Regional Resilience Fellowship Year 1 Reflections

We are excited to share reflections from our inaugural year of the Regional Resilience Fellowship—an initiative that brought together 21 nonprofits, networks, and community-led organizations committed to advancing place-based resilience.

Over the course of 2024, Fellows worked alongside our team to harness the Open Impact platform for coordinating action, delivering programs, documenting outcomes, building project portfolios, publishing resource libraries, mapping sectors and landscapes, and strengthening the visibility and resourcing of their community-driven work.

Beyond technology, the Fellowship created space for connection. Through 11 peer learning sessions, topical convenings, and ongoing dialogue, Fellows built relationships that transformed what can often be an isolating journey into one rooted in creativity, collaboration, and mutual support. Many shared that this combination of shared tools and human-centered engagement expanded their capacity to navigate complexity and adapt with resilience.

Together, we strengthened a global ecosystem of locally sourced solutions, co-developing common infrastructure for collective action while directly supporting 21 organizations across 35 project sites in 16 countries. Collectively, the program reached 25,000+ people through efforts spanning regenerative agriculture, water access, food sovereignty, reforestation, community media, wellness, and cooperative finance, while providing technical assistance to over 4,000 small farmers and building a foundation for replication in regions worldwide.

By the Numbers

Ecological
Restoration

Food
Systems

Community
Wellness

Built
Environment

Strengthening Community Impact

Fellows used the Open Impact platform to facilitate program delivery, coordinate projects, build portfolios, map resources, and document and measure impacts— strengthening capabilities to advance community-driven efforts.

Together, we:

  • Enabled community-led storytelling, data collection, and publishing to make outcomes visible and attract new resources

  • Strengthened local capacities for strategic planning, collaboration, and adaptive implementation

  • Contributed to a living repository of regionally grounded solutions, to support ongoing replication and shared learning

Co-Design in Action

Fellows not only benefit from shared tools—they help design them. We collaborated closely with Fellows to inform and launch platform features that support real-world, community-driven needs. Based on our learnings from this process, we:

  • Ensured our tools for impact measurement and data collection expanded to support qualitative storytelling, multimedia content, and historic data

  • Refined our strategies around group and project management, publishing, and curricular delivery to support delegated permissions and peer review

  • Developed pathways for ongoing, iterative feedback, to ensure we continue to build solutions grounded in lived experience, not theory

Growing Common Infrastructure

Together, we took critical steps toward launching our community-sourced Living Library. Thanks to Fellows’ input, we launched four key features to support our ability to share and iterate community-sourced solutions globally:

  • Dashboard Builder: Custom drag-and-drop interface to visualize progress and share real-time outcomes with funders, community members, and stakeholders.

  • Resource Publishing Tool: Facilitates the upload, curation, and sharing of best practices, curricula, and templates, both with private groups and the public.

  • Form Builder: Simplifies data collection,peer feedback, and program delivery through configurable forms and workflows, ranging from surveys, reporting, and participatory validation to curricula and process management.

  • Permissions Modules: Flexible security settings to support both role delegation and content visibility, all in service to community sovereignty.

Stories of Impact

We partnered with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the largest Historically Black College in the U.S., to expand access to resources and technical assistance for over 4,400 small farmers. Convening community partners, extension agents, and other resource and technical assistance providers, we supported a comprehensive regional resource mapping process using Open Impact, resulting in the publishing of # resources, along with the onboarding of # practitioners and # local projects to support ongoing collaboration, programmatic delivery, acceleration of local food and infrastructure projects, and resource allocation.  

We supported Regenerosity- a philanthropic accelerator focused on just and equitable flows of capital- to begin facilitating their onboarding processes, build project portfolios, and integrate reporting forms into dashboards as they share stories of impact from their Brazil Blossom program. This will support and streamline their program delivery as they work collaboratively with local partners in Brazil, and other regions, to strengthen regenerative practices at the intersection of Indigenous leadership, food sovereignty, livelihoods, and biodiversity.

Through the Fellowship, we supported Reconnecting Northland in New Zealand to pilot their Te Kete Hononga program offering training, resources, and tools to Kairaranga- local community leaders - who serve as mentors and coordinators for community led projects focused on ecological restoration, biocultural stewardship, community enterprise development. Together, we explored how our platform could support their project management, reporting, and impact storytelling for their community-based programs—and we’re excited to continue partnering to grow the capabilities of their regional initiatives.

Supported the curation of a regional project portfolio of indigenous led efforts to permanently protect 86 million acres of bio-culturally diverse tropical rainforests in the Amazon. Through the Fellowship, we worked with the ASHA team to begin supporting the creation of impact dashboards to showcase the project’s efforts, as well as facilitating donations made to projects in order to further resource Biocultural preservation. 

