# Designing, Building, and Implementing Bioregional Financing Facilities 4. Designing, Building, and Implementing Bioregional 65 Financing Facilities Case Study 4: Hawai’i Investment Ready Initiative – An Intermediary for 88 Investing in a Resilient Economy for All Hawai’i  Case Study 5: Spruce Root – An Indigenous-led CDFI Catalyzing a 92 Regenerative Economy 4.4 Systemic investment portfolios for bioregional regeneration 102 4.5 Shifting theories of value and ownership 104 -> 4. Designing, Building, and Implementing Bioregional Financing Facilities Once a Bioregional Organizing Team has brought together key bioregional actors to develop a Bioregional Regeneration Strategy as part of the Co-initiation & Co- the realization of the vision laid out in the strategy. BFFs do this by working hand in hand with the Bioregional Organizing Team and Bioregional Hub to enable the decentralization of financial resource governance, the design of synergistic project portfolios, and the transition to a regenerative economy. Whereas Bioregional Hubs work to bring together and empower a bioregional regeneration network by facilitating regenerative flow of all capital types, BFFs focus specifically – but not exclusively – on facilitating the regenerative flow of financial capital. Together, the Bioregional Organizing Team, Bioregional Hub, and BFFs form the three legs of a stool that supports bioregional regeneration.9 8 Or evolved from an existing aligned institution. 9 Noting that their role is to realize synergies and build networks between the many critical actors in a bioregion. Figure III. The three legs of bioregional regeneration BIOREGIONAL REGENERATION Bireginal Bireginal Bireginal Organizing Team Hub(s) Financing Facilities rather than more, dependent on both financial capital overall and financial capital from outside the region, and where financial flows better align with real flows of value. BFFs will work on creating regenerative flows at multiple levels – at the level of organizations it invests in, and at various levels in nested systems. This includes supporting regenerative organizations in the bioregion with technical assistance, and the development of the enabling environment conditions needed for regenerative organizations to succeed; deepening and expanding markets for regenerative activities; creating regenerating pools of funding to support management of common assets; raising the right type of investment capital; leveraging derisking approaches; and creating cutting edge, integrated MRV a phased approach as laid out in Table II. Table II. An overview of the four types of BFFs (Part 1/2) PHASE 1 1. Bioregional Trust 2. Bioregional Venture Studio A trust that acts as a catalytic grant fund A non-profit, public benefit corporation, – providing grants to a range of priority co-operative, steward-owned entity, organizations and initiatives in order to or DAO that supports the development create a strong foundation for bioregional of a cohort of synergistic regenerative action. It can also set up and manage organizations to drive systems change. bioregional eco-credit programs, Common These organizations provide dealflow for Asset Trusts, and Ecological Institutions. the Investment Company. Capital Raising Capital Raising › Philanthropic and public grant capital › Philanthropic grants (could be sub-national, national, or › Public sector grants (could be sub- multilateral), as well as individual national, national, or multilateral) donations (including through › Supply chain finance crowdfunding) › Concessional capital › Bioregional Tithing program10 Capital Allocation Capital Allocation › Invests in and incubates cohorts of › Provides grants to fund key processes early-stage organizations that work laid out in steps 2-5 of the Multi- together to change a specific system stakeholder Bioregional Regeneration and generate cascading benefits (Table 4) › Provides grants to priority projects or organizations aligned with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy › Provides grants to Bioregional Hubs and Bioregional Organizing Teams › Funds the development of a bioregional MRV platform (to be developed together with a Bioregional Hub) › Sets up the Bioregional Venture Studio, Bioregional Investment Company and Bioregional Bank Both Capital Raising and Allocation › Works with citizen groups to develop, bundle, and sell bioregional scale eco-credits (including to companies operating in the bioregion) › Sets up Common Asset Trusts – holding the rights to manage key ecosystems in the bioregion as commons › Sets up Ecological Institutions – supporting greater sovereignty and economic legibility of bodies of nature 10 Credit to Edward West of Applied Alchemy. Table II. An overview of the four types of BFFs (Part 2/2) PHASE 2 3. Bioregional Investment Company 4. Bioregional Bank A public benefit corporation, co-operative, A bank that provides low-interest loans, steward-owned entity, or DAO that develops microloans, lines of credit, and technical a portfolio of Systemic Investment Funds assistance to aligned organizations. It can and Bioregional Regeneration Bonds. It also provide retail banking services to leverages an integrated capital approach, individuals and can develop and issue a aggregates portfolios of high impact complementary or nature-based currency. projects or businesses. Capital Raising Capital Raising › Concessional capital › Market-rate investment capital › Public sector grants (could be sub- › Concessional capital national, national, or multilateral) › Philanthropic grants › Philanthropic grants › Public sector grants (could be sub- › Guarantees national, national, or multilateral) › Deposits › Supply chain finance Capital Allocation Capital Allocation › Provides low interest loans to aligned Systemic Investment Funds organizations › Invests in diversified portfolios of › Provides technical assistance projects & businesses designed to create systemic impact Currency Creation › Develops and issues complementary Bioregional Regeneration Bonds or nature-based currency › Same objectives as the funds, but through a fixed income security Market-rate Supply Nature- FINANCIAL Donations Philanthropic Public Crowd- Eco- Investment Concessional ChaiÎ Guarantees based RESOURCES Grants Grants funding Credits Capital Capital Finance Currencies Capitalising Reporting + Returns Collaborating on integrated MRV Bioregional Hub(s) Seeding Resourcing Bioregional Bioregional
 Bioregional INTERMEDIARIES Venture
 Investment Bioregional Trust Bank Bioregiona l Investing Studio Compané Profits Stakeholders Governing Capital `llocation, Incubation, Portfolio 4 Returns Data Collection Structuring & Capacity Building Projec t Projec t Projec t Projec t Projec t RE ENERATORS 1 2 3 4 n Systemic Coordination of financial capital, including public and philanthropic grant capital, concessional and market-rate investment capital, as well as supply chain finance and eco-credit revenues. Other critical financial tools are public direct investment, tax revenue, subsidies, and the issuance of Bioregional Regeneration Bonds. as an evolution of impact investing. They seek to establish a financial architecture that recognizes the complexity inherent to systemic transformation, and the fundamental interconnectedness of interventions. They help to build synergistic and systemic investment portfolios, creating positive spillover values which enable mutually reinforcing and positive feedback loops of systemic value generation across projects. BFFs provide a pathway for even multinational corporations – that often seem to operate everywhere and nowhere at the same time – to come back into relationship with the very real places and people they are dependent on and are in turn impacting. BFFs enable them to move towards healing and reciprocity through how they invest. Figure 7. Moving from organizing to economic transition and regeneration B54R!,54.AL 4R,A.525., T!AM Key Bioregional Mapping and Actors Analysis Bioregional Regeneration Strategy Bioregional Hub(s) Bioregional inancing acilities Physical location, legal entity, and team of Legal entity, team of experts, and pool of experts that provides in-person, on land, and financial resources that will strategically and online support to regenerators in a designed systematically fund activities aligned with the area. Particularly, Hubs will focus on capacity vision laid out in the Bioregional Regeneration building and providing technical tools, technical Strategy (including the Hubs). assistance, and shared infrastructure. Regenerative Projects and Businesses Transition to a Regenerative !conomy and Biocultural Regeneration Together, the Bioregional Organizing Team, Bioregional Hub, and BFFs form the three legs of a stool that can serve as a solid foundation for bioregional regeneration (as illustrated in Figure 8.).129 In addition to funding portfolios of regenerative projects and organizations, BFFs can allocate financial resources to one or more Bioregional Hubs (as illustrated in Figure 9.). They can also fund the Bioregional Organizing Team to ensure foundational bioregional organizing work deepens with existing actors, and widens to include additional actors that are supporting the transition to a regenerative economy. Figure 8. The three legs of bioregional regeneration BIOREGIONAL REGENERATION Bireginal Bireginal Bireginal Organizing Team Hub(s) Financing Facilities rather than more dependent on financial capital overall and financial capital from outside the region, and where financial flows better align with real flows of value. However, this aim of localizing and diversifying capital flow must be navigated carefully within the global historical context in which centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism have extracted diverse forms of wealth from certain bioregions and transferred it to others. In places that have grown rich from this extraction, not only will capital diversification be made easier by the excess material and financial capital present, but capital localization efforts made without sincere engagement in decolonial processes of reconciliation, reparation, and healing are likely to further deepen inequality and injustice. In extracted contexts, the need for outside financial capital may be more pressing, and the regenerative impact of financial capital may be greater. Thus, BFFs may offer appropriate infrastructure for forming relationships of solidarity, rebalancing, and reciprocity between diverse regions with shared history.130 For example, BFFs might enable Indigenous communities to receive and manage Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) from Global North countries to support Indigenous stewardship and the realization of the targets set in the Global Biodiversity Framework.131 129 Noting that their role is to realize synergies and build networks between the many critical actors in a bioregion. 130 Contribution from Tyler Wakefield. 131Target 19a of the Global Biodiversity Framework is laid out as follows: “Increasing total biodiversity related international financial resources from developed countries, including official development assistance, and from BFFs will work on creating regenerative flows at multiple levels – at the organizational level and at various levels in nested systems. This includes supporting the development of the enabling environment conditions needed for regenerative organizations to succeed – deepening and expanding markets for regenerative activities; creating regenerating pools of funding to support management of common assets and public goods; raising aligned investment Common assets (also referred capital; leveraging derisking approaches; and creating cutting edge, integrated MRV to as commons) – A type of strategies. resource that is collectively owned, used, or engaged with by a group of people. Commons can range from local resources like forests, fisheries, and urban spaces, Market-rate Supply Nature- FINANCIAL Donations Philanthropic Grants Public Grants Crowd- funding Eco- Credits Investment Concessional Capital ChaiÎ Guarantees based to global resources like the RESOURCES Capital Finance Currencies biosphere, atmosphere, digital networks, and data. Elinor Ostrom's work challenged Capitalising Reporting + Returns the traditional notion that Collaborating on commons are inevitably integrated MRV subject to degradation or Bioregional Hub(s) overuse ("the tragedy of the Seeding Bioregional
 Bioregional Resourcing commons"), and instead INTERMEDIARIES Bioregional Bioregional Trust Investing Venture
 Studio Investment Compané Bank Bioregiona l demonstrated through Profits Governing Stakeholders empirical studies that communities are capable Capital `llocation, of developing effective Incubation, Portfolio 4 Returns Structuring Data Collection & Capacity rules and institutions to Building sustainably manage and govern commons over the long term.132 “Commoning” Projec t Projec t Projec t Projec t Projec t RE ENERATORS 1 2 3 4 n and “re-commoning” are also coming into increasing use as Systemic Coordination verbs to describe the practice of forming and governing new commons or recovering As described in Figure 5 (Section 2), BFFs have the potential to become the historical commons from a present privatized state. connective tissue between various sources of financial capital and grassroots regenerative actors, large land and water projects, and tools and technologies Public good – In economics, a supporting these actors and the economic transition. BFFs can bring much needed “public good" refers to anything financial capital into the mycelial network of bioregional regenerators and bring the that is both non-excludable integrated benefits of regeneration (we use the 4 Returns framework) to financial and non-rivalrous, meaning capital providers, land and water stewards, and all of the life in the bioregion. people cannot be barred access, and one person's use It is up to the Bioregional Organizing Team to decide on the appropriate time to doesn't degrade another's.133 bioregion. The team may need to call in specialized expertise134 to support them in and open-source patents or this work. code are all examples. Public goods are different from common assets, which can be rivalrous and made excludable through governance. countries that voluntarily assume obligations of developed country Parties, to developing countries, in particular the least developed countries and small island developing States, as well as countries with economies in transition, to at least $20 billion per year by 2025, and to at least $30 billion per year by 2030.” 132 Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action 133 Wikipedia: Public good (economics). 134 A network of consultants working on landscape, watershed, and bioregional-level finance is coming together to support bioregions in this work and will be invited to join the forthcoming BioFi Community of Practice. Regeneration Strategy, their structures will vary. Diverse, decentralized organizations can support increased systemic resilience, and improve the effectiveness of BFFs as connective tissue.135 Therefore, we do not seek to be overly prescriptive on how BFFs should be designed. Instead we lay out twelve high-level attributes our research tells us each facility should work towards, and eventually meet in order to effectively support the realization of the BFF objectives. We then introduce templates for BFFs that can serve as a starting place in design. 