[Music] [Music] Samantha it's lovely to see you and thank you for being here and so Samantha has worked for the World Bank in the past where she has stories and experiences she can share she's an ecological Economist a regenerative futurist a Biore regionalist and a founder of or the founder of Finance for Gaia and this morning Samantha's gonna take us through some of the thinking and the work that she's doing to help people learn how to set up and imagine Financial systems at the Biore Regional scale and so I'll hand it over to you Samantha thank you Joe thanks for that intro um very excited to be here today with all of you I'm calling in from the southern tip of cascadas and I am on unseated alone territory in the East Bay of San Francisco um in Oakland um and this is a a very special by our region and I'm really looking forward to sharing with you some research that I have been doing on Biore Regional financing facilities and some work to start to design and Implement those B Regional financing facilities in bi regions around the world so today I'll be talking to you about a paper that I've been working on for more than a year now um that represents the culmination of my experience as an economist turned ecological Economist and bio Regional as Joe explained um this paper is called decentralizing Financial flows to drive regeneration the case for Biore Regional financing facilities and this paper is due out in the next couple of months I am co-writing this paper with an amazing team at dark matter Labs Leon Seafield Raj Kia and Indie joar the project is one of the um initiatives under the Buckminster Fuller Design Lab under their bio Regional resilience and regeneration track and so the Buckminster Fuller Institute has been an amazing supporter of the work from the beginning and it is co-funded by biome trust one Earth and dark matter labs and in this white paper myself and my co-authors make an argument for the decentralization of financial resource governance so that Financial Capital May more efficiently reach the people we believe are best positioned to contribute to Global regeneration it makes the case for the Urgent development and piloting of a new structure to support this decentralization what we call the Biore Regional financing facility or Biore Regional fund and we believe that every bio region on Earth could create these bio Regional financing facilities to support their transition to a regenerative economy and way of being so I'm really excited to tell you more about this work today and how you can potentially engage so before I get to the recommendations and templates that we're developing in the paper I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I got here and my journey um as Joe mentioned I worked for the World Bank um I'm trained as a neoclassical Economist and have been on a a long path of um unlearning a lot of the neoclassical economics that I learned and learning to practice economics as a form of Applied ecology and one that looks at the pie not as fixed but really is rooted in the potential for regeneration and for us to create a a more beautiful future that has abundance for all um and in that transition I um have worked with a lot of indigenous groups um a lot of people leading amazing bi Regional projects um and I have worked in the nature Finance space so you'll see here several papers that I co-authored while I was at the World Bank um on nature Finance I worked at the World Bank for more than five years I um did a brief stun at the US Treasury Department in the environment and energy office and have been working on this question of how do we change Financial flows so that they're flowing to support healing of the earth rather than extraction and destruction from the earth for almost 10 years now this has been the organizing question of my career and um it's taken me to advise central banks and finance Ministries and some of the largest institutional investors in the world and the G20 and um I I was publishing a lot of reports while I was at the World Bank um directed to these audiences trying to convince them to use the levers of power that they held to change where money was flowing and after um you know many years of of putting out these Publications and making these arguments to those actors um I was feeling like I wanted to get closer to the projects that I felt the arguments that were made to these very powerful economic and financial actors were very strong and yet they weren't acting and I wasn't seeing money reach the people that were on the ground doing the work that I felt was most critical and so I decided to leave the World Bank I moved to the West Coast and I started Finance for Gaia and since then I've been working with investors philanthropists uh think tanks nonprofits and people that are leading amazing projects on the west coast and around the world that are serving regeneration and I saw firsthand that most of these projects do not have the financial Capital that they need to scale or to create the impact that they believe is needed in their bi region and so I started working on this question of how do we connect the my silal web of regenerators around the world with the financial resources that they need to support their work and that is where the idea for Biore Regional financing facilities was born so as I mentioned a year and a half ago I started Finance for Gaia where I've been working on reenvisioning finance so that it may be in service to life this concept for B Regional financing facilities emerged in my work at Finance for Gaia and I was called to write yet another paper even though uh when I when I started this company it was because I was not uh wanting to spend so much time doing research but I I saw the need to tell a new story about how Finance can serve regeneration in a decentral ized way um and the need to put Power in the hands of people living in relationship with place um so I believe that this paper will be delivered to an audience that is ready to act as opposed to many of the papers that I wrote um where where I was feeling like the audience was not yet um able to to put the recommendations into action I think um the Biore regionalists around the world are hungry for this uh type of structure and will'll very quickly um put it into action so I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem as I see it and as I frame it in the paper as a result of capitalism I see that financial resources are currently super concentrated in the hands of the few the ecological crisis requires urgent large-scale regeneration of the biosphere rooted in biological integrity and sociocultural revital revitalization and achieving such regeneration is only possible through actions taken by the many small groups all over the world that are living in relationship with place and these groups know how to be stewards and many have indigenous and traditional practices for Land Management that can be interwoven with Western Scientific insights and Technology to support maximally impactful biocultural regeneration my friend Tyson y kaporta says it's not about Western knowledge and systems or their indigenous Alternatives being dominant this moment calls for bridging and co-design for the thriving of all of life however I see a lack of connective tissue between those that holds and manage the large pool of financial resources and the coalitions of actors on the ground carrying out these critical activities bior Regional financing facilities can become this connective tissue and allow resources and regeneration benefits to flow between these two currently disconnected groups of actors myself and my co-authors as well as our advisers