<aside> 💡 This is a working draft and open to feedback and continuous revision.
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📋 Premise
🎯 Inquiry
Although financial flows are plentiful, too few resources reach local groups and people that are rooted in community and best positioned to create meaningful, lasting change. Financial capital is catalytic energy that empowers and enables people to organize, connect, and create. How we deploy this type of capital and enable community-centered governance is essential to power the rise of locally-driven solutions amidst the challenges of our time.
What would it look like to design a bioregional investment approach with the primary purpose of fostering local, community-led and owned systems innovation and transformation?
A bioregion invites us to inhabit a place in a way that is full of relationship (1). Seeing where the natural boundaries of our bioregion are, we can then see the many ecosystems and human relationships alive within it. All these systems, spanning from water and biodiversity to transportation and health, are all connected. Moreover, tracing back for thousands of years, there is a connecting story of people’s reciprocity with the land and each other that shows up in the plants, soil, animals, and the human culture and stories of a given place. Bioregions offer a community-affirming frame to honour and centre these connections and organize shared responsibilities for this place we call home.
The solutions to the crises we face today are not going to be top-down, they will be bottom up. Given this, we must focus efforts on how we develop and sustain the necessary community structures that will allow watersheds across a bioregion to demonstrate what a more hopeful and thriving future could look like. Developing community-affirming structures to propel forward local solutions will involve radically changing how capital flows to grassroots efforts. If we can change capital flow to be regenerative (instead of extractive) and to value investments in stewards of community and nature, we can reshape patterns of being in reciprocity with the land and each other.
To this end, we seek to demonstrate real value and real change by activating ecosystems-based, climate-ready approaches and community-led regenerative economies. It is the people who are rooted in place, connected to and trusted by their community, who have the power to drive transformative change from the ground up. Our goal is to foster social trust and unity among diverse members of a community, forging unusual alliances across a watershed, and encouraging collaborative action for the common good. To do this, our approach is centered on building the resilience of the communities and ecosystems upon which we all depend.
We start with a focus on local food systems. Food is essential to life and has a profound impact on health and well-being. Producing and sharing local, healthy food is central to self-determination as it embodies the nexus between culture, identity, economy, health, and the environment. Being food secure enables communities to strengthen their resilience, promote social cohesion, and assert their autonomy in shaping their own destinies.
Building from that, we embrace the principles of regenerative agriculture, which offers an opportunity to create desirable social and ecological outcomes and risk-adjusted financial returns. Regenerative farming principles are deeply rooted in local food systems, where food is consumed near to the place it was produced. Our concept targets relationships where the caretakers of ecological assets share a legally vested ownership interest in land holdings for the purposes of land conservation and agricultural food production. This ownership model ensures a long-term duty of care for the land, nature, community, and financial resources being stewarded.
Our vision is to create an alignment of financial resources and land stewardship practices that enable cost-effective conservation and regenerative agricultural outcomes.
Our lead implementation site is the Okanagan bioregion in British Columbia. This bioregion is located in the traditional territories of the Okanagan Alliance. It has high quality farmland, soils and water. Our cohort has existing direct relationships with a strong farming community who support and are currently using regenerative practices in this region. The regional food system is less developed compared to other more mature regions. These factors present an opportunity to build out a regenerative farming community with less resistance from incumbent systems and practices.
The Okanagan bioregion enables access to good-sized markets in urban centres, including Kelowna, Kamloops, Vernon, Salmon Arm & Revelstoke. Many regenerative organic farms in the North Okanagan region are currently operating (and aggregating at smaller scales) under their own brands, with strong track records and unmet demand for their products. This enables an investment strategy focused on growth and stabilization (as compared to investing in start-ups). There is also strong support for farmers from economic development agencies (including First Nations Community Futures) and ENGOs who are working on enabling policies, markets development, and community building.
There are several First Nations in the region, including the Splatsin (Spallumcheen), Neskonlith, Okanagan, Little Shuswap Lake. These nations have been engaged in agriculture for millennia and are reconnecting with these practices to enable Indigenous Food Sovereignty (eg. Kweseltken Market, etc.).
The bioregion has had recent and significant experiences with floods, wildfires, and droughts. This has created a focus and sense of urgency to adopt regenerative organic farming as a pathway to climate change mitigation and adaptation, including nature-based solutions and food system resiliency in the region. The Canadian Environmental Grantmakers’ Network considers the Okanagan Basin to be the most arid watershed in Canada, with an urgent need for effective water management.[2] The Okanagan Basin Water Board was established more than 35 years ago, to provide leadership on regional water issues, taking a basin-wide perspective and seeking collaborative solutions.[3]
Please dive into out project components to learn more about our investment approach and the vital components that contribute to….
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