1. Aim to align with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom – BFFs are not meant to be designed as machines to be used for moving money between investors and regenerative activities; they are themselves meant to serve as regenerative activity. This is a purpose inseparable from the objective of catalyzing regenerative economies; thus BFFs should work to embody living systems patterns and principles136 in their organizational design and culture. The BFF, its relationships, the organizations it invests in, the local economy, the global economy, and the broader social and Earth systems they are nested R Values – Jan Hania in are all living systems; accordingly, BFFs should foster conditions for health (Tuwharetoa, Raukawa- at every level and develop methods for evaluating health in relationship to ki-teTonga, Te Atiawa of investment. Finally, BFFs should work to understand contextually-sound Aotearoa/New Zealand and Indigenous worldviews, values, and ways of knowing or being that can offer the Principal of Strategy Development for Biome trustworthy guidance on investment and put them into practice. We recommend Trust) uplifts the “R values” the “R Values” described in the box below as a place to start. These will naturally of relationality, reciprocity, support BFFs to invest in ways that recognize the interconnectedness of responsibility, respect, everything on Earth, as laid out in the Gaia Hypothesis, and in understanding reverence, regeneration, their work as nature investing in nature – rather than humans investing in redistribution, and something separate called nature. reconnection – noting that language must be contextualized and place- based.137 The authors “Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. also uplift re-membering, If we discover the laws that govern this system and live restorying, rewilding, and rematriation. synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.” Nature – Perhaps an – Buckminster Fuller undefinable term (e.g. where does it end?) it is mostly used in this book to refer to the organic world (plants, fungi, 2. Serve the realization of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy – Every animals (including humans), bioregion will need to develop, adaptively manage, and update as conditions ecosystems) as well as world warrant, a long-term (20-100+ year or multigenerational) Bioregional features (hydrology, geology, Regeneration Strategy as the guiding document for all bioregional organizing, climate) that western science does not generally consider capacity building, economic development, land use planning, and capital organic or alive, yet are being allocation. Every Bioregional Financing Facility that is established sets the increasingly recognized Bioregional Regeneration Strategy as its guiding document and raises and as interdependent with the deploys financial capital in service to realizing the vision laid out.138 This attribute organic world (see Gaia Hypothesis). Within the context of other knowledge systems, 135 Nunes: Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal 136 More about this in the Capital Institute’s 8 Principles for a Regenerative Economy and the Biomimicry Institute’s it includes categories such as 6 Life’s Principles. Mother Earth and systems of 137 The Regeneration Will Be Funded (Podcast): Jan Hania life, and it is often viewed as 138 Alternatively, a Facility creates a legal structure that enables the Strategy to become its guiding document once it is something humans are a developed if the Bioregional Financing Facility is set up first. part of.  makes BFFs unique, in that it focuses their capital on large-scale ecological and social regeneration and the realization of cascading benefits through systems change. In practice, this means that BFFs will need to prioritize bioregional regeneration activities and objectives in order to identify which BFFs to set up and in what sequence. From there, the strategy of each BFF should be crafted, with both the short and long term aspects of the broader Strategy as its objectives. BFFs can create tests to determine whether a given investment supports the transition to the regenerative economy,139 including healing and reconciliation, or whether it is further entrenching the economy of the bioregion in increasingly fragile global supply chains and systems built on extraction and destruction. 3. Implement an inclusive and participatory governance structure that represents the bioregion – It is critical that each BFF has a governance structure that is broadly representative of and based on the input of the people living and working in the bioregion, the people that have historically stewarded land in the bioregion if they have been misplaced, and the more than human life in that place. This structure should include management, a board, an investment committee, and participatory processes that feed into its decisions and operations. The role of the Bioregional Organizing Team to organize and activate key bioregional actors is important. Through this trust-building process, the early scaffolding of contextually-sound governance structures and practices can be built, and appropriate bioregional representatives to serve in BFF governance can be identified. The board should be ethnically and culturally representative of bioregional residents and their interests. BFFs should pay special attention to ensure Indigenous groups and communities that have faced structural violence and exploitation are represented in the places where they reside. We also recommend the inclusion of more than human life on BFF boards140 to ensure that the financial capital raised is not used to narrowly serve human interests, but is allocated to benefit all of the life in the bioregion. Additionally, a process should be established to have regular input from both youth and elders. We also recommend that governance boards rotate periodically in order to bring new energy and ideas to BFFs. A bioregion may decide to hold a town hall, citizens assembly, or election to select board members at regular intervals (more about governance in Section 4.5). 4. Work to shift power imbalances – By serving as connective tissue, Bioregional Financing Facilities help address the power imbalances often inherent in funder- fundee or investor-investee relationships. BFFs should work to address the power imbalance between those controlling large amounts of financial capital today and those struggling to resource the implementation of their regenerative projects. This includes imbalances across bioregions, such as those in places that have grown materially rich from colonial extraction and those in places that have been extracted from. It also includes imbalances within bioregions, such as those created by economic, racial, religious, and gender discrimination and violence. The transition to a regenerative economy should lead to a more equitable society where well being for all is prioritized. 139 Based on the bioregion’s vision for the regenerative economy. 140 The rights of nature movement has made progress, particularly since the inclusion of nature’s rights in Ecuador's revised constitution (ratified in 2008), to gain legal recognition of the rights of life other than humans to exist. The Earth Law Center, in particular, has been working to elect oceans, rivers, animals, etc. to corporate boards. These entities are represented by a human proxy that votes on their behalf.  BFFs are designed to empower local land, water, and neighborhood stewards to implement the strategies they believe are most effective in their place – recognizing the value of local knowledge in delivering the 4 Returns. One practical way they do this is by working together with Bioregional Hubs to reduce the burden of applying for grants or securing investment capital, and the reporting requirements that come if a project or organization is successful in raising capital. Additionally, BFFs can support a shift in the power imbalance between humans and the more-than-human world, and promote greater harmony in the relationships between all life on the planet. At every level, BFFs should work towards restoring ‘right relationship’ – rooted in the principles of reciprocity and mutualism found in both biology and Indigenous wisdom.141 5. Be transparent and enable empowered participation – It is critical that capital raising and allocation, to ensure the trust building critical to bioregional Web3 – In contrast to the regeneration. To the extent possible, BFFs should seek to make documents current internet era (Web2) about capital raising and allocation public, and publish decision criteria about characterized by centralized which projects are selected and why. The affiliations of the board, investment platforms and services where user data is controlled by a committee, and management of BFFs should be disclosed, so conflicts of few large corporations, Web3 interest can be observed and addressed as appropriate. Web3 technologies, represents an emerging including blockchain and smart contracts, can support traceability of capital internet that is decentralized, flows. Such robust capital allocation tracking can hopefully enable grant and enabled by blockchain investment resources that have been wary of funding or financing Indigenous technology, where users have peoples and local communities directly to do so. Transparency will be critical greater control over their data, identities, and interactions for BFFs to be able to receive ODA, for instance. It can help to move some of through peer-to-peer networks the resources stuck in organizations with high overhead and burdensome and protocols. bureaucracy to the ground where regeneration is happening. Rights of nature – The Web3 – In contrast to the current internet era (Web2) characterized by recognition that our centralized platforms and services where user data is controlled by a few large ecosystems – including trees, oceans, animals, and corporations, Web3 represents an emerging internet that is decentralized, mountains – have rights just enabled by blockchain technology, where users have greater control over their as human beings have rights. data, identities, and interactions through peer-to-peer networks and protocols. Rather than treating nature Additionally, BFFs should aim to empower everyone in the bioregion to negotiate as property under the law, for their own needs and contribute their unique gifts towards bioregional rights of nature acknowledges regeneration. Through rights of nature and kinship-informed approaches, the that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, conditions for health for the more-than-human life in the bioregion can also be maintain, and regenerate taken into consideration. Beyond implementing a representative governance its vital cycles. And we – the structure, BFFs might host citizens assemblies or town hall meetings at regular people – have the legal intervals to hear about urgent investment needs directly from community authority and responsibility to members before making grant or investment decisions. This approach can enforce these rights on behalf enable wisdom, innovation, and insights from the edges to inform systems of ecosystems. The ecosystem itself can be named as the change.143 A participatory approach could also be applied to grant allocation, injured party, with its own including voting on projects (more about this in Section 6) or a prize model (such legal standing rights, in cases as the Edge Prize or the Wellbeing Protocol). alleging rights violations.142 6. Leverage an integrated capital structure that embeds regenerative Kinship – Encomposses a principles – BFFs may apply an integrated capital structure that aims to complex and interconnected understanding of relationships, leverage grant capital to mobilize investment capital, large grants (to create identity, and responsibilities BFFs, Bioregional Tithing programs, and eco-credits) to mobilize an even larger within human and more-than- human communities. It is not merely a biological or legal 141 Inspired by the Capital Institute’s 8 Principles for a Regenerative Economy. concept, but encompasses 142 Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature: What are the Rights of Nature? spiritual, cultural, familial, and 143 Inspired by the Capital Institute’s 8 Principles for a Regenerative Economy historical dimensions.  sum through many small donations or eco-credit purchases, and local capital to mobilize capital from outside of the bioregion.144 BFFs aim to (i) rapidly scale up the amount of financial capital flowing to bioregional regeneration; (ii) diversify the types of capital used to meet varied financing needs and risk profiles, in an integrated capital structure; and (iii) strengthen local value flows. The primary objective of the integrated capital structure is not to guarantee investor returns, for which blended finance transactions are often criticized, but to strategically de-risk, change risk perception, fund synergistic portfolios of projects to drive systems change, fund common assets, and stimulate and build markets aligned with regeneration. capital to portfolios of smaller, high impact, synergistic projects driving systems change, increasingly referred to as ‘systemic investing’,145 and to do so at target geographies, benefitting from both diversification and the 4 Returns these portfolios will achieve. For investors or companies that want to support innovation, the Venture Studio (more details in Section 4.2) can provide exposure to innovation from the edges of the system and from the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge systems – both of which will be critical in building resilience in the years to come. Potential motivations for investing in bioregional action for philanthropists, investors, corporations, governments, or citizens are wide-ranging (and are explored in detail in Section 4.3). BFFs enable capital holders to invest collaboratively with like-minded funders and financiers. These facilities are designed to support and strengthen relationships, including among funders and financiers and between funders and financiers and the people, places, and changes unfolding in the bioregion. BFFs aim to ensure high levels of credibility and to speak the language of finance in order to establish a solid base of investor confidence. By bridging community-led governance together with current financial industry standards, these facilities also function as important interfaces between local initiatives and external investment – for example, from global capital markets – catalyzing their co-evolution. 7. Treat growth and returns as a means, not an end – The cycles of growth and decay are integral to living systems. BFFs are designed to support the transition to a regenerative economy that is rooted in this natural law, and does not mistake growth and returns for ends in themselves. There can be no infinite growth of a material system within a closed environment of finite materials without bringing about its collapse.146 To this end, BFFs recognize that growth should not be the purpose of a healthy economy or organization and financial returns cannot be the purpose of an investment.147 Financial models, term sheets, risk assessment approaches, and broader economic transition plans should reflect holistic objectives, deriving from the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy and the goals of regenerative organizations. When determining what 144 Demonstrating that local investors with a deeper understanding of bioregional dynamics and influence in the bioregion can help to reduce perceived risk by external investors and enable them to co-invest. 145 See the work of the TransCap Initiative. 146 It should be noted that economic growth is the driving force behind the economic policies of most nation states on Earth, and in 2020, Helmut Haberl et al concluded in A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights, that “large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates." 147 Returns and liquidity can still act as a constraint for investment (inspired by work of the Capital Institute).  level of returns an ecosystem and the people stewarding it can healthfully produce, we recommend BFF leadership apply the principle of the Honorable Harvest148 in their local social, economic, and ecological context. “Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume – that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own.” – Robin Wall-Kimmerer 8. Raise from purpose-aligned funders or investors – It will be important to attract capital providers of all types who believe in the importance of realizing the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy and are willing to try new, more relational models for assessing and mitigating risk149 – such as social credit scores, trust circles, aggregation, and integrated MRV.150 Many bioregions have socio- economic conditions that limit access to capital for certain communities based on conventional systems of assessing and mitigating risk.151 BFFs should seek to engage with capital providers who wish to support the decentralization of financial resource governance and the economic transition of the bioregion, and are interested in all 4 Returns. Potential motivations and incentives for various categories of capital providers are laid out in Section 4.3. The realization of bioregional regeneration strategies and success of regenerative organizations will depend upon the flexibility offered by purpose-aligned funders to address the specific barriers to deploying capital within each bioregion and the communities of which they are woven. Growing or deepening the relationship of funders and investors with the bioregion will be key to developing alignment. will bundle a range of projects and organizations in investment portfolios for systemic change to facilitate streamlined access to investment for small bioregional initiatives, and present an attractive proposition to major funders and investors seeking diversified, impactful, and aligned portfolios focused on bridge the systemic gap between the modest financing demands of individual projects and the substantial capital required for meaningful impact at scale. The aggregation and matchmaking function also importantly reduces the burden on projects and organizations to engage with the bureaucracy inherent in government, philanthropy, and impact investment, associated with accessing 148 More about this in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. 