Bioregionalism in Practice

Weaving Local Solutions in a Global Context

Date: April 17th, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 pm GMT /8:30 – 10:00 am PST 
Hosted by Regenerosity and Be the Earth as part of the Nurture Funder Community of Practice.

In a world where the globalized economy has failed to bring peace and prosperity, many of us are feeling the call to reconnect – with each other, with place, and with the living systems that sustain us. Now more than ever, there is a growing need to root our lives in community and to take meaningful action in our own backyards – while also linking arms with global movements of change.

Bioregionalism offers an “ancestral future”: a way of organizing life based on relationships – relationships with land, culture, and one another. This deeply local approach is both ancient and urgently contemporary. As the Bioregionalism movement gains momentum and draws attention from new funders, its frameworks continue to evolve, but its principles remain grounded in the wisdom of living systems.

This webinar kicks off a new series of bioregional conversations, designed to deepen understanding, improve practice, and expand the horizon of what’s possible when we center life, land, and community. Through stories, case studies, and grounded examples, we’ll begin to weave a vibrant patchwork of regenerative pathways forward.

We begin by centering voices from the Global South with an introduction to Cecosesola, a remarkable Venezuelan network of grassroots organizations. For over 50 years, Cecosesola has connected low-income communities across seven states, co-creating systems to deliver affordable goods and services to over 100,000 families.

We’ll then hear from a panel of inspiring guests – each representing unique expressions of bioregioning in practice. From seasoned elders to newer practitioners, they’ll share reflections, strategies, and lived experience from their bioregions. From bringing together these different levels of experience, we hope the panel can enrich fellow participants in collective reflection as much as the audience.  Together, we’ll explore the patterns and principles emerging from this work – and what it takes to regenerate our communities and ecosystems from the ground up.

Whether you’re a funder, practitioner, or someone exploring bioregional thinking for the first time, we warmly invite you to join this enriching conversation!

Meet the speakers

Cecosesola was established in Venezuela in 1967, with 50+ community orgs active and integrated into a network of goods and services connecting 23,000+ members. Their activities include agricultural production, small-scale agro-industrial production, funeral services, healthcare, savings and loans, mutual aid funds, and food distribution. “Our reason for being lies in a transformative educational process based on equity, mutual support, and responsibility”.

Fabiana Maia is co-founder and president of Instituto Terra Luminous (ITL), a socioenvironmental NGO focused toward protecting the Atlantic Rainforest. In 2010, she transitioned from being an organizational and human resources psychologist within the corporate world to the role of environmentalist, permaculture researcher, and ecopsychologist. She has also been trained in the EDE (Ecovillage Design) by GEN. Living in an intentional community is essential to her who is also one of the Brazilian ambassadors of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). In 2023 Fabi Maia was invited to be part of Regenerosity’s Flow Funding Program, been chosen as Brazil’s representative of the Wisdom Keeper Circle from Be The Earth Foundation (UK).

Her focus as a Philanthropist is sharing resources to the least privileged peoples, especially black and indigenous women and activists.

As co-founder of the non-profit co-op Resilience.Earth, Erika works with communities and organizations to develop distributed decision-making tools, place-based economic models, and governance structures that evolve with both the land and the people. Her bioregioning approach is based on a decolonial and intersectional perspective and the belief in the ability of human groups to co-create more resilient, adaptive, and regenerative systems. She is a member of the Quechua nation and has adoptive family from the Nisga’a nation, communities which have influenced her worldviews and approaches when accompanying communities and organizations.

As co-founder of the non-profit co-op Resilience.earth, Oscar works on the ecosystemic articulation of the social and solidarity economy, the development of adaptive governance systems, and the creation of social infrastructures that balance autonomy and interdependence. His expertise in bioregioning and territorial regeneration enables him to design governance and economic models that center the ecological, social, and cultural specificities of each rural context. Òscar is proudly from the volcanic lands of La Garrotxa, Catalonia and from hails from the Garrotxan social and ecological movements.

Brandon Letsinger is a bioregionalist, open-source advocate, and nonprofit director based in Seattle, Washington. Since founding CascadiaNow! in 2005, he has spent nearly two decades advancing bioregional education, organizing, and place-based regeneration strategies across the Cascadia bioregion. He currently serves as executive director of the Department of Bioregion and is a co-founder of Regenerate Cascadia, a regional initiative launched in 2023.

Born in the bioregion of the Brazilian Atlantic Moist Forests, Ruth grew up witnessing first hand the destruction of the natural environment. This prompted an early interest in environmental issues, nurtured a deep love for the rainforest and fueled great passion for driving change. She considers herself a systems activist, identifying key nodal interventions in systems to support the transition to regenerative cultures. She has been co-creating Lush’s environmental strategy since 2004. She is a trustee and co-founder of Re-Alliance, a collective of practitioners bringing regenerative design to the humanitarian and development sectors, a co-creator of Regenerosity, an initiative with a mission to flow resources to grassroots regenerative projects.

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash