How We Are Allocating $150,000 to Regenerate Barichara

We have just received a generous grant from the NoVo Foundation to support our work at Regenerate Barichara — where we are prototyping the regeneration of an entire territory in the Northern Andes of Colombia.

As we have outlined on our website, there is a weaving of regenerative processes at the territorial scale that has been underway for several years. now. This is depicted graphically below and explained in greater detail here.

The important thing to have in mind is that we organize around the natural organizing patterns of landscapes with watersheds and ecological corridors. In this way, we have created portfolios of projects that function at the landscape scale. You can learn more about two of these portfolios in the Regenerative Education Fund and the Restoring the Rivers Fund.

What I would like to share here is how our team at the territorial foundation we call Barichara Regenerativa is allocating the $150,000 grant to this territorial weaving process.

My hope is that this will inspire others to learn from our example — or better still, become a supporter of one of our bioregional regeneration funds linked to above.

Our Work Plan for the Grant

In this section, I would like to share how we are investing the funds in the portfolio as a whole. Note that the sections below broadly correspond with the five thematic areas that organize our work at Barichara Regenerativa, which are:

• Regenerative Education;
• Regenerative Economy;
• Regeneration of Natural Ecosystems;
• Cultural Regeneration; and
• Territorial Healing

We will allocate this $150,000 grant to the following focus areas:

Laying Groundwork for a Bioregional Learning Center

This work will focus on creating a geospatial reference system of data, maps, and information about our bioregion to inform the coordination of learning processes at the landscape scale. We will hire a cartographer and work with geographic information systems to create reference data about major watersheds and ecological corridors throughout the territory. We will also map social actors, regenerative projects, and other potentials in the field of action and collaboration for the regeneration of these landscape systems.

And we will input all of this information into a prototype monitoring system for tracking regenerative change of forest cover and watershed health.

Budget: 84.470.000 pesos (~$22,000 US)

Restoration of the Tropical Dry Forest

Investments will be made in three important regenerative projects: the community forest of Bioparque Móncora, the nature reserve Origen del Agua, and the demonstration sites of our school for syntropic agroforestry.

This part of the work focuses on preservation and restoration of the unique High Andes Tropical Dry Forest that is filled with rare and endangered species. We will support student engagement in the community forest of Bioparque Móncora, reforestation and watershed restoration at Origen del Agua, and learning exchanges at two demonstration sites of syntropic agroforestry.

Budget: 138.360.000 pesos (~$36,000 US)

Regenerative Economics

We will support the expansion of capacities for our community’s learning hub for resource transformation — a project called Casa Comun. Emphasis will be given to local economic exchanges among producers who live in the community, design and prototyping of different revenue streams that support community projects, and a process to transform locally-grown coffee into a demonstration of value flows in a community economic model.

Budget: 65.600.000 pesos (~$17,000 US)

Cultural Regeneration

Invest in the community theater of Caney Colibri to support a series of workshops and theatrical productions that teach indigenous lifeways to children and help them connect more deeply to the unique ecology of our landscape.

This will focus on two distinct age groups — small children and teenagers — with different educational materials and creative experiences.

Budget: 24.000.000 (~$6,000 US)

Regenerative Education

A major area of investment with this grant will go to the cultivation of a learning ecosystem for children, organized around the local Waldorf school Sueños del Bosque. The funding will cover teachers, learning assistants, subsidized tuition for families, and workshops in the community.

Budget: 91.425.000 pesos (~$24,000 US)

Core Capacities of Our Territorial Foundation

We have recently constituted our territorial foundation, Barichara Regenerativa, and have several key areas of development that need to be undertaken to strengthen our capacities to mobilize resources in service to the regeneration of our territory.

Specifically, we will support key staff personnel in administration, legal supports, project management, communications, and community coordination. Some of these funds will go to our fiscal sponsor Territoria while others will be developed in-house so that we can establish a track record of financial management for our foundation.

Budget: 166.870.000 pesos (~$43,500 US)

The Take-Away Message from This Work

This way of allocating funding reveals that it is possible to organize a portfolio of projects within a landscape system, build trust with the leaders of these projects, bring synergies among them through a joint-investment approach for the portfolio as a whole, and create the pattern of bioregional regeneration as part of the process overall.

This is exactly what is described in the 3-Part Video Series for Creating Bioregional Funding Ecosystems that showcases our work in Barichara in the third video. It also embodies exactly what we are doing as a learning community in the Design School for Regenerating Earth — where many groups have formed around the regeneration of their own bioregions.

Please let us know if you would like to learn more about what has been emerging in Barichara since 2020. You can also watch this playlist of Barichara Update recordings that publicly track our progress.

Onward, fellow humans.

Joe Brewer is co-founder of the Design School for Regnerating Earth as well as a co-founder of Barichara Regenerativa. You can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram and support his work directly on Patreon.