Building financially sustainable and resilient bioregions for regenerative community futures
15 March 2025 Melbourne Australia and Online
From the original bioregional approaches to community and environmental resilience that Australia's first people originated over 150,000 years ago to Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann coining the term "bioregionalism" in the early 1970s, and the Permaculture movement—originated through "Permaculture One" in 1978 by Bill Mollison's groundbreaking work and the work with the Buckminster Fuller Institute—the world has gradually been building a strong and globally interlinked network of people focused on bioregional stability, fostering various environmental, social, and community-scale resilience initiatives designed to sustain humanity in an uncertain future. A bioregional lens reworks the way we deal with the planet's finite resources and work with one another to recognise that we are inextricably connected and need to work together.
Key historical bioregional initiatives include pioneering bioregional resilience work in Northern California during the late 1970s, which emphasized a deep connection to land and ecosystems, a theme also explored by poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder. Indigenous practices, such as those of the Diné (Navajo) Nation and the Iroquois Confederacy in the U.S., have long embodied bioregional principles. In Panama, the Kuna people have maintained their bioregional traditions, while spiritual and ecological communities like Green Gulch Farm Zen Center and the Esalen Institute in California, along with the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, have integrated these principles into modern practices. One of the biggest challenges these movements face in terms of building and maintaining traction is the money factor. Besides the perennial challenges any community faces when working on complex peer group dynamics and social challenges, financing bioregional and community approaches to resilience and broader social sustainability is particularly difficult. Building effective bioregional resilience requires ensuring equity and inclusion across socio-economic and intersectional barriers. Funding must reach all community layers, not just the wealthy, to benefit everyone. Inclusive financial models support marginalized groups, enhancing sustainability, while recognizing intersectional disadvantage is essential for truly resilient systems.
In a society founded on a capitalist, individualist model—where every man is for himself and every project is out to compete with another—how do we shift towards financing models that adopt a more bioregional and community-centric approach? What are some great benchmarks of this around the world? What are strong examples of how communities can support resilience, and how have financial institutions worked to provide valuable investment into community-scale, bioregional resilience initiatives?
Funding Bioregional Resilience is a one day conference providing an overview of the diverse range of finance and funding initiatives supporting resilient and sustainable bioregions. Discussions will explore proven and innovative approaches to financially supporting sustainable bioregional initiatives like ecological restoration, sustainable land management, and bioregional economic and community development, key funding gaps and strategies to fill them, and emerging degrowth centred bioregional economic models.
This inaugural event will address the urgent need for integrated bioregional resilience and ecological health approaches that provide practical financial frameworks to support the ongoing sustainability of these social good efforts. Our goal is to foster connection and collaboration around actionable strategies for long-term ecological, social, and economic resilience in bioregions.
This exploration will focus on emerging bioregional resilience initiatives that are particularly strong, and where the financial foundations of these programs come from. How is this working well? In what ways do we need to reimagine how we financially support initiatives like these and finance more broadly, to disconnect investment in sustainability from the illusion of unchecked eternal growth?
Topics to be explored in our first year include:
Emerging bioregional resilience initiatives and their financial foundations
Integrating Indigenous knowledge into bioregional funding strategies
Exploring traditional community centric finance models like community-supported agriculture schemes and cooperatives
Equity crowdfunding opportunities for community-scale financial support
Project-based finance models: pros, cons, and challenges
Social enterprises and their role in funding community scale resilience
Government funding initiatives promoting bioregional resilience
Community land trusts and their benefits and challenges
Civic science and technology hubs supporting community resilience
Impact investing in bioregional collaboration around nature based solutions and sustainable agriculture
Reimagining financial support models beyond unchecked growth - degrowth-focused economic models for long term financially sustainable communities
Connecting finance with key proponents of community scale social and environmental resilience, we will bring together fund managers, foundations, investors, philanthropists, community finance initiatives with bioregional sustainability and resilience focussed thought leaders, regenerative land management practitioners, bioregional resilience focussed technology and project developers, and sustainability and resilience focussed communities.
This will be a broad discussion in this inaugural year, and we very much welcome any interested parties to share their unique insights as part of this important collaborative discussion on how we make funding bioregional resilience financially sustainable while working on broader sustainability goals. If you're interested in collaborating around event development or want to find out more about speaking, attendance, sponsorship and partnership opportunities, contact me at alicia@strongerground.co.
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