149 The efficacy of such models has been demonstrated in microlending by the Grameen Bank, BRAC, etc. Additionally there are interesting pilots taking place using social risk metrics to finance on-reservation Native American housing in the US (Flower Hill Institute). 150 Such aligned capital providers may initially account for a small percentage of capital pools, but the push of global efforts to stabilize planetary systems and the pull of BFFs establishing strong track records of bioregional regeneration should increase this percentage rapidly by the late 2020s. In addition, significant pools of purpose- aligned funding should become available through forthcoming loss and damage and reparations payments. 151 In Indian Country in the US, for example, some of the factors contributing to this risk perception include: tribal sovereign powers, inalienability of tribal land, lack of trust and historically poor relationships with colonial financial institutions (credit to Atherton Phleger, Flower Hill Institute). 152 When developing portfolios for impact investors, BFFs can focus on a specific asset class to fit into the investor’s capital allocation framework.  capital and reporting on its use. In their role as connective tissue , BFFs are able to interface with projects and capital providers, speaking the language of both, and meeting the needs of each to help bring them together. Due to the unique role networks of local support can play in the success of these projects, BFFs may also assist in advancing alternative forms of project selection and underwriting. 10. Apply an integrated approach to sensing and MRV – BFFs should develop MRV strategies that leverage modern technology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)153 and Indigenous wisdom, quantitative and qualitative data, and sophisticated modeling and on-the-ground verification by citizen scientists.154 Together with Bioregional Hubs, there is potential for BFFs in a bioregion to develop a comprehensive MRV strategy and to share the overhead cost of a platform to host this information.155 This platform should include project or site-specific data and overall bioregional health data to effectively enable tracking of the systemic impact of investments. The platform should be managed as a commons and can enable accountability beyond just the projects BFFs invest in. Technologies such as eDNA analysis, bioacoustics, remote sensing, and life-centered AI156 can support improved sensing, which can serve BFFs and bioregional citizens in better sensemaking when applied in an integrated framework with TEK, Indigenous wisdom, and citizen science. There are several ecological MRV platforms available that bring many datasets into one place, that a bioregion might opt to use, together with bottom-up metrics.157 Building on attributes 7 and 9, an important efficiency of BFFs is that they aggregate MRV, reducing the burden of reporting and due diligence on individual projects and investors. These tools have the ability to meet on-the- ground projects where they are—through workflows, automation, and locally designed interfaces that interoperate with existing tools. This, combined with their ease of use, can play a critical transitional role in meeting legacy reporting requirements while supporting the emergence of self-determined practices, processes, and outcomes.158 These bioregional MRV or sensing platforms can leverage the falling costs of sensing technologies159 and become embodied intelligence systems, as laid out in Bruno Latour’s article, Gaia 2.0. In addition to supporting community members in their ongoing sensemaking and reducing external reporting burdens, community-centered MRV tools and resources, such as those offered through Open Future Coalition’s Open Impact platform, provide pathways to generating local economic returns through training and compensation for peer-to-peer impact validation. 153 See differentiation between TEK, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge,and Indigenous wisdom in section 3 (Vaarde 2023). 154 Examples of direct compensation mechanisms for Indigenous communities for species monitoring/tracking include Biocultural Jaguar Credits issued on Regen Registry and the Biodiversity Credits issued by Savimbo. 155 An entity like the developing Nature Tech Collective could possibly support BFFs in this area. 156 Active Inference technology might be particularly relevant here since it is based on the cognitive processes of humans and other species, embedded in particular geospatial settings, and inherently trackable and traceable (Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles, Karl Friston et al.) . The essay The Gaia Attractor by Rafael Kaufmann proposes a planetary AI co-pilot network to address the metacrisis. James Lovelock proposed something similar in his last book, Novacene, while Timothy M. Lenton and Bruno Latour’s influential article Gaia 2.0 suggested that humans could add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s self-regulation (Science, 2018). 157 The Nature Tech Collective has published a Nature FinTech Sector Map that maps organizations with offerings in the following areas: monetization, modeling, and measurement and monitoring. 158 Informed by Open Future Coalition’s experience working with grassroots impact efforts globally to reduce the burden of existing reporting requirements while bridging towards community-driven quantitative and qualitative metrics. 159 For example, we have access to higher resolution, more up to date remote sensing data than ever before. The launch costs for satellites have fallen 95 percent (with another massive reduction expected in the coming years) thanks to reuse, improved engineering, and increased volumes.  “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.” – Tyson Yunkaporta 11. Invest in storytelling160 – Putting finance in service to life requires new, compelling stories of value, identity, and place. Extractive finance is built upon millenia of stories that are deeply embedded in our culture.161 Both new and ancient stories are essential when we are reassessing what we value and reorienting our culture and resources toward that. For people on the ground, the practicalities, benefits, and beauty of a thriving bioregion can be directly experienced. However, when communicating both the tangible local impact (e.g. the 4 Returns162) and the more intangible global effects of a distributed bioregional movement to non-local investors, robust storytelling is needed. BFFs can treat investment as a form of storytelling itself: breathing life into stories of action waiting to be told. BFFs can act with the understanding that the ways investments are rationalized, structured, and accounted for tell additional stories. Through capital raising, capital allocation, and broader marketing and communications, it is critical that BFFs nurture and enhance the foundation of stories around bioregional history, identity, and shared vision told and developed during the initial phases of bioregional organizing (see Section 3). Lastly, BFFs can invest in catalytic art and storytelling that enables the scaling of a grassroots movement and an economic transition that is only possible through inspiration. “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” – Toni Cade Bambara 12. Engage in partnerships, place-based citizen-stewardship, and the community of practice – BFFs are embedded in place and in local partnerships. To achieve their objectives, BFFs must be built on a strong relational foundation. They are set up by the people of a particular place to serve the vision of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. While they will have their own governance boards, management, and investment committees, the facilities should have close relationships and overlap with Bioregional Organizing Teams and Bioregional Hubs. Regular meetings between entities and ongoing, live feedback are important to ensure the success of the co-evolution process laid out in Table 4. The shared MRV platform can support cooperative sensing and sensemaking among these actors. There is potential for a range of MRV-related partnerships including with Indigenous communities, academia, companies, NGOs . Additionally, BFF leadership should understand that their work or “practice” Living in relationship to cannot be limited to the context of fundraising and making investment decisions. place – Having an intentional, Sincere engagement with, and better investment in, biocultural regeneration embodied, and perhaps spiritual connection and requires living in relationship to place as a place-based citizen-steward, responsibility to specific lands, engaging in intentional learning and unlearning opportunities, and tending ecology, and place-based community through involvement in offerings from Bioregional Hubs and local culture. In contrast, many partners. These may include land-based service projects, educational or people in modern culture may healing courses and workshops, and Indigenous and nature-based ceremony experience a “placelessness” and ritual. The Bioregional Trust could also fund some of these activities. Finally, – a disconnection from geographic roots due to factors BFF leadership are encouraged to engage in the soon-to-be-launched BioFi like globalization, technological change, and dominant culture 160 Inspired by thoughts shared by filmmaker Louis Fox and writer Tyler Wakefield. 161 Yuval Noah Harari illustrates the role of these stories well in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. that considers humans as 162 See ‘4 Returns’ Framework in Section 3. separate from nature.  (Bioregional Finance) Community of Practice stewarded by the BioFi Project. This online community, hosted on Hylo, will support BFFs in sharing tools, insights, and best practices at all levels of practice.163 The BioFi Community of Practice will also be a place where practitioners playing various roles can meet each other to form collaborative partnerships – for example, a Bioregional Organizing Team can find expertise to support their bioregion in designing and implementing a BFF. A phased approach below, have the potential to support the economic transition and regeneration of bioregions around the world. Each BFF will invest in portfolios of synergistic projects or organizations that create cascading benefits. We recommend that the with a Bioregional Trust – a facility that will be capitalized initially with philanthropic and/or public grant capital, but could also raise resources through the development of a Bioregional Tithing, an eco-credit, or a tax program (more details on the latter Bioregional Tithing – A in Table 5 below). The Bioregional Trust can also serve as a Common Asset Trust program through which – holding the rights to manage key ecosystems in the bioregion as a commons. In citizens residing or organizations operating in their 2021 paper, Robert Costanza et al. lay out how forests, watersheds, mountains, the bioregion opt to “tithe” by and other parts of the biosphere can be held in a trust that charges those who take donating a certain amount from the commons and compensate those that regenerate it.164,165 The Bioregional annually or monthly (based Trust can support better management of common assets within the bioregion and on their income or profits) “recommoning.” to the Bioregional Trust to support regeneration of the bioregion they are tasked with Following the Trust (and still in Phase 1), we suggest the setup of a Bioregional stewarding. This program Venture Studio. Fundamentally, the purpose of a Venture Studio is to take an recognizes that while all ecosystemic view of a bioregion: understanding the resources (i.e. what is humans are meant to be abundant, what can grow, what can be harvested, and what can be manufactured); stewards of the lands and the skills, capacity, and expertise (of the residents, organizations, and initiatives); waters of their place, some and the broader world conditions (what is in demand, how technology is changing, are better placed to do this work directly, while others can and how the climate is changing), in order to identify critical projects, initiatives, support them with financial and companies that are required to achieve the Bioregional Regeneration resources. Inspiration can Strategy. A Venture Studio can simultaneously or sequentially incubate cohorts of be taken from the Ohlone entrepreneurs, creating synergistic organizations that, together, push key levers for Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and systems change in a bioregion. Through identifying key opportunities for a cohort its calculator for the voluntary to drive bioregional regeneration and resilience and facilitating their co-learning Shuumi Land Tax.166 and development, the Venture Studio enables organizations to create change greater than the sum of their parts. This will involve supporting the discovery of various approaches to catalyzing the economic transition167 and aligned market development. The Venture Studio can support a range of different regenerative organizations with diverse legal structures, such as Indigenous economic entities, perpetual purpose trusts, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Natural Asset Companies (NACs), commons management organizations, co-operatives, self-sovereign ownership, and multi-species governance. While Venture Studios are often for-profit ventures, investing their own capital for equity stakes or revenue 163 More info about this to come at biofi.earth. 164 While BFFs do not yet have taxation authority, there are precedents for such authority being devolved to place-based governance entities – including utility districts and urban renewal districts. 165 Costanza et al.: Common Assets Trusts to Effectively Steward Natural Capital at Multiple Scales 166 The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust received a $20 million Shuumi Land Tax contribution in early 2024 - the single largest known cash gift to a Native land trust in history. 167 Including the building blocks of technological, legal, financial, governance, and other innovation. shares in the businesses they incubate and launch, the Bioregional Venture Studio may additionally or alternatively be funded with grants. These grants might come from the private sector in exchange for access to dealflow, or more traditional philanthropic or government sources. Once the bioregion reaches a more advanced stage of organizing, activation, and strategy, where markets for regeneration are forming and projects and businesses are ready to take investment, the Bioregional Organizing Team or Bioregional Trust governance team can help to launch a Bioregional Investment Company. This facility develops Systemic Investment Funds and Bioregional Regeneration Bonds, which help to scale up the financing of synergistic portfolios of projects (see Section 4.4) through aggregation and matchmaking. An initial Systemic Investment Fund might focus on a wide variety of businesses. Subsequent funds might be dedicated to specific components of the economic transition – like transitioning the food system or energy system in the bioregion. Asset class frameworks used by targeted investors should be taken into account in the portfolio design process. The Bioregional Bank can be set up in phase 2 or 3, and either before or after the Bioregional Investment Company. The Bioregional Bank will lend specifically to organizations providing goods and services aligned with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. It can also provide advisory services. For bioregions that are interested in developing and issuing complementary currencies,168 including nature-based currencies, the Bioregional Bank can lead this process, supporting a shift in perceptions of value in the bioregion. For example, if the Bioregional Bank issues a currency that is backed by the health of the salmon population or of a key river flowing through the bioregion, those entities become the basis of the value of the currency – attaching currency value to natural assets on which all the life in the bioregion depends (see Section 6 for more details on complementary and Nature- based Currencies). Bioregional Banks can be set up as Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) or the national equivalent, leveraging federal or other guarantees to underwrite loans to small businesses and even non-profits, which are often deemed too risky to lend to (according to traditional credit risk models, which do not accurately account for systemic risk or the 4 Returns). The activities for BFFs included in the templates below are options, illustrative of the range of activities a given facility can support. It is critical that these templates are applied and adapted by Bioregional Organizing Teams to serve the economic transition and regeneration that is emergent in a given place. Each facility is designed to be flexible and modular: some bioregions might choose to combine multiple functions into one facility. In addition, existing aligned financial vehicles like CDFIs, charitable trusts, land trusts, Perpetual Purpose Trusts, landscape and biodiversity-focused private equity funds,169 could be adapted to become BFFs or operate in partnership with them. Regardless of the functions established and precise legal structures incorporated, we encourage any treatment of ownership be infused with the essence of steward-ownership. One BFF the authors believe Steward-ownership – A is needed, but is not within the scope of this book is a Bioregional Insurance corporate ownership structure Company.170 that presents an alternative to shareholder value primacy. 