Through the Fellowship program, we supported Roots of Nature to facilitate the curricular delivery and resource sharing for their Regenerative Agriculture Training Program- Roots to Regeneration- working with farmers and practitioners based in Scotland to transition from conventional to regenerative practices. Roots of Nature utilized our resource library publishing tools, as well as discussion threads, newsfeeds, and calendaring tools to engage program participants.

Insights & Learnings

The Fellowship reaffirmed what we’ve long known: solutions to many of our most pressing global challenges are already alive in communities, stewarded and supported by local leaders, organizers, and networks. Our role is to support, connect, and amplify this essential work. The work is complex, the path nonlinear—but together we’ve laid groundwork for what’s next. We are proud of the progress made, humbled by the lessons learned, and inspired by what’s to come.

Our Reflections:

  • People-Powered Design Benefits Us All: Incorporating Fellows’ real-time feedback into an iterative design process significantly improved platform usability for all. co-developing tools grounded in lived experience

  • Community & Collaboration Matter: Fellows deeply valued peer learning and topical convenings, which fostered a sense of global allyship, shared purpose, and collective intelligence—proving that relationships fuel resilience alongside tools.

  • Solutions are Found in Grassroots Wisdom: Frontline community leaders consistently demonstrated creative, context-sensitive solutions that inspired our team and reinforced the value of platforming and resourcing the work of grassroots leaders and communities.

  • Supporting the Gap: While the platform increased operational efficiency, many projects still require additional pre-development support and team capacity: highlighting the ongoing need to resource grassroots efforts as well as access to a shared service provider network.

  • Value in Trustworthy & Purposeful Tech: In a crowded tech landscape, our partners shared that they gravitate toward our solutions because of our commitment to an ethics-driven, member-centered approach: protecting sovereignty, privacy, and agency while supporting their self-determination.

  • Polycrisis Requires Agility:  In such unprecedented times, responsiveness is necessary to support emerging needs of communities - such as adding to our Fellowship the Center for working Lands at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina mid-cycle as they worked to rebound and support their community affected by disastrous floods.

Meet the Fellows

With efforts spanning 16 countries, these fellows are recognized as playing a crucial role in fostering collaboration, solutions innovation, and knowledge exchange within their respective regions or sectors. With efforts ranging from the application of Traditional Ecological Knowledge to mitigate fire risk to strengthening the financial resilience of small farmers, these organizations are modeling practices we are thrilled to learn alongside and share with our wider network.

  • Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance

    The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is a cooperative partnership with 30 Indigenous nations in Ecuador and Peru with a shared vision to permanently protect 86 million acres of bio-culturally diverse tropical rainforests in the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River, in the Napo, Pastaza, and Marañon River Basins. The Indigenous Led Alliance and its partners are seeking to protect our rainforest territories, united by the common understanding that we all belong to an interconnected web of rivers and forests, and that we are all kin. When we unite, we can better protect our lands and our rights.

  • El Puente

    El Puente facilitates access and benefit-sharing with Indigenous, Originary Peoples & Nations by making grants and investments into projects owned by, operated by, and supporting native communities & ecosystems, promoting biocultural preservation of ethnobotanical legacies, ecological restoration of endangered areas, environmental education & resilience programs.

  • Finca TierraS

    FincaTierraS is bioregional hub in the Diamante Valley, Costa Rica in service to water and food security through supporting the local agrarian community. We model, train, measure, and develop transitional pathways to a regenerative future. Focusing on watersheds first, we serve our local bioregion and community to mitigate the effects of changing climates, displacement of humans, and lack of access to resources.

  • Flower Hill Institute

    Flower Hill Institute is a Native-owned, community-directed nonprofit. Our objectives include preserving and enhancing cultural resources, preparing youth to inherit leadership, improving economic self-sufficiency, agriculture, food sovereignty and security, and improving outcomes to climate change. Our new and emerging projects include facilitating an Indigenous-led landback and rewilding project and developing financing solutions for income-agnostic Tribal housing.

  • Friends of Ecosystem Restoration Camps & Communities

    From the degraded rainforests of Brazil to the arid landscapes of Morocco, communities of everyday people are picking up the tools needed to repair our broken ecosystems. And it's these local people, at over 60 vibrant communities around the world, who are best placed to create lasting, systemic change and are leading the charge toward sustainable restoration.

