This is the first of three blogs about my recent collaboration with the team of Siendo Naturaleza, a deep regeneration* project nestled in the Tiracu Valley, on the edge of the Cordillera Escalera in the Peruvian Amazon basin.
‘The economy of exchange, quid pro quo, separates us from each other and makes us adversarial, while gift-giving and receiving creates mutuality and trust.’ (The Gift Economy, 2022)’
There are many wonderful things about being a Schumie (Schumacher College alumni): the delicious food, the cosy fires and the thought-provoking lectures to name a few. But the highlight is undoubtedly the people you meet. Since I first set foot on the Dartington campus, my world has widened and filled with so many inspiring new faces, who share the same values and the same purpose. Since leaving, I’ve been very fortunate to keep weaving this web of Schumie connections and to start putting the theory of regenerative enterprise into practice.
I first heard about fellow Schumie, Eliane, and her project back in April, through a friend in my cohort who was going to do a work placement with her organisation, Siendo Naturaleza. Karen (a classmate and collaborator) and I learned that Eliane and her team were doing some very interesting work in the Amazon that included reforesting, regenerating the soil and helping to break the rural poverty cycle through learning and education.
We immediately wanted to know more, and, through a series of conversations, we discovered that Siendo Naturaleza was still very young — a ‘life project’ currently sustained by a team of Schumie ecological designers as labour of love. As students of Regenerative Economics, who understand the (often harsh) realities of getting a social enterprise off the ground, we wondered if Siendo Naturaleza might benefit from incubation? If so, we wanted to offer our help!
We had an introduction call with Eliane and a collaboration was born! It was an emotional moment for us all: the team at Siendo Naturaleza had been working tirelessly since 2020 to manifest this dream and had achieved so much — reforesting 13.5-hectare site, creating the infrastructure for a team of five to live, work and play, regenerating the soil and cultivating relations with the local community, not to mention running education programmes for local children and work placements for international students. But, now they were ready to move to the next stage — they needed to become a financially self-sustaining entity, and achieving that fast enough with the size of the team available meant they needed assistance. They were looking for someone with knowledge of regenerative enterprise and regenerative business models to help them to refine their value propositions, understand how to prioritise their growing to-do list, and create a road map and a business plan tailored to their highly unique offering.
We could help. Between us, we had all the right mix of skills: Karen had experience working with B-Corps making enterprises deliver financial as well as social and environmental returns, and as a research consultant, I was used to analysing data intelligently to pull out key insights and make strategic recommendations. So we offered to use our knowledge and skills in building regenerative business models and strategic planning to facilitate the cocreation of Siendo Naturaleza’s business plan. We expected and wanted nothing in return: being able to invest our time and love in work and people who are truly aligned with our vision of building a regenerative future was the reward.
In her essay on Gift Giving and the Goddess, A philosophy for Social Change, Vaughan (1999), explains:
‘Gift giving and receiving create bonds between giver and receiver. The receiver knows someone else is ‘out there’ because someone has satisfied her need. The giver knows the receiver is ‘out there’ because she has seen the need, fashioned or procured something to satisfy it, and knows that she has influenced the wellbeing of the other person. The bonds are formed without an expectation of reciprocity. It is not the incursion of a debt that forms the bond, rather the direct satisfaction of the others’ need.’
The (not-so-)strange thing about giving without expectation is that it so often does engender reciprocity. To kick off the collaboration process we proposed a Deep Learning phase (to be followed by Dreaming and Visioning, Business Plan Cocreation and Execution phases). As part of phase one, I invited the Siendo Naturaleza team to participate in my dissertation research: a transdisciplinary, international study on the role of inner development in scaling regenerative agriculture. They agreed, and each of them told a powerful story about their work, motivations and vision for the project, which added a rich layer to my data and confirmed many of the patterns I had been seeing relating to the role of transformational education and inner development in regenerative innovation, to barriers like time poverty and to external enabling conditions such as incubation and access to funding in the start-up phase.
Their gifts didn’t stop there: from the second we arrived at the airport, we were welcomed with so much gratitude, love and care. Eliane treated us to breakfast at a local café, where we had fruit bowls and frozen pineapple smoothies as she explained about the local area, the wider regional context and more about what to expect on the land. On arriving in the cloud forest, it became clear that this gifting paradigm is a key part of Siendo Naturaleza’s culture. One of their organisational values is service and they live it with integrity: from the time spent generously showing us around the land, right through to the moment we walked away with beautiful hand-drawn gifts and an invitation to return, we couldn’t have felt more comfortable and cared for.
Reciprocity plays a fundamental role in day-to-day interactions at Siendo Naturaleza. The nature of community living means that everyone who lives on site lends a hand to keep things tidy, to cook, to clean after meals, and even to dispose of community poop (more on that later). And their relationships with neighbouring land owners and the wider community also involves a huge amount of giving and receiving — not as a linear mode of exchange but again, without any expectation or idea of receiving anything in kind. Eliane told us that initially she found it hard to receive the generosity of those who have fewer financial resources, but now finds it easier to accept their gifts, knowing one day she’ll be able to give in other ways — for example, by offering produce from the regenerative farm that the team are designing. As an outsider, it seems to me that these gifts are her neighbours’ way of acknowledging their gratitude to Eliane and her team for the investment that Siendo Naturaleza has already made in their children, their community and the local economy!
I’ll be back next week with a follow-up uncovering the reality of life in the forest, the huge ecological transformation that Eliane and her team have presided over since their arrival, and what ‘Siendo Naturaleza’ really means.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to share it far and wide with anyone you think might be interested in Siendo Naturaleza or their work!
*In his article Sustainability is not enough: we need regenerative cultures Daniel Wahl explains: ‘A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.’ I define ‘deep regeneration’ as regenerative action that addresses the inner and outer, interior and collective dimensions of reality, and which seeks to scale deep, by changing the deeper values, cultural beliefs, meanings and practices of people, and the qualities of their relationships, to bring about change (Moore et al, 2015).
