Samantha Power’s Post

This week my team at The BioFi Project and I launched the 1st cohort of our 'BioFi Cultivator' learning and design journey. And we could not be more excited about it. While all parts of the BioFi journey so far have been valuable, this is the part I have most been looking forward to! When we get to build financial institutions that serve high-integrity, biocultural regeneration and raise capital into them so that resources may flow to life. We are embarking on this journey with 19 incredible bioregional leadership teams (BLTs!). While we are in relationship with amazing teams around the world, as a place-based initiative, we decided to focus this first Cultivator on the Americas - where most of our team are based. We have one practice group based in North America and one in Central and South America (see comments for the list of these BLTs and read more about them on the Cultivator Notion page). Through the BioFi Cultivator, we will deliver a curriculum (with input from our amazing partner network) to support these BLTs to design, create, capitalize, and implement the world's first Bioregional Financing Facilities. We are asking: 'what are the most important people and activities we could invest in in these times?,' building portfolios of those projects, raising aligned capital, telling stories about these important investments, and building relationships foundational to it all along the way. We will be regularly harvesting learnings from the Cultivator to share with the broader BioFi Community of Practice (https://lnkd.in/g_63aCra). We will also bring some of these Cultivator teams to share what they're working on in our BioFi Field Building Calls (calendar here: https://lnkd.in/gD5DaJtc). Amidst a great sense of loss, turmoil, and angst in North America and around the world, we are also feeling a profound sense of hope about the potential for the emerging and resurgent bioregional and regenerative economics movements this year. And particularly how those movements can weave together with the powerful, tireless work of Indigenous communities. Amidst the increased dysfunction and collapse of old systems, as well as the loss of bioregional ways of life, ecosystems, structures, and perceived stability, there is space for new institutions and new ways of seeing and being to emerge. The BioFi Project team is very excited to spend 2025 bringing #BFFs4Life to life. Stay tuned for more! Grateful as always to the brilliant Tyler Wakefield, Edward West, Taya Seidler, and Karla Lopez for their support in making this possible. We are also SO excited to add the amazing Michelle Lee to The BioFi Project team that's hosting the Cultivator. You'll be seeing more of her soon! https://lnkd.in/g3S7PiVm #biofi #bioregionalism #regeneration #grassroots #powerbuilding #investinlife