believe that bi Regional financing facilities are a critical piece of of the financial architecture needed to respond to the ecological crisis in particular and the poly crisis more broadly and can help Drive the transition to economic activity that supports the thriving of all life on earth a mission that each of us that has contributed to this paper shares so here you see a diagram where the bi Regional financing facilities or bi Regional funds are the trunk of the trees the connective tissue connecting financial resources and this mycelial web of regenerators so that is what we were we are aiming to do in the paper with a story and with templates that we're designing that can help people in bi regions around the world um begin to create these facilities so the paper aims to raise awareness among investors and policy makers of the urgency and criticality of decentral izing Financial resource governance to achieve global climate and nature goals and to mitigate widespread ecological economic and social collapse while I was at the World Bank one of the the issues I was most focused on is looking at the financial and economic risks associated with destroying the biosphere and making an argument for Action based in assessment of those financial and economic risks and indeed as you all know very well the biosphere is the foundation of the economy and of our society and if we destroy it certainly the economy is going to fall along with the rest of our societal stability and that audience very much is is still hungry for recommendations on paths forward about how to mitigate financial and economic risks and so this paper is partially directed to them to get them to see that pushing Capital through the financial architecture as it's currently structured is not going to lead to the results that they are aiming for which is to to mitigate these economic and financial risks associated with ecological destruction so the paper um aims to create a new narrative for large scale investors and polic makers that helps them to understand the need to push decision making down to a more place-based structure the paper is also meant to catalyze bio regions around the world to begin designing and implementing these facilities and developing project portfolios so that they may raise and deploy Financial Capital that supports their transition to local living economies we also aim to to motivate a network of philanthropists public Grant providers and investors to capitalize these facilities they will be capitalized with Blended Finance so there's potential for both investors seeking a return and Grant providers to invest in these additionally we will try to inspire innovators and futurists from across disciplines to develop new financial and governance tools instruments bu business models and legal structures that can support the realization of both the local and Global value of Biore Regional regeneration many of you are probably on this call today so the risk as we see it is that there's a growing pool of Financial Resources committed to Nature and that if that growing pool of Financial Resources flows through the existing Financial architect cure it could lead to further privatization corporatization and centralization of natural assets as these assets are increasingly perceived as valuable in the face of collapse so this nature Finance movement that I've been a part of creating over the past five or so years could um you know lead to more dollars invested in in ecological conservation and regeneration um on paper but if it doesn't support the Regeneration of those resources in a new economic structure in a new power structure it could lead to a worsening of the ecological crisis and the poly crisis in my view as a result um of of the risk of this growing pool of resources um contributing to privatization and corporatization and centralization um these resources I believe may work against the ecological regeneration goals laid out in various agreements nation states have made under the Rio convention so the Paris agreement the um Global biodiversity framework that was agreed in in Montreal just a year ago um and it may further destabilize social and ecological systems and Financial economic systems as a result um so the the money that's being committed is not set up to serve the goals that um that nation states or investors have identified um much less the goals that Bier regions have identified so I see this need for decentralization that I've mentioned if Financial Resources public private and philanthropic are to drive the high integrity biocultural regeneration needed to fend off ecological collapse and deliver well-being for all governance of Financial Resources will need to be decentralized returning decision-making power to people living in deep relationship to place in addition Capital allocation will need to be systemic in nature through systemic investment portfolios to match the the systemic complexities of the challenges it tries to address together these steps can work to reverse the abstraction inherent in our current financialized economy and the Myriad issues resulting from this phenomenon it is both critical and Urgent for human survival and for all life on the planet that we build the financial architecture that enables those best positioned to deliver regeneration to access the resources needed to begin to deepen or expand their work and systemic regeneration so this paper getting to the nuts and bolts of it lays out a template for B Regional financing facilities that strategically and effectively leverage public Grant Capital philanthropic Grant capital and private investment capital and Empower local stakeholders to participate at in decision making regarding Financial resource allocation and identification of impact metrics so what we're recommending is that bi regions take a a phased approach where in phase one they develop a Biore Regional trust or fund that receives and allocates philanthropic and public Grant Capital as well as individual donations there's a a crowdfunding component that can play a very important role it facilitates the usage of instruments such as place-based Equity crowdfunding voluntary taxation or Advanced Market commitments it works with citizen groups to develop bundle and sell Eco credits perhaps and it can seed and set up a bi Regional Investment Company or a B Regional Community Development financial institution or cdfi for short um so this bi Regional trust or fund is really about building out the ecosystem of projects in the bio region so that there can be an aggregated portfolio of projects that's ready to receive um investment capital or or um loan capital from a bank um and many bi regions around the world are already thinking about how to set up these Biore Regional trusts I know the folks in regenerate Cascadia are um I'm working on a project supporting Buffalo rewilding that is also thinking about the role of a trust um there are bio regions in the UK that are asking this question about how a bi Regional trust can be structured um so there there are many that I think are ready for these bional trusts and there are donors that are in interested in financing these trusts um and then I think there's potential to tap into public Grant capital at the federal level or the state level um in the US as well as other countries that could flow into these Biore Regional trusts and in phase two we have um the Biore Regional Investment Company being developed of course this should be structured around living systems principles and not the traditional extractive investment structures that we have seen in the past um but we're envisioning a venture Studio that