework for coordinating bioregional regeneration efforts.
• Organization forms we’ve discussed to date included federated cooperatives and a Bioregional Trust.
• Map out existing and emergent initiatives within the bioregion.
• Host in-person and digital gatherings with partners to refine strategies, governance structures, and funding models for coordinating bioregional regeneration efforts.
• We will gradually increase in convening scale and/or diversify to specific working groups as coherence forms.
• Deepen co-presencing and co-learning building on our current practices of engaging within our team, other regions and beyond human kin to further expand our collective capacity
• Identify and pursue further resources to support organizing and partner work to promote ecosystem health and community resilience
• Develop a network of bioregional learning centers/hubs to help communities deepen their connection to place, cultivate coherence and a shared understanding of bioregional engagement, and co-create knowledge commons.

As we form our Bioregional Financing Facility, we are drawing upon the deep experience and wealth of this bioregion, to craft truly regenerative circular bioeconomies and the cultural and governance structures to achieve systemic transformation of capitalism.

*Regen Foundation is serving as a Fiscal Sponsor for this project, hence the regenfoundation.eth address.