168 “Complementary currencies facilitate transactions that otherwise wouldn’t occur, linking otherwise unused It ensures that companies resources to unmet needs, and encouraging diversity and interconnections that otherwise wouldn’t exist,” writes prioritize their long-term co-designer of the Euro, Bernard Lietar, in his 2011 essay Scientific Evidence of Why Complementary Currencies are purpose over short-term Necessary to Financial Stability. 169 The consortium 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People has identified a range of innovations for integrated finance profits – by legally enshrining on large landscapes and created a five-step process called Integrated Landscape Management (ILM), designed to two principles of Self- identify landscape project portfolios with synergistic co-benefits. Its open source technology platform Terraso helps Determination and Purpose- local leaders and landscape partners practice ILM. Orientation.171 170 The BioFi Project will be conducting further research on this. 171 Purpose Economy: What's steward-ownership? Table 5. Bioregional Financing Facility templates PHASE 1 1. Bioregional Trust 2. Bioregional Venture Studio A trust that acts as a catalytic grant fund A non-profit, public benefit corporation, – providing grants to a range of priority co-operative, steward-owned entity, organizations and initiatives in order to or DAO that supports the development create a strong foundation for bioregional of a cohort of synergistic regenerative action. It can also set up and manage organizations to drive systems change. bioregional eco-credit programs, Common These organizations provide dealflow for Asset Trusts, and Ecological Institutions. the Investment Company. Capital Raising Capital Raising › Philanthropic and public grant capital › Philanthropic grants (could be sub-national, national, or › Public sector grants (could be sub- multilateral), as well as individual national, national, or multilateral) donations (including through › Supply chain finance crowdfunding) › Concessional capital › Bioregional Tithing program172 Capital Allocation Capital Allocation › Invests in and incubates cohorts of › Provides grants to fund key processes early-stage organizations that work laid out in steps 2-5 of the Multi- together to change a specific system stakeholder Bioregional Regeneration and generate cascading benefits (Table 4) › Provides grants to priority projects or organizations aligned with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy › Provides grants to Bioregional Hubs and Bioregional Organizing Teams › Funds the development of a bioregional MRV platform (to be developed together with a Bioregional Hub) › Sets up the Bioregional Venture Studio, Bioregional Investment Company and Bioregional Bank Both Capital Raising and Allocation › Works with citizen groups to develop, bundle, and sell bioregional scale eco-credits (including to companies operating in the bioregion) › Sets up Common Asset Trusts – holding the rights to manage key ecosystems in the bioregion as commons › Sets up Ecological Institutions – supporting greater sovereignty and economic legibility of bodies of nature 172 Credit to Edward West of Applied Alchemy. Table 5. Bioregional Financing Facility templates *Note: Phase 2 can be split into PHASE 2* phases 2 and 3, as deemed appropriate in a given bioregion. 3. Bioregional Investment Company 4. Bioregional Bank A public benefit corporation, co-operative, A bank that provides low-interest loans, steward-owned entity, or DAO that develops microloans, lines of credit, and technical a portfolio of Systemic Investment Funds assistance to aligned organizations. It can and Bioregional Regeneration Bonds. It also provide retail banking services to leverages an integrated capital approach, individuals and can develop and issue a aggregates portfolios of high impact complementary or nature-based currency. projects or businesses. Capital Raising Capital Raising › Concessional capital › Market-rate investment capital › Public sector grants (could be sub- › Concessional capital national, national, or multilateral) › Philanthropic grants › Philanthropic grants › Public sector grants (could be sub- › Guarantees national, national, or multilateral) › Deposits › Supply chain finance Capital Allocation Capital Allocation › Provides low interest loans to aligned Systemic Investment Funds organizations › Invests in diversified portfolios of › Provides technical assistance projects & businesses designed to create systemic impact Currency Creation › Develops and issues complementary Bioregional Regeneration Bonds or nature-based currency › Same objectives as the funds, but through a fixed income security Below we describe each type of Bioregional Financing Facility including some options for the legal structure each could take. Some of these elements are demonstrated in case studies at the end of the section or in Section 5. Table 6. BFF 1 – The Bioregional Trust BIOREGIONAL TRUST Description A trust that acts as a catalytic grant fund. It provides grants to a range of synergistic projects and organizations with cascading benefits in order to create a strong foundation for bioregional action. Legal structure We recommend a non-profit charitable trust or perpetual purpose trust structure. An Indigenous nation, tribe, or consortium of nations and tribes might have an alternative legal structure they choose to use. The Trust could also be an initiative of an existing non-profit organization or start as a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), or equivalent. Building trust The Bioregional Trust is the first Bioregional Financing Facility we recommend setting up. We use “trust” to describe both a form of social capital and a financial vehicle. These two aspects of “trust” must be deeply interwoven in the design and implementation of this BFF. The financial capital that flows into this facility should be carefully allocated to support the repair and strengthening of relational trust in the bioregion. Creating a strong The Trust will be responsible for investing in the foundational foundation for elements of bioregional organizing and activation. It can fund bioregional action any of the activities in stages 2 through 5 of the multi-stakeholder bioregional regeneration, Table 4 (Mapping and Analysis, Convening and Activation, Co-initiation and Co-creation, and Co- evolution) – including possibly supporting Bioregional Organizing teams. Together with the Bioregional Hub(s), the Trust will be responsible for mapping which systems within the bioregion to focus on transitioning first and strategically allocating grants to support whole ecosystems of organizations that can drive that transition. The Trust can also serve as a fiscal sponsor to projects in the bioregion that do their own fundraising. Capacity building If there are not one or more Bioregional Hubs already in place, this is one of the initial activities we recommend the Trust to fund. As noted in Section 3, the Hubs will support projects and organizations in the bioregion to prepare for investment. Trusts can also make grants to projects and organizations directly to help them get to the stage where they are operating regenerative business models173 or to prepare them for investment. Capacity raising The Trust receives philanthropic and public grant capital, as well as individual donations. It may introduce a Bioregional Tithing program. It is important to note that the public grant capital can be sub-national, national, or multilateral, and the Trust may need to meet certain criteria to receive these grants. The Trust can play an important role in ensuring that large pools of public capital (e.g. from loss and damages, reparations, climate, and ecological restoration funds) meant to be invested in global public goods or common assets are efficiently used and that they reach on-the- ground regenerators. 173 Does not require that an organization is profitable, but that it is regenerating itself in terms of its funding/financing structure in alignment with the purpose and life cycle of the organization. This approach acknowledges regenerative organizations might have a death date at which they choose to end their operations.  Capital allocation It provides grants to fund key processes of multi-stakeholder bioregional regeneration (including what is often referred to “the spaces in between” – organizing, convening, relationship building, art, learning & integration, etc.) and to priority projects and organizations aligned with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. As mentioned above, grants can be allocated through a participatory budgeting process including voting as part of a prize model (such as the Edge Prize – see case study), through Quadratic Voting (such as in the Golden Bay bioregion – see case study), or Quadratic Funding (see Section 6 for examples). The Trust can also set up and/or seed the Bioregional Venture Studio, Bioregional Investment Company and Bioregional Bank. Eco-credits:174 both The Trust can work with key bioregional actors to develop, capital raising and bundle, and sell eco-credits (including, importantly, to companies allocation operating in the bioregion or companies that have historically contributed to extraction or destruction in that bioregion). A platform like the Regen Marketplace (see the Regen Network case study) can enable the development of a methodology aligned with the priority regeneration activities in a given bioregion. This methodology should be developed through a participatory, transparent process. Once the methodology is agreed upon and approved by the platform of choice, the Trust can support regenerators from across the bioregion to engage in designated activities. As discussed above, the integrated MRV capabilities of the Trust will enable it to track credit delivery, and bundle and issue credits accordingly. Proceeds will then flow to regenerators – perhaps with the Trust taking a small fee to cover its services. We see this as an effective approach to scaling up strategic, decentralized action quickly to drive regeneration. This tool could be used to drive long-term outcomes like watershed restoration or species recovery, but could also be used to drive rapid fire risk mitigation activities in advance of the fire season in a bioregion, for example. An important part of this process will be cultivating relationships with potential eco-credit buyers – noting that there is not yet strong demand for eco-credits beyond ICROA-certified carbon credits, which do not take into account a holistic composition of biocultural factors. The potential for eco-credits to connect corporations operating in a bioregion with regenerators stewarding that bioregion is significant. We believe that the voluntary carbon market is ripe for disruption, and that a bottom-up, bioregional, approach to credit development could be catalytic in driving financial resources to regeneration. We have already seen a regulated carbon market prioritize credits aligned with a locally developed methodology – in the case of Querétaro, Mexico175 and the role that the Sierra Gorda Reserve played in shaping the legislation. 174 Attestations about ecological state which prove regeneration is occurring, has occurred, or will occur. It is our recommendation that eco-credits are based on community-developed and governed definitions of regeneration, which are rooted in context and include a composition of ecological factors (rather a single parameter, such as carbon) (adapted from input from Regen Foundation). A reflection from Gregory Landau of Regen Network on the term eco-credit here: To Credit, or Not to Credit. 175 More details available here: UNDP Equator Initiative Case Studies: GRUPO ECOLÓGICO SIERRA GORDA.  Common Asset The Bioregional Trust can serve as a Common Asset Trust – Trusts: both holding the rights to manage key ecosystems in the bioregion as capital raising and commons. In their 2021 paper, Robert Costanza et al. lay out how allocation forests, watersheds, mountains, and other parts of the biosphere can be held in a trust that charges fees to those who take from the commons and compensates those that regenerate it.176 The Bioregional Trust is well suited to support “recommoning” – the transition of land from private ownership to commons management. It can also support more effective management of common assets by leveraging the bioregional MRV platform to track use or degradation, as well as regeneration. Eco-credits can support the compensation for the regeneration of common assets. Legal structures aligned with the rights of nature and self-sovereign nature could be applied in a Common Asset Trust structure.177 Ecological Recent innovations in rights of nature have created legal legibility Institutions: both for ecosystems and more-than-human species. Innovation in capital raising and the Web3 space has paved the way for economic legibility to be allocation layered on top of this legal layer – enabling bodies of nature to have their own blockchain addresses. A Bioregional Trust could set up an Ecological Institution with a blockchain address for a watershed or buffalo herd and could raise capital into a wallet at that address to be allocated to improve the health of that body of nature (more about this in the Regen Network Case Study). People will be elected as proxies or guardians for the body of nature to determine how capital should be allocated. Technological tools and Indigenous wisdom will both have an important role in supporting sensing of ecosystem health and resulting capital allocation decisions. This can change from a fully automated Ecological Institution that acts based on data inputs about ecosystem or species health to a “Convivial Ecological Institution” that relied more on human sensing of an ecosystem and its inhabitants.178 Examples of similar › Salmon Nation Trust – a Public Benefit LLC created to entities “discover, connect, and fund regenerative entrepreneurs and the emergence of a vibrant Nature State” in the Salmon Nation bioregion (see Case Study 1). › Sea Coast Trust – a permanent funding mechanism created to provide access to capital for Indigenous-led conservation projects that place local communities at the center of efforts to achieve a healthy environment (see Case Study 5: Spruce Root Trust). › Reimagine Appalachia – an NGO leading strategic coordination of funding, through creating a funders network, to support regeneration across the region of Appalachia. 176 While BFFs do not yet have taxation authority, there are precedents for such authority being devolved to place-based governance entities – including utility districts and urban renewal districts. 177 More about this from the Earth Law Center, the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, and Sacred Contract. 