could invest in small regenerative businesses and provide them support um in the form of capacity building as well as investment um as well as a systemic investment fund that can raise and invest capital in integrated portfolios of projects and businesses that um support systemic and catalytic impact um these could also issue sustainability linked or or green bonds supporting projects across the buer region and a b Regional cdfi could be developed that provides low interest loans to regenerative businesses and could even issue a nature-based currency I've spoken to many um amazing innovators working on complimentary currencies or local currencies nature-based currencies that are interested in supporting true B Regional sovereignty um or the B region can assess value and determine how it values various activities in the bio region and develop a currency that supports the Regeneration of that value and supports um legibility of the value and um ability for that value to be realized so that people can can um Can Thrive can meet their needs um for for food water and shelter and connection in the bio region um doing what they love and and providing their gift of regeneration to the bio region so um I'm not sure that b region should start there some might right if there's a group that's really committed to developing um complimentary currencies in the bio region um they they could start there um but we're recommending in the paper that fire regions begin with um a 501c3 um structure in the US a charitable trust um and then move into an investment company and a bank um that can be a bank for the B region over time um and the ability to to play and to paint on this canvas is endless um and I um and a team of of collaborators my coauthors on this paper but also um other collaborators that I'm working with are ready to support bio regions to be begin to design and Implement these facilities um knowing that this work needs to be funded in quite an urgent way um we're we're ready to get started um on working on multiple of these around the world um as soon as the paper launches so here we look at capitalizing B Regional financing facilities um as I mentioned um many of these facilities will rely on a a blended capital structure and um indeed we we believe that one of the um compelling aspects of bi Regional financing facilities is that they can very effectively blend Capital um so we see public Grant Capital flowing in um Private Financial return seeking Capital philanthropic Grant capital and crowdfunding so um these types of capital will receive um various types of returns there are various activities that are aligned with the the returns or the needs of these forms of capital and there's an investment rationale that we're developing for each of these forms of capital that makes the case for them to invest in these bi Regional financing facilities um and I believe that the storytelling around why return seeking investors in particular should invest in B Regional financing facilities is one of the most important contributions of this paper um and I am working with one investor in particular that is quite interested in in investing in these facilities and um I know there are more and there are investors that have committed to investing in ecological regeneration that are struggling to find um you know what they would refer to is Project pipeline that aligns with the social and ecological impact that they would like to create and I believe that b Regional financing facilities can um deliver them the returns that they're looking for as well as the social and ecological impact that is so critical um that they are are not getting from larger scale projects and um many of these investors will not have the resources to do due diligence on small projects so their project size is often $5 million are greater um even though the the highest impact I believe comes from much smaller projects led by people living in relationship with place and um I believe that bi Regional financing facilities can support um investors to invest in aggregated portfolios of small high impact projects and to aggregate the due diligence and Reporting across those projects and the folks running the B Regional financing Facility Who should be based in the bi region connected to the bi region can organize aggregated reporting and aggregated um Capital raising as well so that people leading projects aren't so bogged down in Grant applications and and impact reporting if they get the grants um that function is really delegated to the B Regional financing facility and the regener generators the folks doing the amazing work of land and water stewardship can do what they do best and what they want to spend their time on which is tending to the Earth so in the paper we include um case studies um a lot of amazing case studies that I'm so excited to share with you um and as many of you already know I'm preaching to the choir with this group this work is already happening in B regions around the world and the paper aims to demonstrate various approaches to decentralizing financial decision-making and putting capital in the hands of reg generators so we look at um everything from indigenous Le cdfis to um online tech um Communications platforms where by regions were organizing to the amazing work of regenerate Cascadia and organizing and activating a bio region um to the vision work of semon nation and the edge prize um so some really incredible case studies in the paper and when the paper is launched we plan to um create a community of practice where um people working in B regions around the world can come together share experiences share their interest in designing by Regional financing facilities get connected with folks that can help them to do that whether it's myself and my colleagues or or other people working on this um I I want to connect everyone um that has an interest in rapidly designing and setting up these facilities to do so and to also connect funders Grant providers but as also investors that are interested in capitalizing these facilities so look out for that when the paper launches in closing I'll say that that um this paper is very much rooted in the belief that the fabric of a resilient Society is woven from relationships and that our current Financial system is not serving relationships and is very often um trying to remove relationships from the financing equation and I believe that a resilient Society is woven from relationships between community members people and the land and Waters they inhabit and Steward the flora fauna funga and microorganisms that inhabit the land and Waters and that we must direct Finance so that it supports and deepens relationships and the resilience they weave so that's it um thank you so much for listening to to my work um on B Regional financing facilities I hope you'll check out the paper when it comes out and join the community of practice join the discussion as we work on on creating some of these facilities and all of the exciting things happening along the way thank you so much Samantha really wonderful to just see all of this taking form and evolving and getting more into its intricacies I remember when we talked about this about six months ago and I've seen I've seen it's it's really coming together uh I wanted to maybe start by just um sort of affirming something you said and then coming into a question the affirmation is that uh there really is a need for financial flow and the absence of financial flow into on the ground projects is strangling to the efforts on the ground one thing I've seen that is connected to that is that projects on the ground are not prepared to mobilize funding