Tierra Valiente is a living lab embodied through a learning center, regenerative farm, emerging residential community, and mutual-aid network dedicated to exploring viable alternatives to dominant systems. The project stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within dominant culture and the urgent need to create transition pathways that offer genuinely different possibilities in service to Life. This recognition extends beyond typical sustainability work to question the fundamental logics embedded in dominant culture that drive extraction and destruction.

Round 1 funding focused on establishing the physical and social infrastructure of this living lab. The team planted over 800 trees and implemented regenerative and syntropic farming practices that now produce approximately 60% of the food served at the learning center. These practices simultaneously regenerate topsoil through increased organic matter and biological activity, produce food that nourishes the community, and sequester carbon that would otherwise remain in the atmosphere. The integration of these outcomes represents the transformative power of regenerative thinking at work.

About half of the Round 1 funds went toward establishing a solidarity scholarship fund that creates accessibility to the center for BIPOC activists, land defenders, and water protectors. This fund was a direct response to recognizing that frontline activists and defenders of land and water are disproportionately people of color and often lack resources for rest, healing, and strategic reflection.

The scholarship enabled convening opportunities and healing and restoration spaces where frontline workers could gather to recover from their activism. This approach recognized that regeneration includes the regeneration of human beings engaged in difficult work at the frontlines of ecological and social crisis.

Round 1 established both the ecological foundation of food production and the social infrastructure of care and mutual aid necessary for the living lab to function as a space of genuine alternative possibility. The integration of farming and solidarity economics demonstrates that regeneration is not just an environmental project but a comprehensive reimagining of how we organize ourselves in relationship to land and to each other.