  • Institute of Ecotechnics

    Ecotechnics thinks and acts of a planetary scale- integrating two complementary fields of study: the ‘ecology of technics’ and the ‘technics of ecology’. For nearly 50 years, the Institute of Ecotechnics has convened international conferences and workshops, as well as supported global demonstration projects, developing and applying innovative approaches to harmonizing technology and the global biosphere

  • Media for Change

    Media for Change is working with storytelling educators internationally to enable individuals and organizations alike to become self sufficient in digital impact storytelling. Through its mentorship of storytellers, workshops, and the annual With Festival conference, Media for Change raises awareness of changemakers around the world and serves as a venue for aspiring media makers to get involved with building a better world trough their media projects.

  • Mongol Tribe

    Mongol Tribe’s pillars focus on co-operative development, regenerative land care practices, and education. Focus on learning programs and workforce development trainings for traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), silvopasture and traditional grazing practices, regenerative agroforestry and fire mitigation techniques, and holistic health & wellness.

  • Okyeman Environment Foundation

    The Okyeman Environment Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to addressing the environmental issues in West Africa by building the public interest of biodiversity, while sponsoring and assisting organizations participating in environmental preservation. Okeyman Environment Foundation promotes, cultivates, sponsors, develops, and advances public education and participation of environmental and natural resource preservation and protection.

  • Permaculture Design at Oregon State University

    OSU Permaculture Design offers high quality online Permaculture education in introductory permaculture design, advanced permaculture, food forests, and permaculture water management, serving over 45,000 students. The program teaches whole-systems design approaches to developing sustainable human settlements and institutions and lays the foundation for a lifelong study and path in permaculture including horticulture and agriculture, regional planning, ecology, animal husbandry, technology, architecture and international development.

  • Reconnecting Northland

    Reconnecting Northland is a purpose-led, non-profit organisation with a bold vision for Northland, New Zealand to become a flourishing tapestry of abundant and resilient ecosystems. Te Kete Hononga, our primary service delivery function, weaves together packages of support to help realise community-led initiatives, whilst also growing capability and resilience of the community. This is achieved by connecting and centralising services, resources, investment, knowledge and skills for the benefit of the many taiao/earthcare groups and collectives working to regenerate our region’s ecological and social fabrics.

  • Regenerosity

    Regenerosity envisions a world where communities thrive in healthy ecosystems supported by just and equitable flows of capital. We work towards our vision by partnering with, and flowing trust-based funds to community-based organizations that support thousands of indigenous and smallholder farmer communities around the world. Together, we co-develop programs deeply informed by the communities we benefit, at the intersection of food sovereignty, regenerative livelihoods, and ecological resilience.

  • Regenerate Cascadia

    Regenerate Cascadia's mission is to regenerate the Cascadia bioregion. Regenerate Cascadia supports regenerative projects, communities and organizers to reinforce work happening on the ground, grow bioregional governance; and celebrate our unique stories, autonomy, and context of place. Regenerate Cascadia is a program of the Department of Bioregion, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to growing bioregions and bioregional movements around the world.

  • Revitalizing Desert Oases

    Revitalizing Desert Oases is project working to educate on regenerative strategies to reverse the impacts of drought and desertification in Algeria through purifying wastewaters and rainwater harvesting, while dimishing soil erosion through habitat rehabilitation and increasing soil health through biochar and other remediations.

  • Roots of Nature

    Roots of Nature LTD is an organisation working at several levels in regeneration to support the development of a regenerative culture in the UK and beyond. We work at the grass roots level by training and supporting landowners to design and implement regenerative farming systems on their farms and estates using our ROOTED framework. We work at the organisational level by developing regenerative training programmes for food companies and supply chains. We work at the leadership level by applying regenerative leadership and design principles to our projects and and organisational operations and training in these concepts.

  • Small Farms Research & Innovation Center at N.C. A&T Cooperative Extension

    The Small Farms Research and Innovation Center (SFRIC) at N.C. A&T Cooperative Extension works to to better connect and resource small, beginning, diversified, and veteran farmers and ranchers (SBDVFRs) with public, private, and in-kind partners to grow regenerative understanding and behavior and economic and community infrastructures and relationships that grow health, resilience, and prosperity in perpetuity.

  • TreeAngle Foundation

    The Treeangle Foundation works with local foundations to reforest mountains with trees indigenous to each mountain and region. Treeangle Foundation funds, advises, and supports local partners in creating nature reserves in mountainous regions, restoring indigenous forests, measuring and monitoring impact, and engaging location communities through sustainability education.