they're not organized they haven't mapped themselves they haven't identified the the priorities and the criteria for what they would do in their own local context and they haven't created their portfolios of projects and um that's something that we'll be talking about later this morning with what we've done in bar Chara where we actually have a couple of rounds of doing that and and I'm just curious where you see the um especially maybe it'll be in the case studies but where do you see in this paper the how to help people on the ground to prepare themselves for the being able to meet with people who might want to bring funding or enter into a partnership around the mobilization of capital from outside of their bio region bring it in so like where where do you see that coming into play at that sweet spot of inside out and outside in with respect to the bio region absolutely thank you Joe and um this is a very important point that um I I failed to address in my presentation and actually I think this work of mapping and organizing and activating a bio region is the hardest part and I think my job is um easier than than what you've been up to Joe and what um what many of the the folks on this call have been up to Brandon and and Cascadia and Brian and the Toronto by region um and there is a whole section in the paper um dedicated to um you know what we call like creating the enabling environment for B Regional financing facilities to succeed right you don't want to uh start a bio Regional financing facility if your bio region has not come together and agreed in a democratic participatory transparent way on what Biore Regional regeneration looks like in that place right the Biore Regional financing facilities have to be in service to a Biore Regional regeneration strategy um so that has to be developed and agreed upon the B region needs a map a Manifesto where are we going um and and how are we going to get there and then the financing facilities themselves of course you know should be governed by local people but those those um you know board of directors whoever it is that's governing the financing facility needs needs a North star needs a a map to guide them as to how the money um you know and it will be um initially a limited pool of capital how it should be um fairly disseminated and so um in the paper my my co-author Leon Seafield who um is at dark matter Labs but also works for the bi Regional weaving Labs um lays out the the phases uh that are needed to get the bi region ready for B Regional financing facilities um so you know there's uh kind of a preparation phase a mapping and Analysis phase convening in action um sorry convening and activation Co initiation and co-creation um and then a co-evolution phase um you know noting that there's a continuous integration of learnings um into bi Regional strategies um but I think there's a a certain level of um you know agreeing on a path forward for the B region and I'm a a big advocate for B regions taking a 100-year um long uh approach to envisioning where they want to go but I think at least kind of 20 to 30 years to move Beyond kind of immediate um you know conflicts or or a sense of scarcity in the B region that often um you know leads to disagreement about what should be funded um and then once that strategy is in place um there is some organizing and and capacity building that needs to happen people that are working unlik things can come together and collaborate and develop um you know joint funding proposals to the B Regional fund to fund them to work together in a a strategic and systemic way um and there's also you know some I think the bio Regional trust can fund capacity building before or the B Regional investment Co comes in and then starts like investing in um a portfolio project or the B Regional cdfi comes in and starts lending to projects but that capacity building is is really important um you know building regenerative businesses and co-ops and you know all these new governance structures so that they're ready to take capital and when they do take it um you know it's supporting truly the transition to a local regenerative economy in that place um so absolutely Joe this this work is critical and foundational and um you know Bier regions should not jump um you know right to like we need money to to get things done I mean like certainly if there's a team of organizers that's doing the map they need to be funded um you know the the work of um the design school for regeneration that needs to be funded um but if you're going to like set up a a facility that is going to start deploying Capital across the B region you need agreement on on where it's going to be deployed and what means um what ends sorry it's going to serve yeah one of the things that we're starting to do um just in the last few months it's been percolating up from the field meaning uh people are starting to approach us from different foundations that are interested in supporting this kind of work and help change the internal culture of their own philanthropic institutions so we're starting to build a tapestry of relationships around a community of practice for a network of Foundations Each of which may have its own Geographic Focus like a foundation based in the UK another one for Turtle Island and so forth and what we're already seeing is that there's a need for two things like as early steps one is to identify people who are doing the Biore Regional weaving in Landscapes and support them in their work and then the other is to create demonstrations of early models and Frameworks that are transferable to really do this in practice and so this is something that we see we're moving toward I would say so some of those elements are coming into place um and I wanted to bring in a question that had come from Suzanne BS I'm pretty sure because I know suzan joined us mutual friend for both of us type this in um she said what distinguishes an indigenous Le indigenous Le in quotes by a regional Trust From The Others indigenous Commons points to the erer the erasing of Eco culture meany makak and value as the major block to regenerative systems Beyond lack of funding how do we ensure that the trust is constituted with regenerative and decolonial systems of funding funding governance given that indigenous lifeways are critical uh Technologies and often eclipsed by Progressive and well-meaning Western science movements such as regenerative forming so she's holding this tension that I know that that you uh also sit within the delicate nature of is how do we ensure that that when a Biore Regional trust is set up that it can be genuinely indigenously LED uh and not just you know that the tokenism or the other unhelpful things that are still unfortunately too comment absolutely yeah it's it's a good question and I know Suzanne and the team and of indigenous Commons have been deep in this inquiry for for years now um so she's probably uh a better position to answer it than I am but um yeah I think in every bio region there will need to be a process to identify who who serves on the governance Board of a b Regional trust um what the process is for allocating that capital and I think if there's a very clear B Regional regeneration strategy that's been developed through a democratic participatory process it makes it a lot easier for the the folks that are governing the B Regional trust to um know where to send the money initially and and how to sequence it um and absolutely I believe that these structure should be based in a flow funding Model A trust-based philanthropic model where um the donor that capitalizes the B Regional financing facility puts full trust in the the people that