178 Regen Foundation: Ecological Institutions Protocols to Grow Autonomous and Convivial Ecological Actors Table 7. BFF 2 – The Bioregional Venture Studio BIOREGIONAL VENTURE STUDIO Description It takes an ecosystemic view of a bioregion to identify critical projects, initiatives, and businesses that are required to achieve the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. It then supports the synergistic, coordinated development of one or multiple cohorts of regenerative organizations to drive systems change. These organizations provide investment dealflow for the Bioregional Investment Company. Legal structure A non-profit, public benefit corporation, co-operative, steward- owned entity, perpetual purpose trust, or DAO. The Venture Studio could also start as a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) or equivalent. Innovation Through identifying key opportunities for a cohort to drive bioregional regeneration and resilience and facilitating their co-learning and development, the Venture Studio enables organizations to create change greater than the sum of their parts. This will involve supporting the discovery of various approaches to catalyzing the economic transition and aligned market development. It can incubate or accelerate organizations of various types of legal structures including Indigenous economic entities, perpetual purpose trusts, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Natural Asset Companies (NACs), commons management organizations, co-operatives, self-sovereign ownership, and multi-species governance organizations. It can support entrepreneurs in applying legal structures that support worker ownership, rights of nature, and expansion of the commons. The Studio can connect buyers engaging in the supply shed179 with entrepreneurs who can help address their business challenges – particularly related to the risks associated with ecological degradation and climate change. Capital raising Possibilities for funding the Venture Studio include philanthropic or public grants, grants from corporations wanting to make investments in supply shed resilience and to develop future dealflow,180 founders’ equity, studio-level equity, revenue sharing agreements, or option pools. Capacity allocation The Bioregional Venture Studio will invest in and incubate or accelerate cohorts of early-stage organizations focused on key opportunities for bioregional regeneration and resilience. It will support innovation that can drive economic transition and catalyze new markets. Each cohort will focus on shifting a particular system and will work to build an ecosystem of actors that can work synergistically to drive that change – rooted in coordinated, strategic action. 179 We use this term rather than “supply chain”, noting that materials do not flow in a linear process, but rather more like a watershed. 180 This investment could come from the sustainability, R&D, operations, or even the marketing budget within a corporation. Examples of similar › Hawai‘i Investment Ready Initiative – an accelerator program entities for social enterprises in Hawai‘i, supporting thematic, systems-based cohorts of enterprises with access to investment capital, mentorship, and resources (see case study below). › ProjectTogether – an open social innovation accelerator catalyzing thematic cohorts of innovators and connecting them to other changemakers (public & private) in Germany. › Fresh Ventures – a Dutch venture studio focused on accelerating a circular and regenerative food system in the country. It incubates cohorts of entrepreneurs to develop organizations that work together to shift this system. › The Nature-based Climate Solutions Accelerator – a US- based accelerator program that brings cohorts of municipal & community allies through a series of modules designed to grow community capacity to implement “equity-centered, nature-based climate solutions to some of the most pressing climate change challenges facing communities.” Table 8. BFF 3 – The Bioregional Investment Company BIOREGIONAL INVESTMENT COMPANY Description An organization that develops a portfolio of Systemic Investment Funds – leveraging an integrated capital approach and aggregating portfolios of synergistic, high-impact projects or businesses with cascading benefits. Legal structure It can take various forms, including a public benefit corporation (where the majority of shares might be owned by the Bioregional Trust or another affiliated non-profit, this could also function as a holding company), co-operative, steward-owned entity, revolving fund, evergreen fund, perpetual purpose trust, Indigenous economic entity, or a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). These structures can involve an “exit to community” structure where the community purchases the assets after a set time period. It is important that this company is legally mandated to serve the thriving of all life in the bioregion and is majority owned by people working towards that goal, and perhaps by the more-than- human life there as well. Beyond this, there is a lot of potential for innovation and prototyping with this BFF. As compared to the others, it possibly has the most significant potential to raise financial resources and create a shift in how those resources are owned and governed. Systemic Investment Funds Legal structure GP-LP structure or DAO with a capped return structure where the fund owns equity in projects or businesses, which it may buy, hold, resell to another investor, resell to the community, or gradually sell back to the founders through profit-sharing. A percentage of profits should flow into the Trust, future funds, and/or the Venture Studio. This model recognizes that any organization in the bioregion turning a profit is benefitting from the commons, and is designed to invest in collective assets on an ongoing basis. Long-term equity will play an important role in building new infrastructure (built, social, or IT) or a new market.  Innovation As with the overall Bioregional Investment Company, there is significant room for innovation in how these funds are structured – including from fund to fund. For innovative approaches, tools, and templates that these facilities could leverage, explore Section 6. Governance The management of the Investment Company and a representative from the Trust should serve as the GPs and should represent the interests of the bioregion. The GPs will be tasked with deploying financial resources in service to the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. Capital raising Systemic Investment Funds can raise market-rate investment capital, concessional capital, or supply chain finance. The GPs will develop the term sheet for each fund based on market analysis and financial modeling to determine the returns priority investee projects or businesses can likely generate.181 Therefore, target returns will stem directly from those projects and businesses aligned with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. The primary objective of the integrated capital structure is not to guarantee investor returns, for which blended finance transactions are often criticized, but to strategically de-risk, change risk perception, fund common goods that projects or organizations may generate, and stimulate and build markets aligned with regeneration as a result. Large investors might choose to invest in a range of different funds in neighboring bioregions, around the world, or focused on a particular sector or thematic vertical. By creating an opportunity for investors to gain exposure to portfolios of diversified, yet connected, high impact, regenerative projects, Systemic Investment Funds are filling an existing gap in the impact investing market. For further details on our current thinking regarding systemic portfolios, see Section 4.4. Capital allocation Invests in diversified portfolios of projects and businesses designed to create systemic impact. Requires consultation of a local expert group (e.g. from Bioregional Hubs) to define interdependencies and leverage points in portfolios (see the case study below on the Hawai‘i Investment Ready Initiative). These funds will apply financial and systems analytics that enable them to move beyond the widely applied modern portfolio theory, which is a theory of speculation based on backward-looking data that suggests investors have no way to address systemic risks. This is not reflective of the real social, ecological, economic, and financial risks we are facing as the polycrisis unfolds, and disregards the leverage that lies in systemic capital allocation. Examples of similar While we have not yet seen Systemic Investment Funds entities operational the way we describe them here, some existing initiatives demonstrate certain elements of it, including: › AquaSpark – an open-ended investment fund building a synergistic demonstration portfolio of companies across the aquaculture value chain to take pressure off the oceans. › TransCap and Centre for Public Impact: Urban Climate Finance – a proposal for a systemic funding architecture bringing systemic investing to the challenge of funding urban transformation. 181 This Regenerative Term Sheet developed by the Regenerative Investing Institute can serve as a starting place for BFF management teams.  › Seed Commons – a network of 30 “locally-rooted, non- extractive loan funds” across the US. Seed Commons takes in investment as a single fund, then onlends to local funds who lend to marginalized communities. › The Ujima Fund – “a democratic investment vehicle” that lends to small businesses and real estate and infrastructure projects led by members of Boston’s working-class Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. The Fund uses a participatory budgeting process in combination with traditional underwriting to “put economic development decisions in the hands of community members.” Bioregional Regeneration Bonds Legal structure A series of privately issued fixed income instruments that fund portfolios of qualifying regeneration activities in a bioregion. The bonds are issued by the Bioregional Investment Company and could be structured similarly to municipal bonds.182 Governance The Bioregional Investment Company will set the terms for the bond. These will be based on the portfolio of priority projects identified through the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy, public consultations, and market analysis. The management of the Bioregional Investment Company will oversee relationships with investee projects and investors. If there is cooperation with municipal or sub-national authorities, the management will also oversee these relationships. Capital raising The bonds can be structured similarly to municipal bonds and tap into the sizable, tax-advantaged municipal bond market, which includes institutional investors. They can raise market-rate investment capital or concessional capital. It is also possible for Central Banks to purchase these bonds to address the myriad economic and financial risks emanating from destruction of the biosphere. These bonds can leverage innovative structures, for example by linking to bioregional regeneration targets in a structure known as a “sustainability-linked bond.” If regeneration targets are met, the borrower pays a lower interest rate. This enables the sharing of the financial value of risk reduction that comes with regeneration.183 The MRV platform BFFs build will be an important enabler to setting and monitoring such targets. Capital allocation The Bioregional Investment Company will identify and allocate capital to a portfolio of synergistic projects that together drive a particular part of the economic transition or address an ecological need in the bioregion. The bond will be purchased by return seeking investors, so the underlying assets should generate a financial return. For common asset projects, such as large-scale infrastructure or ecosystem regeneration projects, it is possible for the Bioregional Investment Company to work with local authorities to collect taxes to pay for both the principal and interest on the bond. 182 A similar bond could also be issued by a municipal or sub-national authority. 183 The World Bank has developed a Feasibility-AmBitiousness (FAB) Matrix for sovereign sustainability-linked bond criteria, which can be used to guide bioregional target setting.  Examples of similar › DC Water Green Bond – an Environmental Impact Bond entities issued by the DC Water and Sewer Authority in 2016. The funds raised paid for green infrastructure to support stormwater management across the city. The payout on the bond was linked to the ecological performance of the underlying projects. If the projects outperform the target, the investors receive a premium on the base rate and if the targets are missed, the investors will receive a discount on the base rate, and in some cases could lose some of the loan principal.184 › Forest Resilience Bond – an ecological outcomes-linked bond issued by non-profit conservation finance organization Blue Forest that raises capital from private investors and then aggregates diverse beneficiaries to pay for outcomes for improved forest management in Northern California. CASE STUDY 4: Hawai‘i Investment Ready Initiative – An Intermediary for Investing in a Resilient Economy for All Hawai‘i About the Hawai’i Investment Ready Initiative In the heart of the Pacific, Hawai‘i grapples with the delicate balance between economic prosperity and ecological preservation, especially considering its vulnerability to climate change and the fragility of its ecosystems. Against this backdrop, the "Hawai‘i Investment Ready" (HIR) initiative has emerged – charting a pioneering course in bioregional financing. HIR is a collaborative effort between government agencies, environmental organizations, and private investors, that seeks to redefine the relationship between economic development and ecological well- being. HIR was established in 2013 as the first Indigenous-led social enterprise accelerator program in the United States. It has supported businesses spanning diverse sectors, including renewable energy, eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture, and marine conservation. Community engagement is integral to the ethos of HIR, and the selection process of businesses to support ensures that local voices inform decision-making, fostering a sense of shared responsibility for economic and ecological outcomes. Growing a more resilient economy In 2017, HIR started pioneering the field of impact investing in Hawai‘i, spearheading efforts to educate funders and investors on this approach to financing social enterprises. Through the impact investments that HIR catalyzed by linking impact investors with viable and promising impact ventures, it has played a pivotal role in diversifying Hawai‘i’s economy, reducing dependence on traditional industries and fostering a more resilient economic landscape. Green jobs have been created across various sectors and skills development programs were developed to equip the local workforce for emerging opportunities in the green economy. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 spurred another significant shift 184 A case study on this bond is available in the World Bank report Mobilizing Private Finance for Nature on page 49.  