5 Major Lessons from The Regenerative Neighborhood Movement
Shared by Regen Tribe’s team of community co.creators
We love failure for all the richness of its lessons, and that is why we’ve dedicated so much time to studying the process of others in this journey, and want to offer you our findings.
After years of studying, witnessing, and experiencing firsthand the common trip-ups that people have when building sustainable and intentional communities, we want to sum it up for you.
- What Comes First?
The regenerative neighborhood movement has taught us many valuable lessons about community building, and more notably, humans. One of the most important lessons to be absorbed is that people, not infrastructure, are the heart of any community.
We’ve seen beautifully constructed regenerative communities built by a single visionholder, but unfortunately they remain empty because they were built for phase 20 instead of phase 2.
We’ve seen visionholders build all the infrastructure they can dream of, and even when no residents have bought a lot or a home, they keep investing their own money into amenities like a giant lagoon or an additional event palapa in the hope that this will wow people into wanting to live there.
Here’s a golden secret. No matter what your budget — luxe or low-key — put down short term housing first.
If you get people living onsite as soon as possible, then you have succeeded in the phase of community that we call “the pioneer community”
The pioneer community is your group of early adopters. Basically, they are the first people on the dance floor, when everyone else is too shy to make that leap.
These are the people that will move in and dedicate themselves to making the community happen. They bring life, culture, and the necessary vibes to make other people want to start ‘dancing’.
The physical infrastructure that regenerative communities should prioritize to make this pioneer community viable are:
- [Compost] bathrooms
- A community kitchen
- A water/waste system
- Basic energy source
These systems embody a sustainable quality of life and bring people together in a shared space.
Our advice is not to wait until the community has all its beautiful organic superadobe houses to live there, emphasizing here that fully custom means full price, and unnecessary price tags can cause your community development to lose traction and stall.
Build one big beautiful community house with a kitchen and coworking space, maybe put 5 smaller private units around it, and you have a community space.
It’s important to remember that given the nature of climate emergency, living in a resilient, self-sufficient village is “better now than 10 years from now”.
2. Reevaluating the Concept of “Mine” in Community Development
There is another common obstacle that we as village builders have to decondition ourselves from, but may find challenging to do so — our beliefs about ownership.
When building a regenerative community, the process naturally challenges us to examine how we act on our ideas of ownership.
In our process of meeting as many village builders as we can in this space, we have seen many (too many) people who decided they wanted to start a community and their first step is buying land.
That is admirable, and arguably an excellent way of using the privilege they have of having enough capital to buy land in that you can then freely invite people to take part in the co.creation.
However, a common scenario we have seen is that all of these people now independently own large tracts of land and can no longer collaborate because they’re already committed to their “own land”. They could have made excellent partners, but they, perhaps subconsciously, wanted to create a community where they possess default control.
It requires trust and courage to surrender control and invite people into collaboration. But it provides much more opportunity to develop your community more holistically. You will be able to source from community abundance of resources and skills to build your villager better and faster.
In spaces where people are innovating in regeneration, ownership is constantly being challenged by its more honest and noble version, stewardship.
If you want to create a community land project, be a steward. Land should not be owned, so collaborating with aligned others on the investment will make it that much more likely to be successful as a community, not a kingdom.
Which brings us to the next point.
3. Find the humans first
You simply can’t build community alone. It’s antithetical.
We suggest your focus be on finding the humans first and building from there.
Get 20 of you on a boat and go for a long trip. The 5 that last until the end, those are your people. Go make community with them.
— Giovanni Razzini
Prioritizing finding people with the same ideals and vision will make it easier to collaborate and build a thriving community. The ease can manifest itself in pooled capital, multidisciplinary skills, and even emotional support to keep yourself inspired and reassured on your village building journey.
Collaboration cannot be ignored when creating an authentic regenerative community. Use a digital space like Tribes, a social networking and resource platform for people building regenerative communities, to connect with all the right people and spark interest in your vision for community.
True regenerative neighborhood building has to be ontologically designed for, and often by, the people who will be using the spaces. Include the people who will live there in the design process and you will have a perfect glove fit of a community.
Planning and creating through the community lens helps us decondition from exhausting hyperindividualism. The process of community building is a path that is meant to be shared.
4. Get everything (yes, everything) in writing
Clear agreements and defined roles are necessary for success. Village builders have again and again expressed remorse for failing to make clear, written agreements with their collaborators. You need to plan for the best, and plan for the worst.
Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) can fail— clear responsibilities and expectations should be outlined.
- Are you a couple starting a project? Have mature conversations about what will happen to you/the community in the event you split up.
- Are you business partners? Make sure you’re doing deep dives to discover true alignment before taking any leaps of commitment.
- Are you friends? Roles and responsibilities are a common conflict. Make sure you know who is responsible for what, so that you can mitigate resentment in people who feel like they take on more than others.
One of Regen Tribe’s cofounders lost 60k in investment in a project because the project partner turned sketchy and didn’t honor their verbal agreements. This project had multiple investors and it was the same story for them, too.
Clear, written agreements that also outline worst case scenarios are priceless, because without them, you’re likely to pay a painful price in the form of financial loss, emotional upset, and so on.
We have a drive folder of community creation resources that also contains bylaws and examples of community agreements.
5. Improve your process by leveraging digital tools
We notice that village buiders tend to fall into two camps — one that espouses technology and one that seeks to escape it. The choice typically stems from beliefs about whether or not technology can harmonize with (our) nature.
The cult of progress is not the final authority. You don’t have to adopt technology just for the sake of it. Many village builders seek to get “back to nature”, and think that technology goes counter to this movement.
We disagree. We see that modern tech is empowering this movement and offers us many tools we can use to our village building benefit.
Modern tools we recommend:
- Tribes for connecting with the people, resources, events, and communities connected to the regenerative neighborhood movement. Here you can find guides on community building.
- Miro for mapping your design thoughtwork and collaborating on ideas. For inspiration, look to re:build’s incredible Miro master plan of their land project la tierra
- Asana for creating project timelines and collaborating remotely on a village project
- ChatGPT & Generative Image AI’s fro accelerating your creative process and concept art
- 3D Village Mapping — see examples from Agartha’s VillageOS or Heartland Collective’s VR ecovillage.
- Topia for creating online worlds
- NFTs and tokenization for raising capital for your projects.
Here we are, looking out at a horizon that many of us see painted with hope. The regenerative neighborhood movement is an invitation to explore a new way of living and to reimagine what is possible.
Take this as a chance to create something meaningful, powerful, and lasting, and to do it in a way that honors both people and the planet. There are those who came before us who were bitten by mistakes and things they didn’t know they had to think about, as well as people who have successfully been running ecovillages for 30+ years.
When we stand on the shoulders of giants, the view is incredible, and it will show us where to go.
Visit www.regentribe.org for more info on the regenerative neighborhood movement and our various projects.
