Regenerative Governance Project
“Regenerative governance is the foundational structure of a regenerative future,
built by people who’ve learned how to cooperate, make decisions together,
give and receive feedback, adapt to change, and self-organize.” ~ Michelle Smith
Governance systems for a regenerative future
Governance systems that flow like living systems are adaptive, distributed, and resilient. Decisions are made by the people doing the work, in connection with the purposes of the whole. Governance moves through relationships of trust in pluricentric networks of collaboration.
The transition to regenerative culture requires a parallel shift in how we coordinate with one another, grounded in practices that build the relational infrastructure of trust, resilience, and collective flourishing. This is what we mean by governance culture: the living practices through which any group of people makes decisions, shares power, and acts together.
That transition happens through the simultaneous spread of embodied skills, practiced in real relationships, across many nodes of the community. This is a cultural propagation model: like mycelium, it spreads through connection, experimentation, feedback and learning.
How do we build governance systems that flow like living systems so we can build a regenerative future together?
Do we have the embodied skills and cultural practices that allow us to respond collectively to the conditions and opportunities of our current reality?
We don’t yet. But we can learn them.
The Regenerative Governance Project aims to build capacity for collaborative collective action by creating open source tools, providing experiential learning labs, and communities of practice, and supporting skilled facilitators who can make regenerative governance accessible across a bioregion.
For over 12 years we’ve curated methodologies that are internationally tested and work at every level of culture, from mutual aid initiatives and social impact networks to regional institutions and cooperative businesses.
We envision a network of bioregions where the default assumptions about how we make decisions together, hold power, and care for each other and the land are regenerative rather than extractive; where governance has become a living practice, continuously renewed by the people who inhabit it.
That future grows from skills practiced in relationships of trust throughout multi-level place-based networks of collaboration.
A project of the Raft Foundation
Circle Forward is proud to partner with the Raft Foundation as fiscal sponsor for the Regenerative Governance Project.
Raft Foundation is a US-based 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor that brings communities together to support neighbors in need through: collective care, community technology, movement infrastructure and societal transformation
Why This Work Needs Funding
Many communties and bioregions are rich with the kinds of initiatives and organizations that are ready to learn and practice together.
People in organizations and initiatives with visions for systems change know they want more collaborative, less hierarchical decision-making as they design new ways to work and be together. Often they’re seeking to expand their practical capacity with skilled facilitation, workshops, real-life practice, shared tools, and a community of people learning together.
Sometimes leaders recognize that the group’s cultural habits are blocking their ability to actualize the principles they want to live into. They need spaces that create the conditions for learning, unlearning, sensing into those habits.
But for neighborhood associations, mutual aid networks, forming cooperatives, and movement organizations “learning and practice for deep systems change” is a budget line item they often struggle to fund.
The Regenerative Governance Project aims to address this structural gap. We aim to create safe places to learn, practice and build capacity for creating systems and structures that honor our relationship to ourselves, our ancestors, future generations, and all life.
We started RGP as a nonprofit initiative because this kind of learning and practice spaces almost always need to be subsidized. While it rarely pays for itself, it’s essential work that makes everything else possible.
If you’re part of a network, cooperative, faith community, or bioregional effort working for a regenerative future, we’d love to connect.
If you’re a funder who believes deep systems change requires investment in how people learn to work together, we’d love to talk with you too.
Your support makes it possible to bring this work to the groups that need it most, and to demonstrate, right here in this bioregion, what regenerative governance looks like when it takes root.
Objections Play-shop Series
A safe play-space to practice. For people who are already working with consent-based decision-making, and want to get more skillful, more grounded, and more at ease with objections when things get hard.
Rising Together: a Bioregional UnConference
Rising Together brings the people from the whole system to build relationships, projects, and shared governance from connections that form across every sector.
Practicing Consent
Coaching for teams, circles, and working groups who want to foster a culture of trust, respect and shared responsiblity for all.