within HIR. Needing to address the compounding challenges posed by climate breakdown, the organization decided to advance from merely supporting incremental improvements within individual enterprises to catalyzing transformational shifts across entire systems. It became evident that the escalating complexity of these challenges demanded equally intricate solutions. The new holistic Theory of Change became: “When we accelerate the coordination and collaboration of capital to seed and scale systemic solutions, we are investing in Hawai‘i's economic transformation.” In 2022, HIR launched its first prototype in shifting systems, focused on the vertical of Hawai’i’s food systems. This endeavor commenced with a redesign of its social enterprise accelerator program to take a systems change approach. Transforming Hawai‘i’s Food Systems Together conducted an exhaustive systems mapping exercise, meticulously identifying interdependencies, feedback loops, and potential leverage points. HIR leveraged this work in the redesign of its approach. It became clear that various interventions would require a coordinated investment approach between different types of capital, however, an accompanying ‘Hawai‘i Capital Scan’ report revealed that financial resources remained siloed with limited collaboration taking place between diverse capital holders. Consequently, HIR initiated conversations with food system investors within its network and helped them solve the problems of a) managing risks, b) creating leverage, and c) placing the best bets in this complex investment environment by initiating collaboration and de-siloing the capital stack. As a side effect, this also helped to level power hierarchies between investors and investees in the face of a shared purpose. Catalyzing regenerative investments Emerging as a strategic intermediary, HIR discerns the optimal deployment of funds to effectively drive systemic change. By identifying where different types of capital could be best utilized within the capital stack, HIR significantly enhanced its value proposition for all stakeholders involved. The next step for HIR is to track the investment portfolios against a set of systemic metrics and to effectively fund the health of entire ecosystems. Co-initiated by HIR, the ‘Āina Aloha Economy Fund is Hawaiʻi’s first catalytic capital fund integrating HIR’s program expertise and research with the work of ‘Āina Aloha Economic Futures, a partnering initiative around which 2,600+ community members and organizations have coalesced to develop a vision for Hawaiʻiʻs economic future. Offering adaptable, patient, and risk-tolerant debt capital, the Fund addresses the critical capital gap between initial grants or startup funding and commercial capital. It helps to smooth over the capital stack allowing investorsʻ capital to work better together. This strategic approach provides a necessary runway for systems entrepreneurs, particularly those focused on Native-led and sustainable foodways, to implement their strategies for fostering a more equitable and regenerative island economy. In addition to financial support, the Fund is committed to enhancing the success of these enterprises by offering ongoing technical assistance and help to navigate resources and other financial providers. Beyond catalyzing funds and investment across the capital stack, HIR has recognized the important role of policy and advocacy work in order to win a supportive enabling  environment for bioregional investments. It is thus actively collaborating with other institutions to facilitate conversations between funders, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. As an intermediary at the intersection of systems change and capital allocation, HIR currently operates on catalytic grant capital from philanthropy, distinct from the investments made in for-profit ventures and not-for-profit projects within its cohorts. HIR aims to transform Hawai‘i‘s systems (such as food & agriculture, housing & real estate, etc.) and to serve as an example of how a non-profit can catalyze the transition to a regenerative economy. In its own words, HIR describes this ambition as “becoming a fractal of what could happen in a more holistic global financial system.” Table 9. BFF 4 – The Bioregional Bank BIOREGIONAL BANK Description A Bioregional Bank that provides low-interest loans, microloans, lines of credit, and technical assistance to aligned organizations (including corporations, for-purpose businesses, non-profit organizations, and co-ops). The Bioregional Bank can also provide retail banking services to individuals and can develop and issue a complementary or nature-based currency. Legal structure We recommend the Bioregional Bank is set up as a bank, public bank, Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), non- profit,185 a publicly-owned entity (owned by the bioregion), or a credit union (with partial ownership by the Bioregional Trust and investors) under the relevant national jurisdiction. Leveraging debt As a bioregion transitions to a regenerative economy, it might financing to eventually wish to have its own bank. One initial option would be enable economic to establish this Bioregional Bank as a CDFI. The long track record transformation of CDFIs and all of the hard work of their champions provide a roadmap for the path that Bioregional Banks could take. There are many examples of CDFIs supporting the development of 4 Returns, and indeed, the mission of CDFIs is aligned with many of the attributes of BFFs. CDFIs have successfully leveraged public capital or attained public guarantees to mobilize private investment,186 based on a model that empowers the CDFI to use flexible underwriting criteria to assess loan applications, enabling the use of relational information and local knowledge to guide risk assessment/management and capital allocation. Difference from A Bioregional Bank has two main differences from a conventional traditional CDFIs CDFI: (i) It takes a systemic approach to lending, aligned with achieving the vision of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy and (ii) it may issue a complementary currency. Its capitalization structure may also reflect a bioregional focus. 185 There are multiple types of CDFIs including banks, credit unions, loan funds, and venture capital funds. 186 CDFIs leverage an estimated $12 of private capital for every $1 of public investment (CDFI Coalition).  Capital raising Bioregional Banks can raise philanthropic grants, public grants,187 concessionary investment capital, and investment capital via deposits from individuals or organizations. Importantly, Bioregional Banks, like their CDFI counterparts, will seek to leverage guarantees. Some impact investors invest in portfolios of CDFIs and could do the same with Bioregional Banks. Organizations like the Native CDFI Network188 could be helpful to partners as they assist Bioregional Banks in raising capital. Capital allocation Bioregional Banks can provide low interest loans or revolving lines of credit to aligned organizations. They will also be able to offer technical assistance. Currency For bioregions that are interested in developing a complementary development currency (including nature-based, energy-based, or community currencies), the Bioregional Banks can design and issue this currency to support a more contextual, relational, and dynamic approach to valuation and value flow within the bioregion (see more about this in Section 6.2). Such a currency can incentivize biocultural regeneration. By creating its own currency, a bioregion can also create more economic sovereignty and resilience – possibly moving towards managing its own values-aligned monetary policy.189 Complementary currencies have been shown to reduce dependence on external capital over time.190 Examples of similar › CDFIs are mission-driven financial institutions dedicated to entities serving marginalized communities. As of 2022, more than 1,300 certified CDFIs across the United States held nearly $247 billion in total assets (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco). Their primary goal is to promote economic development, increase access to capital, and address financial gaps in areas where traditional financial institutions may not adequately serve. CDFIs originated in the United States, but similar entities exist in other countries under different names and structures. Microfinance institutions, development finance institutions, cooperative banks, credit unions, mutual organizations and social investment funds can serve a similar purpose. › Spruce Root (see Case Study 5) – an Indigenous-led CDFI in Alaska that supports Indigenous-owned businesses through providing low interest loans and technical assistance. › Walden Mutual Bank – a local bank that invests deposits in food systems change in New England and New York through offering strategically designed loans to support regenerative farming. 187 In addition to the US CDFI Fund, several states in the US have introduced funds dedicated to capitalizing CDFIs. Other governments have similar lending programs or can consider creating a national or multiple subnational funds to capitalize BCDFIs. 188 Organizations like this have a track record that enables them to qualify for federal funding. The Native CDFI Network was recently selected to receive a Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA) award of $400M from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. This award will enable the Native CDFI Network to support 63 community lenders across Indian Country to fund ‘renewable energy, energy-efficient upgrades, and sustainability projects that will enhance well-being and create employment opportunities for Native people.’ 189 Many communities around the world wish to move away from the use of currencies that hinge on an infinite growth paradigm. 190 More about this in research on the Grassroots Economics Foundation’s Community Inclusion Currency (CIC) implemented in Kenya.  › Beneficial State Bank – a CDFI based in Oakland, CA that focuses on uplifting low-to-moderate communities (particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area). 79% of its lending portfolio in 2022 supported sectors that “positively impact local communities and the planet.” › Triodos Bank – A Netherlands based bank that only lends to organizations “in the real economy working to bring about positive and lasting change.” The bank does not lend to “any organization that puts profit before people and planet.” CASE STUDY 5: Spruce Root – An Indigenous-led CDFI Catalyzing a Regenerative Economy By: Alana Peterson, Kalah Duncan, and India Rose Matharu-Daley Spruce Root Founded in 2012, Spruce Root is a CDFI based in Juneau, AK, that works to empower Alaskan Natives, Indigenous peoples, rural populations and communities across Southeast Alaska through equitable economic development. Spruce Root serves 23 communities from Yakutat in the north to Hydaburg in the south. Spruce Root's core programs encompass small business lending, comprehensive business education, and personalized coaching services.These initiatives are aimed at building organizational capacity, enabling locally-driven enterprises to strengthen Southeast Alaska's economy, promote inclusivity, generate quality employment opportunities, and foster community well-being. In addition to entrepreneurial support, Spruce Root provides technical assistance and facilitation services to support regenerative collaboration between public, private, and Indigenous stakeholders. Spruce Root was founded with $500,000 in seed funding from the Sealaska Corporation, one of a dozen regional Alaska Native corporations created in 1971 by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). Owned by more than 26,000 Tlingít, Haida, and Tsimshian shareholders, Sealaska’s mission is to strengthen its people, culture, and homelands by creating economic prosperity and protecting the environment. Sealaska owns and manages 362,000 acres of land on behalf of its Indigenous constituents, and dominated the timber industry in the region until 2021, when it renounced commercial logging (Resneck et al., 2023). Now, Sealaska has set aside 176,000 acres of Tongass rainforest for carbon sequestration in partnership with The Nature Conservancy (Woocheen, no date). The seed funding for Spruce Root came from sales of the resulting carbon credits. Spruce Root's business development programs Spruce Root's small business lending program targets entrepreneurs who may not have access to affordable capital through traditional financing channels. However, the program remains open to considering applicants who contribute to economic development and community well-being in the region. Before potential borrowers apply for a loan, Spruce Root provides business and career coaching, and supports them after the loan is issued. The loans can fund startup capital, working capital, business expansion, and more. Between 2012 and 2022, Spruce Root deployed  $1.2 million in loan capital and, in 2022, it issued loans to four Alaska small businesses totaling $350,000. In 2023 new loans deployed amounted to just under $900,000. Outside the small business lending program, Spruce Root offers business coaching to other stakeholders. For example, in 2022, Spruce Root provided business basics training to Tlingit and Haida citizens, and partnered with Sealaska Heritage Institute on developing a business curriculum for Alaska Native artists. Spruce Root also organizes workshops and competitions for Southeast Alaska entrepreneurs. Its Path to Prosperity business development competition supports local businesses that have positive social, economic, and ecological impact and promote the regenerative use of the region’s resources. In 2022, the competition attracted 23 applications from eight communities. The 12 finalists attended an in-person Business Boot Camp, and received 26+ hours of training and technical assistance from 14 mentors. In addition, Spruce Root supports Southeast Alaska communities through strategic planning and workforce development. In 2022, it finalized and took part in implementing a five-year strategic plan for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and began to facilitate an update of the comprehensive community plan for Yakutat in partnership with the local government. Spruce Root also provided one-on-one careers coaching for 10 people from multiple sectors, and led various workshops and training across the region for youth employment and leadership.led an internship program for young people at Sealaska, and collaborated with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska on a youth employment program. For more information see Spruce Root 2022 Annual Report. Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP) The Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP), a program of Spruce Root and Sealaska, is a regional network based on a collective impact model. The SSP aims to foster collaborative, community-driven initiatives that address complex social, ecological, and economic challenges in the region in accordance with Indigenous values. Any individual, organization, business, or government can join, and the network includes Tribal governments, Native corporations and entities, community- minded organizations, state and federal agencies, local businesses, and more. The SSP appoints community catalysts hosted by village-level entities to conduct community assessments of energy, food, and natural resource and economic sustainability. The community catalysts identify projects, which range from food security and energy independence to habitat restoration and more, and work with regional catalysts on project design, implementation, and monitoring. Regional catalysts also work to influence the policy environment and develop economic cooperatives and social support networks, and organize workshops and training. Seacoast Trust Spruce Root is the fiscal sponsor of the Seacoast Trust, a permanent funding mechanism created to provide access to capital for Indigenous-led conservation projects that place local communities at the center of efforts to achieve a healthy environment. The Seacoast Trust guiding principles include respecting community voices, upholding Indigenous governance and leadership, and valuing the integrity of all knowledge systems, including those anchored in 10,000 plus years of Indigenous history, traditions, and stewardship. The Seacoast Trust will fund the work of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. Projects slated for funding by the trust include Native forest partnerships, healthy salmon habitat, Indigenous Guardians programs, youth leadership opportunities,  food sovereignty, climate migration, regenerative economies, and reduced carbon footprints (Seacoast Trust Annual Report, 2023). The Trust provides grants for work programs, loans for small Tribal businesses, Southeast Tribal Land Purchases, and local infrastructure projects, and exchange-traded and impact fund, as well as network coordination and capacity building. Along with Spruce Root, the Seacoast Trust also funds the work of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. In 2022, the Seacoast Trust reached an initial $20M funding goal with the help of Sealaska, The Nature Conservancy, and the Rasmuson, Hewlett, Edgerton, Chorus, and Wilburforce foundations (The Nature Conservancy, 2021). The goal of the trust is to reach $100M in order to fully fund the work of Sustainable Southeast Partnership in perpetuity. 