are governing it to determine how to use those resources right there's reporting back on how they're used but um the the argument that I'm making in the paper is that people living in r relationship with Place need to be deciding how to use those resources and um they need to be deploying them to the strategy um that was developed by the people living in the B region that have a a vision for um for regeneration and absolutely indigenous folks should have a seat at the table um in all of those discussions and um you know should certainly serve on the the governance Boards of Regional financing facilities and some B regions they'll probably make up the entire governance board right if um the the financing facility is being um set up to serve um you know indigenous territory then um you know they they can make up the entire govern governance board in a place like Cascadia I think um you know they will um have um you know probably some seats on the governance board I also really am very excited and making a strong recommendation for um the more than human life to have a seat on the government's Board of the bi Regional financing facilities so um on the the Buffalo work that I'm doing um Buffalo could have a a proxy vote in the form of a human representing the interests of the Buffalo um in many places watersheds could um have a seat at the table um my friends in New New Zealand um have been working on um a mountain having um the ability to own assets and and to sit on a governance Board of how assets to support regeneration are deployed um so I think there's a lot of potential to innovate with um with governance structures and um you know in short my answer to suzan's question would be it's going to look different in every place and it's not for me to tell a Biore exactly how to set up that that governance structure um I will make recommendations in the paper and absolutely advocate for indigenous involvement in every single bi Regional financing facility that's set up um but I I'm not sure all of them um will be fully governed by indigenous folks I think in many places it will be um a a combination of indigenous folks along with um other by regionalists working um in in the region uh I want to go to another question from Steve uh oh there are two questions together okay St Steve and David these are related questions Steve asks how address the coming collapse of global finance and market economy and transition to local currency systems so how do we how do we navigate the collapse of those financial systems to reemerge as local living economies with local currency systems and then David asks what do we do with the oligarch who seem to believe that they can out live the CL and may be seeking to facilitate it the BOS musks etc etc and how how do you see um sort of the real politic of that playing into these recommendations great question yeah fantastic question thanks for that Steve this is this is a fun one um yeah in the paper I as I've mentioned am trying to tell a new story about how Capital can support um Mitigation Of The poly crisis the ecological crisis you know collapse of our ecosystems um because right now the way um it is Flowing to Nature um is is not supporting um the the mitigation of the risks that the the capital is is saying that they are seeking to mitigate right whether this is large institutional investors or corporations they are you know they understand the risks there is an an understanding and awareness of the risks that was not there five years ago and that was part of you know my work at the World Bank was to bring attention to those risks and yet the um the actions that they're taking and the way they're directing Capital towards um these resources is not yet serving resilience um because it's not shifting power to to people living in relationship with place and that is the only way to uh achieve resilience in my view and so I see these mechanisms as a way for us to kind of compost um Capital right Capital that has been extracted um Capital that is supporting even you know corporations that are are still based and extractive model um and we can start to invest it in Biore Regional healing and I am making an argument for corporations that have historically extracted from bio regions or are currently extracting from bio regions or you know at least sourcing from bio regions to start to invest in restoring the value sheds of those bio regions um for healing and Reconciliation purposes or um you know just strictly for business operations purposes so I do believe that um there there is a way to to attract some capital from you know this this very fragile Global capitalist system um and compost it to support the transition to local living economies um I I don't think that um we can do what we need to do at scale at the bio Regional level if we are not bringing in some of that capital from kind of this old fragile economic system and I also have had the experience that at many of these large corporations and investors there are people that like all of us here see that um you know what the actions that companies are currently taking are are not commensurate to the scale of the CR is is and they're really hungry to try something different thank you so much for that and thank you so much for coming today and for sharing this with us it's just um it's really helpful to ground the conversation we're having um so thank you so much Samantha we had Samantha power with us and she's working on creating Frameworks to help people understand how do we create these collaborative funding and governance ecosystems and so she talked to us about what is she finding as she talks people around the world and gave us like a conceptual container for us to have a conversation what does it mean to create a funding ecosystem organized as a landscape to regenerate that place how does that work so at the core of all of this was a way of understanding how Biore regions can be organized how they can organize themselves and so we offered this Biore Regional regeneration platform which is that you create a learning ecosystem centered around Biore Regional Learning Centers that coordinate and bring together all of the ways of learning all of the ways of knowing within the landscape that are connected to the living systems of that place that we weave a tapestry of projects because everywhere you could go anywhere on Earth if you go there today you will find there are people who are restoring water regrowing Forest healing C cultural trauma and so on there's so much happening but they're fragmented and they're isolated from each other and they need to be woven into tapestries and organized as Landscapes so these tapestries of projects are fundamental to the way we organize in the Regeneration of Biore regions and then to do all of this we need collaborative funding and governance we need the movement of energy and resources and support and we need decisions to be made close to where their consequences are with the best knowledge available for those decisions which means we need bio Regional governance and Biore Regional economies and with this way of thinking we applied this to the greater taranto bio region we asked ourselves how far along are we at creating these things do the elements exist and what are examples of them but then also we recognize that no bio region is an island even the islands because everything is connected by a living interdependent Dynamic Earth and so we need to have a network of Bio regions and exchanges between them by connecting with other Landscapes the basic metaphor for what we're doing is that we think of the land or the territory as a bank for regenerative Investments and in