  • University of International Cooperation

    UCI is a global institution headquartered in Costa Rica, founded in 1994 to educate leaders in sustainable development. In 2016, UCI reoriented its focus to implement regenerative development actively, becoming the first university in the world to prioritize this emerging field. Approved by the Costa Rican government, it operates as a non-profit organization. UCI pioneered virtual education in 1997 and has since become a leader in online learning with students from over 60 countries. UCI launched the Regenerate Costa Rica initiative and co-launched the Regenerative Communities Network in 2018. UCI has implemented hundreds of projects in over 40 countries across six continents.

  • Vid Sertsya Budova Regenerative City

    "International consortium of partners working to develop a smart and regenerative community-led city project near Kyiv, Ukraine with a strong social purpose agenda. Vid Serstya Budova City is anchored by a commitment to high levels of wellbeing in all aspects of planning (physical, social, cultural, environmental, occupational, financial and spiritual) to ensure the wellbeing of individuals and the community as a whole. This project demonstrates the possibilities of long-term, future-oriented planning by using a trauma-informed, human-centred design approach to envision and build an urban environment that meets the needs of its residents, particularly in the aftermath of conflict and displacement.

  • WaterNow

    WaterNow is a non-profit focused on integrated and culturally appropriate clean water and sanitation engineering solutions for indigenous communities and remote villages. With an extensive background in water purification, waste water systems, and rainwater catchment, spanning several decades, WaterNow has provided more than 100,000 people in over a dozen countries with water solutions and is dedicated to the global pursuit of clean water access. We firmly believe that clean water should be a fundamental right, not a luxury. We proudly provide innovative water solutions that benefit households, farms, villages, and future generations.

  • “I'm delighted to contribute to this visionary project, which perfectly complements my expanding bioregional work and offers significant potential for creating positive environmental and social impact.”

    — Caroline Grinrod- Roots of Nature

  • “The thing that I'm most grateful for in this fellowship, has been the profound, personalized, customizable accompaniment. It's the reason why I keep coming back, the personal relationships that we're building out of this is really what's been making all the difference. Tech can fall, but you're offering people value, time, attention- there is a huge incentive to keep going. This is essentially community building. And we have to approach it that way if we actually want that social-relational field to be built up in a way that will stand the test of time, that keeps the resistance strong.”

    —Stefan Fiedler Alvarado, UCI

  • “Finding the others doing this work, and then building the capacity to do this work together, is fortifying. The work of resilience building cannot happen theoretically, it has to actually happen as its being iterated. We need the learning to go back into the communities and to connect the resources because each of us are resources to each other. This is the wealth building that unlocks true potential.”

    —Clare Attwell, Regenerate Cascadia

  • “Through this collaboration with Open Future Coalition, we are able to advance collective vision and infrastructure for how we want to move forward and how we add integrity and regeneration for what we do and how we prepare ourselves to be resilient as people and organizations.”

    —Charlie Hopper, North Carolina A&T State University

  • “Meeting and collaborating with other organizations in the cohort is amazing. The Fellowship is very meaningful as it increases the relevance of our work, almost like making our individual organizations larger.…Overall, we are very excited about the Open Impact Platform, as a single, easy to use database where we can keep all our project information and give access to all our stakeholders.”

    —Eva Iglesis, Regenerosity

About the Regional Resilience Fellowship Program

Participation in this year-long Fellowship will include a customized project plan that identifies key goals or needs and leverages the tools, resources, and capacities of the Open Future Coalition to advance the Fellow’s work.

As part of this program, Fellows will gain access to support in the coordination, documentation, measurement, & resourcing of their efforts, through access to the Open Impact platform and a global network of practitioners, researchers, & funders.

This support includes:

  • Access to the Open Impact platform as an integrated community and project management and measurement tool to support the organization of your regional project(s)

    Onboarding support to set up your account, create your projects, set measurable goals, and invite collaborators

    Early access to test new features, and opportunities to provide feedback and help us refine—ensuring Open Impact serves you and the impact ecosystem

  • Membership access to a rich, multi-sided ecosystem of impact organizations, communities, projects, funders, and experts

    Invitations to participate in ecosystem-wide convenings and salons

    Participation in peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange through cohort spaces, resources, and templates

    Networking, matching, and skill sharing opportunities with other cohort members within specific areas of focus to bolster sectoral collaboration and cross-sectoral cooperation

  • A customized project plan and needs identification to help match fellows with appropriate tools and support

    Opportunities to advance, resource, measure, and showcase initiatives within communities of practice

    Preferential access to opportunities to implement custom workflows, curricula, and project templates (noting that some customizations will require a budget, which will be estimated in advance.)

  • Access to best practices, tools, and methodologies for community led storytelling as an organizing framework for supporting local resilience

    Opportunities to partner with existing partner campaigns in media and citizen science to inform, amplify, and resource your work