4.3 Capitalization of Bioregional Financing Facilities As shown in Table 5, we recommend a phased approach to setting up Bioregional Financing Facilities, starting with Bioregional Trusts. In Table 10., below, we lay out the types of capital that can be mobilized to capitalize BFFs, the expected returns, examples of aligned activities, and the potential investment rationale behind it. Table 10. is meant to serve as inspiration. The rationale for investing in bioregional regeneration is emergent, and will be developed through prototypes in many places and critically, through telling new stories about value and about the relationship between financial capital, the entities that hold it, and bioregions. One near-term, high-impact way BFFs can support the flow of financial resources at scale to regeneration is through being set up to receive the $20 billion in ODA countries in the Global North have pledged to provide to countries in the Global South by 2025 (under Target 19), in support of achieving the ecological and social targets set in the Global Biodiversity Framework. BFFs could also support capital allocation of Brazil’s $600 million Amazon Fund (Reuters 2024). Bioregional Trusts designed to receive and allocate this funding can be built in key biodiversity areas and Indigenous territories. Allocating funds through BFFs can reduce overhead costs, bureaucracy, time lags, and corruption and can also help to address problematic power dynamics often at play between governments and multilaterals and the grassroots efforts they are seeking to resource. Type of Aligned Examples of Investment rationale Financial returns (from aligned activities Capital Four Returns Framework) Public grant Inspiration, Regeneration Multilateral and national capital ecological, activities authorities have resources (Overseas social, and aligned with allocated to various Development economic ODA objectives regeneration activities to Assistance – particularly support the provision of – ODA or achievement common assets and public multilateral of the goals set goods. As explained in section funding) out in various 1, the authors believe that the agreements achievement of the targets made under the set in the various agreements Rio Conventions made under the Rio Convention (Convention (particularly the Global on Biological Biodiversity Framework) can Diversity (CBD), only be achieved through more UN Framework efficiently directing resources to Convention on grassroots regenerative efforts Climate Change – importantly to Indigenous (UNFCCC), and communities which protect 80% Convention of the world’s biodiversity.192 to Combat Currently a large percentage of Desertification ODA flows through multilateral (UNCCD)). It is entities, then to national possible for such entities, then possibly to sub- grants to fund a national entities before the range of multi- remainder eventually reaches stakeholder grassroots organizations and bioregional communities. In the case of regeneration financial resources reaching activities (see Table Indigenous land and water 4), large projects, stewards, there is often a nation an aggregated state government between the portfolio of smaller organization with the funding projects, the and the Indigenous nation Venture Studio, or community. This creates or the seeding of problematic power dynamics the Bioregional that prevent the resources from Investment getting to the people on the Company or ground.193,194 Bioregional Bank. Bioregional BFFs can be designed to organizing teams efficiently and transparently can work together receive and allocate ODA – with relevant reducing the overhead costs authorities to associated with bureaucracy design proposals and more effectively channeling and manage it to synergistic portfolios of projects. projects. 192 In the World Bank book, Decentralization and Biodiversity Conservation (published in 1996), the Multilateral Development bank lays out, in 10 country case studies and 32 projects analyses, how decentralization of governance (including political, fiscal, administrative, and legislative power) can positively support biodiversity conservation outcomes. 193 Rights and Resources Initiative: State of Funding for Tenure Rights and Forest Guardianship 194 This is the case with large multilateral funds focused on ecological regeneration including: the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, and the Climate Investment Funds.  Public grant Inspiration, Regeneration National and sub-national capital ecological, activities aligned authorities have resources (domestic) social, and with public allocated to various economic programs (or that regeneration activities to have a case to support the provision of develop a public common assets and public program) in a given goods. It is increasingly political jurisdiction. common to see national and It is possible for sub-national grant programs such grants to mandated to allocate financial fund a range of capital to communities, but multi-stakeholder communities195 are often bioregional not organized to apply for or regeneration receive these funds.196 activities (see Table 4), large projects, In this case, the BFFs can an aggregated play an important connective portfolio of smaller tissue role – including through projects, the providing communities access Venture Studio, to tools and processes they or to seed the need to make decisions about Bioregional how to regenerate their place197 Investment and facilitating the submission Company or of organized proposals to Bioregional public grant programs. BFFs Bank. Bioregional can receive and manage these organizing teams funds in a transparent and can work together responsive way, overcoming with sub-national challenges with getting grants or national to communities who do not authorities to have sufficient administrative design proposals capacity. and manage projects. 195 An example is the US Inflation Reduction Act (passed in 2022) that allocated $3 billion in environmental and climate justice block grants and $1.3 billion in neighborhood access and equity grant programs to promote community resilience and access to safe, affordable transportation. An additional $40B was allocated for environmental justice. 196 One program seeking to address this, that is still highly centralized, is the EPA- and DOE-supported Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center. BFFs could work together with this Center to improve its efficacy. 197 One such tool is the Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA) Living Infrastructure Field Kit (developed by Spherical Studios), which enables communities to engage in the infrastructure design process from the start to ensure their vision is at the center of restoration activities in the Los Angeles River basin in order to deliver health and vitality for the people and more than human life there.  Philanthropic Inspiration, A range of multi- Philanthropists are seeking grant capital ecological, stakeholder to support coordination social, and bioregional among grantees, and BFFs economic regeneration provide them a way to invest activities (see in catalyzing a coordinated Table 4), large group of actors – leveraging priority projects or participatory resource organizations or a allocation. The trust-based portfolio of small philanthropy movement seeks ones, the Venture to move funding decisions Studio, or to seed down to the grassroots level.198 the Investment Additionally, Community Company or Foundations in countries like Bioregional Bank. the US, Canada, and Colombia This funding have shown interest in aligning might also be with bioregional priorities.199 allocated through a participatory budgeting approach to encourage broader participation in resource allocation. Some of these examples include but are not limited to participatory, trust-based, and power-sharing philanthropy. Delivering capital through a co- aligned process with the grantees, where the grantees are the decision- makers and the trusted distributors. 198 See the work of Regenerosity or Kinship Earth on “flow funding” (pioneered by Marion Rockefeller Weber) from large donors to multiple projects on the ground through trusted regional intermediaries. 199 Deeper analysis of why philanthropists might donate to institutions with the attributes of BFFs is laid out in Lynn Murphy and Alnoor Ladha’s book Post Capitalist Philanthropy. The 6 Principles of Trust-Based Philanthropy are also relevant.  Donor-Advised Inspiration, Same as above. As of 2022, there was an Funds (DAFs)200 ecological, estimated $230B in more than social, and 1.2 million DAFs in the US.201 economic These funds have already been contributed for public interest purposes and could be quickly mobilized to support BFFs, perhaps starting with DAFs held by Community Foundations that already have a place-based mandate. All BFFs are strong candidates for DAF donations for mission aligned donors. Additionally, the financial capital in DAFs can be invested in Systemic Investment Funds before a donation is made. It should also be noted that there is no requirement that DAFs are invested in return-generating investments. Individual Inspiration, Same as above. Individuals will have various donations ecological, incentives for donating to a (crowdfunding, social, and given bioregion. Some of these Bioregional economic incentives include: residency; Tithing, access land stewardship; exposure to fees for public ecological risks in the bioregion; lands or benefitting from common lands held as assets in the bioregion; commons, etc.) benefitting from historical or ongoing activities contributing to extraction/ degradation; and having an ancestral, cultural, or spiritual connection to a place. Revenue Inspiration, Same as above. Policymakers, regulators, and generated ecological, companies may choose to through an social, and pursue this low-friction way Earth fee202 economic to aggregate capital that is relatively inconsequential to the consumer (1 cent on a $10 purchase), but over time could generate significant pooled funding. Companies participating are also able to receive recognition for the positive impact that results. 200 A donor-advised fund is a charitable account, whereby donors make irrevocable, tax-deductible contributions to a charitable sponsor. Donors give up legal control of these donated assets to the DAF sponsor, but retain advisory privileges that allow them to recommend how those funds are distributed to the nonprofits of their choosing and can also recommend how funds in the account are invested (The Foundation Review). 201 In the US, there is currently no spend-down requirement on these DAFs. A problem that could be addressed to increase the flow of funding to regeneration. (National Philanthropic Trust: 2023 DAF Report) 202 An ‘Earth fee’ is a voluntary transaction fee built into transactions (including financial transactions), such as point-of- sale POS systems, in-app purchases, or other opt-in methods for collecting a small fractional fee based on revenue (e.g. 10 basis points). See Karl Burkart’s TED Talk: If nature could draw a map of the world.  Market-rate Inspiration, Projects or Investors are increasingly investment ecological, businesses that seeking to realize returns capital social, and are expected beyond the strictly financial. economic/ to generate a There is a growing pool of financial financial return, “impact-first investors.”203 including activities Because of the catalytic nature in the following of BFFs – particularly their categories: focus on driving the transition regenerative to a regenerative economy agriculture, and serving as connective regenerative tissue – BFFs offer investors forestry, eco- inspiration, social, ecological, tourism, circular and economic returns at a economy, potentially significantly higher regenerative built rate,and with greater upside environment, water potential, than what they have purification and access to through alternatives. efficiency, eco- By investing in BFFs, investors credits. also help to build resilient business ecosystems, and thus, investment markets of the future. Concessionary Inspiration, Same as above, Same as above. investment ecological, but able to invest capital social, and in more innovative economic/ organizations or financial projects that might be perceived as higher risk (especially through conventional risk- assessment tools). Insurance Inspiration, Projects or Insurance companies are company ecological, businesses that increasingly realizing the risks balance sheets social, and are expected to to their business ecological economic/ generate a financial destruction poses.204 Investing financial return and reduce in regeneration through a risks to assets systemic, bioregional approach that the insurance can help insurance companies companies are navigate the risks they are providing policies exposed to through their for. This includes policies and underwriting. If activities in the they are able to develop risk- following categories: return models that take the regenerative value of systemic risk reduction agriculture, into account, there is potential regenerative for them to fund common forestry, eco- assets. tourism, circular economy, regenerative built environment, water purification and efficiency, eco- credits. 203 Social Finance estimated the annual dealflow of global impact-first investments to be approximately $24 billion. 204 The World Bank: Insuring Nature's Survival: The Role of Insurance in Meeting the Financial Need to Preserve Biodiversity  Central bank Inspiration, Through These bonds could be an balance sheets ecological, Bioregional avenue for Central Banks social, and Regeneration to support bioregional economic/ Bonds, central regeneration and address financial banks can invest the myriad economic and in activities that financial risks emanating from support ecosystem destruction of the biosphere, recovery and which Central Banks are mitigate broader tasked with managing economic and (NGFS, 2023 – both). These financial risks. bonds can link returns to bioregional regeneration targets in a structure known as a “sustainability-linked bond,” enabling the sharing of the financial value of risk reduction that comes with regeneration.205 Supply chain Inspiration, Projects or Business operational, finance ecological, businesses reputational, or legal risks social, and contributing to posed by the ecological crisis or economic/ supply chain social instability. Also regulatory financial resilience, directly or public pressure for reporting or indirectly. on impacts and dependencies Projects or on nature, including through businesses reporting frameworks like the regenerating lands Taskforce on Nature-related and waters that Financial Disclosures (TNFD). have historically been extracted from or degraded by the company. Revenue Inspiration, Projects Companies increasingly see the through eco- ecological, contributing to need to support locally-defined credits (more social, and land or water ecological regeneration as on this topic in economic/ stewardship that opposed to purchasing credits Case Study 6: financial fit the criteria that have been developed Regen Network for one or more through a top-down approach and Eco- locally developed that is not reflective of the credits) eco-credit tenets of effective stewardship methodologies in a given place. or a global methodology that accurately reflects ecological value in the bioregion. As the wave of return-seeking capital committing to investing in nature grows (as explained in Section 1), we believe that the owners and managers of financial capital will increasingly see the imperative to drive decentralization of financial resource governance and catalyze the transition to a regenerative economy. 