Project Story

Threads of Resilience / Reti di Resilienza is a place-based initiative designed to empower local communities within the vital ecological corridor of the North Oglio River park, situated inside the wider Po River macro-bioregion.

Utilizing a systemic framework, the project facilitates a participatory co-design process to identify regenerative land stewardship practices. We address a critical, driving question: How can we collectively manage our local resources under escalating climate change scenarios while cultivating the conditions for life to thrive?

Funding raised in this campaign will directly support this ongoing regeneration and climate resilience initiative, operating across the interconnected ecological, social, and economic layers that shape the territory’s unique identity. Driven by local voices, the project unites municipal governance, local organizations, businesses, and academic institutions to transform localized data into collective, climate-proactive action.

1 Our Mission

We believe in the power of reconnecting people with the places they inhabit and with the communities that sustain them. Healthy landscapes and resilient communities grow together.

This project has grounded our experience in bioregional thinking and place-based systems within Soncino, one of the most prominent historical and natural hubs of the agricultural landscape in the North Oglio River park. Our aim is to support a transition from reactive climate response toward more resilient, locally rooted systems that strengthen biodiversity, livelihoods, and stewardship of land and resources.

This initiative is also very personal, as one of our core team members holds generational roots in the territory. This connection gives us an intimate understanding of the landscape and a trusted network within the community, ensuring our lifelong commitment to Soncino's ecological and economic health.

2 Background & Problem Statement

Soncino is a historic agricultural municipality, it is based in an area where its landscape thrived under ancient agricultural practices rooted in the historical Bonifica benedettina (land reclamation). This centuries-old management sustained irrigation, biodiversity, and local livelihoods, creating resilient landscapes that provided food, fibers, and natural resources for generations.

Over time, this balance has been progressively disrupted by the severe intensification of agriculture. Local regenerative value chains, including hemp, flax, and silk production, have largely disappeared, replaced by synthetic materials and globalized systems that have weakened local crafts, cultural knowledge and dramatically impoverished local biodiversity.

Today, escalating climate disruptions, extreme weather events, and seasonal water stress threaten not only the long-term viability of the territory’s agricultural economy, but also the resilience of the communities and organizations that depend on it. At the same time, many local actors continue to manage water, soil, and material resources independently, without a shared understanding of the territory’s interconnected systems or common spaces for collaboration. Strengthening climate resilience therefore requires new ways of collectively understanding and regenerating the landscapes they share.

3 Pathway Forward

Our project responds to a central climate adaptation challenge: How can communities make informed, collective decisions about land stewardship in the face of increasing ecological and climate uncertainty? In the bioregion where Soncino is located, we are bringing together bioregional mapping, participatory systems design, and material innovation practices to support a more resilient future for land, livelihoods, and ecosystems. By combining ecological analysis with collaborative processes, the project helps local actors develop a shared understanding of water, soil, biodiversity, and local material flows across the territory.

Working alongside research and local partners, we aim to identify opportunities for reconnecting the use of local resources to regional ecological and economic resilience. This initial phase will culminate in a feasibility study to assess which bioregional material flows hold the greatest potential to catalyze systemic regeneration and climate resilience across the territory.

Launched in 2023, the project is the evolution of applied research conducted by our team, which established a deeply rooted, place-based stakeholder engagement process alongside local farms, local businesses, and the active participation of the Municipality of Soncino. While this funding will directly enable us to consolidate our work on the territory, it will also serve as a vital foundation for our long-term continuation. To track this trajectory, we will implement continuous monitoring of the initiative's ecological and socio-economic impact. Beyond this foundational phase, we will ensure that our outcomes foster authentic and long-term climate resilience and deliver lasting empowerment to the Soncino community, hopefully turning this initiative into a permanent model for bioregional regeneration.

4 Opportunity

The immediate opportunity lies in turning data into a living tool for collective action. Through participatory, community-wide gatherings, we will come together to deeply understand our bioregional needs and co-design a new, shared model for local resource management. Instead of working in isolation, our community will collaborate to visually map out these local resource flows. This shared mapping process will spark collaborative learning, environmental education, and a profound sense of collective stewardship across the territory. By reconnecting ecological health with localized material systems, Soncino can pioneer how community-led, regenerative flows can practically safeguard our rural economy against climate disruptions.

5 How We Are Regenerating

In the context of Soncino, we approach bioregional resilience through three interconnected pillars:

Pillar 1: Bioregional Mapping & Predictive Technology:

We are laying the foundation for a living digital map of the territory to help visualize relationships between water, biomass, waste, and ecological health across the bioregion where Soncino is located. This initial phase will deliver a mapping architecture and define some key data layers, providing a baseline that we will continue to build upon and evolve long after this funding cycle.