conceptual terms you can think of it this way the Land is What can retain water and build soils it can train people and provide livelihoods it can cycle nutrients and create material flows for the local economy and the local ecology it can provide housing and grow food for the people who live there and all of these things enable the land as a bank to grow the capacities of local economies and weave them with other Landscapes so we're going to talk about funding ecosystems and how they relate to Regional Learning to organizing of Landscapes to to economic development at a community scale and so when we talk about money as currency just like we talk about electricity as currency the metaphor is that money is energy that's a liquid or a fluid and that it flows so what is regenerative finance and first let's just create a little confusion because we can talk about regenerative economics regenerative e ecology or the Regeneration of a you know of a watershed or soils or a forest and what is the role of Finance as it relates to economics and ecology like what is that what's different and special about it now the way I like to think about this and my friends who work in finance will have slightly different and hopefully complimentary definitions is that Finance is a set of coordination tools for the flow of value within an economy because you see an economy is the management of material resource flows and ecology is the dynamic web of living relationships and finance is the coordination of value within an economy but what's interesting is every economy whether it understands this or not because there's a lot of really stupid ideology in the field of Economics is that all real economic systems are embedded within larger and deeper ecological contexts which is to say the management of material resources and flows which is economics is always embedded within a living system which is ecology but economy e economics and ecology always have a financial system which is they always have some way of coordinating the flow of value within those material exchanges for the living system and finance is that focus on the coordination and communication of value and so when we see Finance in this way regenerative Finance is the the coordination tools for the flow of value within a living system that support life and well-being and wholesomeness and so here's an example of an economy this is a forest a trophic flow a web of energy and nutrient exchange between living organisms just take the pentry in the upper left the black bear eats it and the materials of the pron tree enter into the body of the black bear but eventually the bear dies or it just poops out the pron and then it becomes food for parasol fungus down in the bottom and you can start to see that these arrows represent the economics which is the material exchanges the resource management of an ecosystem but also these material flows these trophic flows are part are partly they are the financial system which is that there is value stored in the bodies of these organisms there is value exchanged in their living Dynamic interactions like the black bear eating the pmen is a flow and a transformation of value and as that flow moves through the system it is signaled by the health and well-being of the organisms in the system which is to say that this flow of energy and and resources in an ecosystem has an implicit Financial system there is a system of value um structure and flow communicated across the life web through the interaction actions of the living organisms all right here's another Financial system that we don't normally think of as a financial system the entire biosphere for all of life on Earth is shaped profoundly by the Earth's energy Bud budget the Earth's energy budget is an atmospheric atmospheric science term which is that basically all of life on Earth comes from energy from the Sun and as energy comes in from the sun it's moved about in lots of places some of it reflected back into space some of it's absorbed to heat the atmosphere creating the greenhouse effect some of it through photosynthesis becomes the body of plants those plants are eaten by animals so the photosynthesis turns the energy of the sun into the body of animals through the body of plants and you start to see that there is a financial system here there is a flow of value through the movement of air the Earth's weather through the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean and through all biotic life on Earth there is a financial system and interestingly the entire human economy is a subset of this financial system which is the extent to which we can create Financial flows that are already part of the Earth's ecology and geophysical reality which includes the movement of solar energy the better we will be able to live in harmony with life so part of Biore Regional regeneration is to create Financial flows that are based in these living System Dynamics so there is a financial system in the Earth's energy budget so in a nutshell what I'm saying and this is sort of like lay person's terms Finance is the storage flow and transformation of value so we can experience how value is created and flow across any living system but what's interesting is that value can be held in many forms and these are are just a few of them what I'm showing you here with these words money land tools labor knowhow these are things that we would say are multiple kinds of capital within an economic capitalism lens is that money is a form of capital called Financial Capital land is a kind of capital that's land Capital tools are um are a kind of Technology Capital the ability to get things done we could add infrastructure like buildings and Roads and Transport Systems and they would be a kind of capital knowledge and the ability to do things is part of capital which is to say that the financial system is about the storage of value and the diverse kinds of value that exist and the interactions between them for example money can enable tools and labor labor to be applied to land to create an agricultural output or knowhow which is represented as labor and tools can be mobilized with money in order to create a building or to create a business to create a school and you start to see that Finance is the storage flow and transformation of value in its many diverse forms which means when we design a funding ecosystem we're not just talking about money we're talking about all the forms of value that exist and how they are stored so for example you could take money you could buy land you could put the land into a community land trust and now you're storing value for the community in the land and then the land can store value by recharging an aquafer by being a flood protection with a forest or by being an agriculturally productive land or affordable housing for local people and you can start to convert the land into other kinds of stored value and now you start to see that the financial system that we need to design is about all of the kinds of value in our Landscapes and in our bio regions so does this remind you of anything well hopefully it looks like a different version of this we talked about how Biore Regional Learning Centers are actually an ecosystem of learning processes and that they represent a Biore Regional information comment right but what we can see is this learning ecosystem is filled with flows of value your ecosystem of learning processes includes land it includes money it includes tools it includes labor it includes knowhow which is to say the financial system represented schematically on the left and the information exchanges in the Learning System on the right are the same so