Catalyzing Bioregional Economies
Samantha Power is co-founder and director of the BioFi Project.
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Catalyzing Bioregional Economies with Samantha Power
Bioregionalism is a philosophy of organizing societies around "life places" defined by geology, ecology, and culture rather than political borders. In this Learning Lab session, Samantha Power, Director of the BioFi Project, traces the movement from its roots in 1960s North America and indigenous land stewardship through its resurgence today, with the first Turtle Island Bioregional Congress since 2009 on the horizon.
Samantha shares how working at the World Bank and US Treasury showed her that money wanting to support regeneration was pooling at the top while the most critical place-based projects remained underfunded. The gap, she realized, wasn't financial. It was relational, cultural, and structural. This led to her vision for Bioregional Financing Facilities, or BFFs: place-based institutions governed by the people of a bioregion, designed to connect global capital with local land stewards and culture bearers doing the work of regeneration on the ground.
She walks through what bioregional economies look like in practice at every scale, from growing food and repairing clothes at the household level to cooperative ownership, mutual credit systems, and community land trusts at the bioregional level. She also shares early lessons from working with 22 teams across the Americas, including a collaboration with 30 indigenous nations working to permanently protect the headwaters of the Amazon. The Q&A unpacks questions about moving capital downstream and the relational work that requires.
The BioFi Project's book is available for free in English and Spanish at their website.
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Catalyzing Bioregional Economies
Samantha Power
Geopolitical boundaries lay the foundation for our global economy, in many ways enabling the extraction of value from people and landscapes in favor of short-term economic returns. Could a new approach to place — a bioregional lens, where human societies organize around their physical landscapes — guide and inform how we finance and shape value flows?
As many across the world envision life-affirming economies, bioregionalism — a term coined in the 1970s — is making a comeback. Thousands of bioregional groups around the world are working to restore landscapes, watersheds, and steward biodiversity. But how can these efforts plug into financial flows that could meaningfully support their initiatives?
Next up in Ma Earth’s Learning Lab, we’re joined by regenerative economist Samantha Power, co-author of Bioregional Financing Facilities and Director of the BioFi Project. We’ll hear how Samantha and her collaborators are facilitating the creation of financial institutions in the Amazon rainforest, Cascadia, and beyond — redirecting capital toward regeneration and local economies.
In this Lab we’ll explore…
💧 The origins and future of the bioregionalism movement
💧 Challenges regenerative land projects face in accessing funding, and pathways forward
💧 How communities, funders, and institutions can coordinate to create systemic change
Join us for an interactive webinar on how bioregional financing and place-based collaboration could help catalyze regenerative economies around the world.
Can’t make it live? Register and we’ll send you a recording of the session.