We have already started a place-based data collection process to establish a comprehensive ecological and material baseline. The prosecution of this activity involves deploying a localized Dynamic Material Flow Analysis to track local material flows (e.g. water, biomass, and agricultural residuals) over time. These streams shall be normalized through regional proxies and integrated into a modeling tool, enabling the community to simulate future climate stress scenarios and pre-assess land-use trade-offs ex-ante. The project creates a shared understanding of how ecological and material systems interact, helping communities make more informed and proactive land stewardship decisions.

Pillar 2: Community Empowerment through Co-Design

Thanks to our established presence in the Po River bioregion, we will continue facilitating the collaborative process that wishes to consolidate the interaction of municipalities, farmers, local organizations and businesses, and land stewards through systemic workshops, serious games, and participatory dialogue. The goal is to strengthen collaboration, reconnect fragmented perspectives, and support shared decision-making around the territory’s future.

Pillar 3: Bioregional Materials & Resource management

In collaboration with the MaDe/Trans Research Group at Politecnico di Milano, we are exploring opportunities for locally rooted bio-based materials using agricultural residues and natural fibers. This first phase aims to identify promising material pathways and develop early prototypes that can support a more regenerative place-based resource management model, linked to bioregional needs and capacities.

6. Tracking Impact

This funding will allow us to translate our systemic research and digital modeling into visible, accessible, and practical community actions.

The funding will directly support:

1 Living Digital Map Platform: Setting up the initial baseline data architecture for a future stakeholder platform. This phase focuses on gathering and structuring existing regional data layers, such as water networks and local agricultural assets, and organizing them into an accessible conceptual framework. This lays the essential groundwork and data mapping required before moving into active software development.
3 Future Climate Narratives: Using existing modeling frameworks to present clear, simplified visual forecasts of landscape changes over a 10-year horizon to show stakeholders what is at stake.
6 Local Stakeholder Conversations: Focused roundtables to bridge operational silos, actively connecting local farmers, municipal representatives, and local businesses to identify shared bioregional needs.
2 Community Co-Design Workshops: Utilizing hands-on serious games and systemic design tools to translate regional data into shared, practical community knowledge. These participatory processes will also be used to map and pinpoint existing or potential local bioregional material flows.
1 Bioregional Material Feasibility Study Conducted with Politecnico di Milano, this phase focuses on selecting at least one specific bioregional material flow from our community mapping for a feasibility study. We will analyze this single stream to evaluate its potential use and climate-beneficial properties.
Photo and Video Documentation: Capturing the workshops and conversations to create a short, bilingual story report and create communication material (English/Italian).

To ensure that regeneration is both meaningful and measurable, the project will monitor impact through complementary ecological and social health indicators, combining quantitative evidence with lived community experience over time.

Social Regeneration

In the long term, we will assess how local stewardship capacities evolve across the territory. Indicators may include the number of local stakeholders engaged and the emergence of new collaborations around land, materials, and shared stewardship. A baseline assessment will be established at project launch, followed by milestone evaluations in the medium term (2–5 years) and longer term (10 years), helping communities understand how participation and regenerative practices evolve over time.

Ecological Regeneration

Similarly, ecological indicators and spatial ecosystem analysis will track improvements in ecosystem health and climate resilience across the territory. These may include water systems, soil health (such as soil organic matter, biological activity, and soil structure), biodiversity, and carbon sequestration (potentially linked to land-use transitions and nature-based solutions).

Alongside measurable indicators, the project will also gather qualitative “warm data”, recognizing that regeneration is measured not only through numbers, but through lived experience.

7 Our Experience

While Threads of Resilience marks our first dedicated collaboration in Soncino, our team brings extensive experience in territorial systems thinking, ecological mapping, and bioregional design across Northern Italy and the wider Po River basin.

We have previously developed systemic evaluations of riverine, agricultural, and material flows across the Po basin, helping build methodologies for understanding ecological interdependencies and opportunities for regional resilience. This experience is complemented by place-based work in landscapes such as Vercelli, Mantua, and the Venice Lagoon, where our team has explored circular resource systems, socio-ecological relationships, and territorial transitions.

The project is further strengthened through partnerships with local institutions, researchers, and organizations, including the Municipality of Soncino, local actors, the Politecnico di Milano and the Monviso Institute. Together, these collaborations provide the place-based knowledge, scientific grounding, and practical relationships needed to support a meaningful and lasting process of territorial regeneration.