that means that the design of a financial flow and storage and transformation is also the design of a learning ecosystem it's also the design of a local living economy these are just different lenses to draw attention to different parts of what we're working on and that means that to create a Biore Regional Learning Center we have to design funding ecosystems otherwise we can't gather store measure move or transform value we need to know how to do that and so one way to talk about this is in the language of a Biore Regional investment platform which is to say that we can imagine that there are different kinds of regenerative projects related to our learning ecosystem and that these projects are spread out across their Landscapes so what if we organize the projects around a specific territorial landscape and defined it as a portfolio for investment so that then an investor which could be a local government with P public sector Investments it could be philanthropic investment it could be impact investment it could be entrepreneurial business investment but the idea is once you have looked at the landscape as an organizing pattern and you see projects within the landscape and you see oh all the projects within this Watershed they could become a portfolio how do we create robust circulation of value and benefits for that entire landscape and that's what brings us back to this image in the lower right which we called the Biore Regional regeneration platform which is that there's a portfolio of local projects organized as a landscape that there's a Biore Regional Learning Center or a learning ecosystem and that there is a territorial Foundation which is collaborative funding and governance for the landscape system and then we can start to see that what we're designing here is an investment platform someone who wants to invest invest in biodiversity or invest in education for children or invest in affordable housing can invest in it within a portfolio that manages the risk because of the diversity of projects that are in that portfolio now when we start to ask what kinds of projects could be in a portfolio like this if you're looking at a specific landscape like where we are in the northern Andes in Colombia or where some of our friends are in Cascadia in the Salish sea or or like our friends that are in the driftless region and the upper part of the Mississippi Basin we start to see that there are different kinds of biomes and different kinds of ecosystems that there are diversity have Cooperative structures we might have regenerative goals like local food production and food security or affordable housing or quality education or connecting people to Nature have a variety of regenerative goals so there can be projects that have different structures and different goals some projects are small like a small Waldorf School or multif family homeschooling some projects are large like a watershed restoration project they can be at various stages of development you can have a ni aidea for a project that doesn't even exist yet or you can have a project that is weaving multi-stakeholder networks with multiple projects that's been going for 20 years and you start to see that the idea of a portfolio is that these different kinds of diversity allow us to create integrative holistic approaches and to diversify investment and manage Collective risk at the scale of the landscape and we're starting to see that the structuring of our project s into a portfolio is the building up of elements of a financial system so in body chura Columbia we've been doing this for about five years now and four of the patterns of regeneration that have been guiding our work just to start to see how would you identify regenerative projects how would you organize them one of them is we're focused on the restoration of entire watersheds so in body charara Columbia we organize regenerative projects around stream bed water sheds ecological corridors these larger holistic landscape systems we have a focus on a learning centrance in Tropic agroforestry which is to say part of how we do Watershed restoration and reforestation and food security and restoration of soils is with Agro forestry methods so creating an ecosystem of learning around Agro forestry and reforestation methods is anchored to a Learning Center in Copic agroforestry that's connect to our need in our own territory to change the agricultural system create local food sovereignty and local food security so the transformation of Local Food Systems integrates a lot of things within our watersheds and within our regenerative agroforestry practices all of that is connected to the design of alternative economic models and we have a really beautiful project in body called kasak Kon that is weaving together a tapestry of local projects that is prototyping a community currency that is a center for transformation of local resources and that's connected to all of the other projects and what you can see is that when you look into your own bio region you will see patterns like in your bio region do you need to restore watersheds in your bio region do you need to have an integrative way of doing regenerative practice for landscape Restoration in your landscape do you need a different kind of Agriculture a different kind of Tourism a different kind of local economy and you start to see that these kinds of patterns become organizing principles for how you create funding ecosystems you organize around these highlevel goals and strategies related to them to see how to store flow and transform value within your landscape so you see this is a portfolio approach which is to say there are individual regenerative projects in your bio region and you build up collaborative processes within those projects and between them to weave new efforts and new scales of capacity for your bio region as a whole and so an element of this that I think is really important to add is a specific lens the lens of community philanthropy Community philanthropy is a a particular philosophy and ethic for finance and it works like this community philanthropy is the process of working together in community leveraging community resources of various kinds and determining the use of external resources as a community so Community philanthropy is acting in service to the community as a community member so members of the community come together identify the resources that the value that they already have they mobilize those resources in service to the community and if money does or if resources do do come in from the outside the community has sovereignty and autonomy to decide which resources come in and they come in on the terms of the community another way of thinking of it is like this that you could have a community funding pool you could say that we could pull together all of the resources we have in the community we could map out those those those resources we could mobilize the diverse different kinds of resources and just look at this image on the left I took this picture at the birthday party of a six-year-old girl over the weekend notice that part of the Community Resources is a house and a table another part of the Community Resources is there's a cake someone made a cake for the kids we're about to share it among the kids and all the kids are gathering together and they're learning and building relationships and there's trust and support among the parents to be able to raise our children together and you start to see that just in this image there are many kinds of value there are many different community resour es and they are flowing beautifully to the children because we as families care about our kids so a community