205 The World Bank has developed a ‘Feasibility-AmBitiousness (FAB) Matrix’ for sovereign sustainability-linked bond criteria, which can be used to guide bioregional target setting. BFFs provide a pathway for even multinational corporations – that often seem to operate everywhere and nowhere at the same time – to come back into relationship with the very real places and people they are dependent on and are in turn impacting. BFFs enable them to move towards healing and reciprocity through how they invest. We have identified a range of return seeking funds under development that we offer. More such funds are being launched all the time. Pollination and the Green Climate Fund have recently launched a fund that aims to raise billions of dollars to fund the transition of the agricultural system to regenerative practices. The fund plans to finance smallholder farmers via local financial institutions – a role that BFFs are well suited to play.206 Additionally, there is potential for DAF investment (which does not necessarily require a return), as well as DAF donations, to flow into BFFs. We believe that it is important that capital holders build their capacity to understand bioregional, systemic approaches to regeneration so that they are better equipped to assess and engage with this new category of investment. public direct investment can also play an important role in funding bioregional regeneration. National and sub-national authorities have resources allocated to various regeneration activities to support the provision of common assets. In contrast to the public grant capital, outlined above, public direct investment often involves projects of significant scale. Examples of projects where this form of capital could be tapped include: dam removal and restoration, fire risk mitigation activities on public lands, and coastal flood risk mitigation projects on public land. Tax revenue and subsidies are important sources of funding, which can be raised by sub-national or national authorities to support regenerative activities. BFFs can work closely with these authorities to ensure alignment between economic fiscal policy and Bioregional Regeneration Strategies.207 Taxes and subsidies will play an important role in funding common assets. One possible structure for this is the Common Asset Trust model. In this model, certain assets are held in common and anyone who degrades them must pay in, where individuals or organizations regenerating them receive compensation commensurate with their contributions. Place-based taxation districts like utility districts, urban renewal districts, municipalities, and counties provide precedents for both voluntary (e.g. Shuumi Land Tax on Ohlone territory) and legislatively-authorized bioregional taxation. Generally, we want to highlight that capitalization is needed both from outside the bioregion and from within. While further dependencies on external financial capital should be avoided, it will not be possible to mobilize the needed amounts from within every bioregion – particularly in colonized contexts that have been subject to centuries of wealth extraction.208 At the same time, it is important that both financial and real economic value flows remain rooted in the community, bringing significant economic benefits through local circulation while also fostering a sense of ownership and commitment among local stakeholders (more about the Local Multiplier Effect in Section 4.5). In this way, external capital can be transitionary – helping to build endogenous capacity. 206 Carbon Pulse: Pollination plans blended regenerative agriculture fund worth billions 207 More about environmental fiscal reform in Section 3.1 of An Overview of Nature-Related Risks and Potential Policy Actions for Ministries of Finance: Bending The Curve of Nature Loss. 208 According to the UN International Panel on Climate Change: “Vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions (very high confidence), driven by patterns of intersecting socio-economic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance (high confidence).” Ultimately, mobilizing citizens and local businesses to become active investors, as well as customers, clients, and advocates, should support a healthy local economy that benefits both local and external stakeholders. Complementary currencies can also play a key role here.209 4.4 Systemic Investment Portfolios for Bioregional Regeneration sustainability and regeneration financing mechanisms. Even where individual financing solutions are agreed upon today (e.g. a local bank issuing a loan on concessionary terms to a social enterprise from the region), these merely focus on a single project or intervention at a time, systematically disregarding the interconnected nature of real life. From a systems perspective, catalyzing individual projects in such an uncoordinated manner seldom has a meaningful impact on overall transitions, and is unlikely to tip entire systems on relevant time scales. This is one of the reasons why current approaches in impact investing and venture philanthropy have not delivered the system-wide impact they promised to catalyze. Often, individual project success is stalled by systemic barriers that could be removed through policy change, market creation, or connectivity between different silos of work. recognizes the complexity inherent to systemic transformation and the fundamental interconnectedness of interventions. We recommend that they build on the emerging concept of systemic investing as an evolution of impact investing.210 Table 11. Traditional Impact Investing vs. Systemic Investing (Daggers et al. 2023) Traditional Impact Investing Systemic Investing Impact Frame Improve a metric Transform a system Source of Impact Individual companies/projects Portfolio effects Unit of Analysis / Single asset Strategic portfolio Transaction Impact Metrics Static gains/reductions Systems dynamics Funding Paradigm Single instrument Funding architecture Nature of the World Predictive, linear, atomized Uncertain, complex, systemic 209 More about this in research on the Grassroots Economics Foundation’s Community Inclusion Currency (CIC) implemented in Kenya. 210 For further information on possible investment strategies under the systemic investing paradigm, see Alban Yau: How Can Impact Investors Enable Systems Change? Exploring the Theory and Practice of an Emerging Field. investment portfolios that create cascading benefits, which enable mutually reinforcing and positive feedback loops of systemic value generation across projects. Projects bundled in a systemic portfolio (see Figure 10. below) enhance each other's regenerative impact and financial performance alike. In addition to viable business cases, investments in such synergistic and systemic portfolios will likely include investments in a series of interventions with low or no direct profitability that remove significant obstacles for other projects to become successful in both impact and financial terms. These projects receive financing because of their positive contribution to the overall success of the portfolio. For example, simultaneously financing a set of farms to transition to regenerative practices, an urban education program on healthy diets, and a sustainable transportation system by bundling them in a systemic investment portfolio, helps the projects succeed and strengthens the investment case. In this case, the education program creates demand for healthy produce from regenerative farms, and a sustainable supply chain benefits from increased transport volume from rural areas to urban centers. At the same time, investors benefit from higher expected overall profitability as projects mutually enhance their value proposition. The current investment paradigm, built on Modern Portfolio Theory, aims to minimize correlation between assets and to maximize diversification to reduce investment risk. This is based on the myth that investors cannot impact systemic risks through their capital allocation decisions.211 This assumption is becoming increasingly hard to justify in the age of the polycrisis and as assessments of how investment portfolios are contributing to specific risks increase in their robustness and specificity. In contrast, bioregional investment portfolios intentionally seek to create a harmonious interplay among diverse assets, leveraging spillover effects and fostering mutual reinforcement. By setting the investment strategy to meticulously select and align assets that complement one another, the portfolio generates synergistic effects across the bioregional economy. This mimics how resource flows are structured in living systems, and allows the combined regenerative impact to far exceed the sum of its individual components. How this works on a bioregional transition or bioregional economy level can be compared to how Venture Capital and Private Equity investments, for example, do not only invest in the production and sales teams of a given company but also recognize the indirect contribution of, for example, the accounting and human resources departments as necessary overheads that require resourcing. At the bioregional scale, such “overheads” might include activism and policy work, systems mapping, multi-stakeholder convening and facilitation work, conflict mediation, and the services provided by Bioregional Hubs more broadly (see Section 3.2). Through such an ecosystem-based investment approach at the bioregional scale, individual interventions add up to meaningful, directional, and catalyzed transitions. Even innovation gaps can be clearly identified, labeled, and signaled to the public to spur new project development and business creation. 211 In their 2023 book Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters, Lukomnik and Hawley debunk this myth. While traditionally, investors or other financial intermediaries would pick projects for their portfolios, new governance mechanisms in the BFFs could ensure that bioregional investment portfolios are built through decentralized decision-making and in alignment with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. Bioregional investment portfolios can either cover a series of place-based assets across regeneration themes, or a range of thematic assets across various geographies (see image below). This allows both investors with place-based intentions or restrictions and investors with thematically restricted investment foci to participate in bioregional regeneration finance. Investing in different types of portfolios can also help with diversification and investment risk mitigation. Figure 10: Possible composition of both place-based and thematic bioregional investment portfolios. Note: This diagram is indicative only. BIOREGIONA L (Inspired by Hannant et al. 2022.) S TRAN ITION PORTFOLIO pl ( ace a e ) -b s d Rootop Sola r n{ Wi Cooperati攀e r Fa m Renewable Energy n rgy Landtrust E e .... T ar nsition Communit y Cooperati攀 e Smart
 Garden Farm Micro-grid Food waste
 F ood Syste
m s urant Re ta Transition .... BIOREGION ô RENEWABLE Wildfr e Ri攀e r ENERGY PORTFOLIO Regen A g r n ng Program T ai i Corridors Clean-up (thematic) Tre e Nature Business Case / l n ng P a ti .... Protect x Restoration Business Case / Transitio« .... Protect y Area xyz Ge oparL Business Case / Rooftop Solar Wind Protect z Cooperati8e Farm Reneãable Energy Energy Landtrust .... Transition Smartë Micro-grid Rooftop Solar Wind Cooperati8e Farm Reneãable BIOREGION ³ Free House Community Energy Energy Landtrust .... Collecti8e Land Trust Transition Business Case / Protect x Sustainable Smartë Housing Timber Construction .... Transition Micro-grid Business Case / Transitio« .... BIOREGION 2 Protect y Area xyz Community RetrofiJ Program Business Case / Business Case / Protect x Protect z Business Case / Transitio« .... Protect y Area xyz Business Case / Protect z 4.5 Shifting theories of value and ownership As shown above, BFFs serve the realization of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. Their task is to determine how financial resources can best be deployed to support the transition to regenerative economies. This purpose, embedded in the BFF structure, enables them to support a shift in theory of value in the bioregion. Over time, BFFs can also enable a shift in value for the external actors the bioregion engages with. In The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato directs us to look at who defines value, creates value, and reaps the rewards of that value.212 BFFs can enable value – identified through participatory processes including participatory budgeting – to translate into the bioregional economy, its neighboring economies, and the global economy. Additionally, BFFs support the transition to a more local 212 Mazzucato: The Value of Everything economy – enabling a greater percentage of the value created by the people there to stay there. The “Local Multiplier Effect”213 shows that money spent in the local economy circulates more often in that place than money spent at non-local businesses (AIBA). Moving from an individual to a shared ownership model, or even self-sovereignty of living systems, can support a paradigm-level shift to catalyze the transition to regenerative economies. The concepts of property and ownership often imply notions of dominion and control, leading us to view elements of the natural world, such as animals, land, and minerals, as commodities.214 In regenerative economies, timber is not worth more than an intact forest and a whale’s life is not interchangeable with 23,500 barrels of oil.215 There is value in their respective existence separate from the value they provide to humans. BFFs can support the repair of relationships between humans and the rest of life in a way that recognizes the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world. Enabling the legibility of this value is something that other financial instruments and institutions have largely failed to do thus far. The monoculturization216 of value has been reinforced by abstract, decontextualized economic metrics including GDP that take a uniform approach to assessing value. It has also been bolstered by new markets like decentralized finance, with metrics such as “Total Value Locked” that fall into the trap of Goodhart’s law, where the measure becomes the target. This collapses dimensionality, as such measures fail to account for real value creation or ecological well being, and do not account for much needed circulation in our value flows.217 There are promising models like Bhutan’s Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH) and metrics oriented towards dynamism and circulation like Total Value Flowed that BFFs can iterate on and contextualize bioregionally. Pilots of mechanisms through which BFFs can support the legibility of varying dimensions of value – including giving mountains and rivers their own blockchain addresses and wallets – are underway (see more in the Regen Network case study). Indigenous ways of relating to the more-than-human world, particularly through a kinship lens, are beginning to spread. Additionally, shifting technological capacities can support this legibility, as laid out in Gaia 2.0. Finally, the development of complementary or Nature-based Currencies can play a critical role in shifting the local economy to align with what people in a bioregion value. 213 A term developed by economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. 214 Dark Matter Labs: Life Ennobling Economics 215 Buller: The Value of a Whale 216 An allusion to the dominant industrial agriculture practice of monoculture, in which biodiversity is destroyed in order to plant an entire field with a single species of crop that can be managed with machinery and inputs so as to maximize short-term production 217 Total Value Flowed is suggested as a potential metric for regenerative (ecological) economics in the book MycoFi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 & Beyond by Jeff Emmett & Jessica Zartler.  5. BFF Governance and Capital Allocation  5. BFF Governance and Capital Allocation The governance structure of BFFs underpins their ability to decentralize financial resource governance, organize synergistic portfolios, and catalyze the transition to a regenerative economy. In this section, we offer high-level guidance regarding several key considerations and aims for governance, and offer various approaches and tools that we hope will be helpful. However, a full exploration of governance is not within the scope of this book. At their core, financial institutions –BFFs and otherwise – are humans coming together to make decisions about how to raise and allocate resources and build systems to execute those decisions. In other words, they are ultimately about governance, and governance is challenging for all types of organizations. Adding further difficulty, BFFs represent an intentional attempt to encode an institution with worldviews, values, logic, and context that are fundamentally distinct from those of existing financial institutions. The beliefs, assumptions, and habits of governance resulting from education, socialization, and participation in modern institutions can be expected to cause friction where attempts are made to govern resource raising and allocation towards genuine regeneration, free from externalities. While humbled by the magnitude of this challenge, we also believe that the ancient and modern wisdom needed to support this purpose is alive and accessible. Through experiments in creating BFFs around the world, the collective intelligence of place can be harnessed to inform and support an entire network of BFFs – allowing common patterns of trustworthy governance structures to emerge. 5.1 Key consideration: What are the values? The governance structure (frameworks, processes, and participants) is what encodes values held by individuals or a group into an institution. BFF attribute #3 (Section 4.1) offers the highest level guidance: “Implement an inclusive, participatory governance structure that represents the bioregion.” While inclusivity, participation, and representation are values that can be understood very broadly, each Bioregional Regeneration Strategy should work to clarify specific, place-based understandings of these and other values that are to be upheld in any aspect of the work, especially BFF governance. We recommend that the “R Values” that many Indigenous communities center in their governance (Section 4.1) also play a key