funding pool could be a birthday party a birthday party is a community funding Pool isn't that interesting and so here's an example of a a a a pool that we created because we've created a Waldorf School in barura called swos delbos so we pulled together some money and then we use some of that money to hire really awesome teachers here are some of our awesome teachers our awesome teachers have been flowing value into the community and connecting with other awesome teachers here on the upper right is a local expert in the Indigenous cultural practices of harvesting the native be or the native ants because in B the indigenous people would eat the queen ants of the leaf cutter ant species and so our teachers in the waldor school are bringing the kids into context into contact with local indigenous knowledge on the bottom right the woman in the yellow shirt is Diana a local B expert and the kids are learning from a local teacher who's not part of the school except that she is meaning she's not a teacher in the school but she's a teacher in the community and we were able to move flowing resources and paying di to teach the kids about bees but also we can organize new capacities because once we've hired the teachers the teachers can organize with the parents and the teachers can organize different kinds of community leaders and we can create new capacities in the community and you can see in these images that the pulling of resources into a Community Fund which we've called the school SOS Doos but it's a Community Fund as well has allowed us to invest resources in the storage of value of human beings of teachers who came to the community and those teachers are a really valuable resource because they can actively transform value they can actively facilitate the flow of value into human relationships and learning processes across the community and this is a funding ecosystem so there are two important things that I want us to be really clear about the first one is that a fund is about a lot more than money so yes a fund can have money in it but money is just one of the tools one of the resources that we have within the community there are many many other kinds of value that a fund can hold so as we design our funding ecosystems we should look at those diverse kinds of value the second thing is that the financial system is how coordination and flow happen which means that it might be implicit it might be invisible but it is definitely there if value is being stored if it's moving if it is transforming there is a financial system and so creating one of these creating a bio Regional Learning ecosystem is a process creating value flow which is designing a regenerative Finance system it's about funding pools of bringing together resources in service to Collective goals and to mobilize them into Community processes and that Real World Exchange is happening that there is a regenerative economics that is occurring within the learning ecosystem and that's why creating a Biore Regional Learning Center is also creating a funding ecosystem and is also about governance and decision-making but what we can see is that we need to be thinking about how we invest in our communities with the resources we have but I want to make a comment on extractive investments because one of the big questions that I think many of you have asked or have been asked is should I accept funding that requires a financial return to the investor and this is a really good question because some kinds of money will not flow unless the investor gets a financial return and you'll have to decide if you accept that money or not and what I want to say is that Investments that require a financial return are extractive in the sense that they are helping to create value but then they're pulling value back out and giving it to the investors and so if that extra extraction is external to the system that means that the investors then take the money and can put it into a different system but if those investors are part of the community then that extraction might simply be just moving it to another place within the community so extraction here may be okay and it may not be okay and you can just see that it's it's a sensitive topic and it's a nuanced topic but I want to make an ecological argument for why Financial returns cannot be allowed in the initial Investments because of where most of our economies and ecosystems are and it looks like this here's a picture of my daughter at least two years ago she's a lot bigger now she is holding a little pile of clay that she scooped up in Bop Park monora and I just want you to notice how crappy that Clay is that is not soil the top soil has been eroded away there are almost no nutrients right it it has very little regenerative capacity if it rains hard all of it just washes away as a erosion and so if you are in a degraded landscape like the one that Elise was in in this picture then you're in the left on this uh this um curve so if we think of time moving forward from left to right and regenerative capacity is from bottom to top so the higher the line is the more regenerative capacity there is that if you go into a degraded landscape you have very little regenerative capacity at the beginning there's no soil to speak of there's very little regenerative capacity so we need to invest in cultivating the regenerative capacities and if you try to like if you Tred to extract an agricultural output if you Tred to grow food crops in this lousy soil you'd very quickly s find out that you would just degrade the soils even further and that extraction of an economic output would harm the building of soil which means at this stage of degradation the Investments need to be in building up the regenerative capacity but eventually the regenerative capacity becomes self-perpetuating it becomes cumulative and the Harvest becomes possible you could Harvest outcomes which means if you were going to have a financial investor get a financial return that might happen at a later stage but it would be harmful to the accumulation of regenerative capacities at an earlier stage see Investments need to focus on in increasing these regenerative capacities in the local culture the economy and the ecology which means we need to understand when we invite different kinds of investment and just as a side comment in the landscape uh Finance model developed by commonland Foundation they have found that Financial returns aren't even realistic or or feasible for regenerative B businesses at the landscape scale until 8 to 10 years in and that before that it's primarily public goods investment and philanthropic investment and it's for this reason it's because to build up the robustness of a regenerative economy you need to actually invest in that regenerative economy without extracting from it because it's fragile and brittle in those early stages and so that's just a comment on the nuances of this kind of work and why it's so important to focus on on cultural regeneration and Human Relationships economic regeneration in different kinds of financial flows and economic models and ecological regeneration in restoring the life systems of our places it's about relationships and the core question for us is what is the relationship for humans with the rest of life that is the question that we need to answer and that is the question that we're answering now by trying to in increase GDP in every quarterly return of our stock exchange for our shareholder companies for the top .01% of humans as extinctions Skyrocket clearly what we need to value is not what is being measured and interestingly what we value most may not need a measure [Music] oh [Music] [Music]