BioFi Project
= "a collective supporting bioregions to design, build, and implement Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs)".
URL = https://www.biofi.earth
Description
1.
""The ecological crisis requires urgent, large-scale regeneration of the biosphere rooted in ecological integrity and cultural revitalization.
This is possible if we ensure financial resources flow to the many small groups all over the world doing the critical work of on-the-ground regeneration – acting in a coordinated, synergistic way.
We envision nothing less than the creation of a new layer in the global financial architecture of Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) that enable both flow and organization.
It is our work to ensure that every bioregion on Earth gets a BFF to support its transition to a regenerative economy – so that finance can serve life."
2. Samantha Power:
"The BioFi Project is a collective supporting bioregions to design, build, and implement Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) that connect financial resources with regenerators. We partner with bioregional organizing teams and Indigenous communities across North America and around the world to apply the BFF templates and capital raising and allocation approaches laid out in this book.
The BioFi Project team is made up of practitioners in the areas of economics, finance, governance, bioregionalism, ecology, regeneration, and social justice. The BioFi Project establishes partnerships with bioregions and then engages in a listening process; supports asset mapping; identifies which BFF is best to start with; designs a detailed proposal for a BFF; and supports the bioregion with capital raising, capital allocation, and governance implementation. At the global level, the team also shares the concepts laid out in this book, stewards a community of practice, builds relevant software tooling, and supports eco-credit co-design facilitation. The BioFi Project is a fiscally sponsored project of Buckminster Fuller Institute, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt non-profit organization."
Characteristics
Ernesto van Peborgh:
"The Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF) framework offers one of the most sophisticated responses yet to the challenge of financing territorial regeneration.
Its greatest contribution may be recognizing that a bioregion cannot be financed through isolated projects alone. It requires an interconnected institutional ecosystem capable of bridging the gap between financial resources and regenerators on the ground, helping determine how capital flows, who participates in decision-making, what values guide allocation, and how long-term stewardship is maintained. Rather than a hierarchy, these institutions function as complementary nodes within a living financial architecture designed to support the emergence, resilience, and regeneration of place.
Around the bioregional core, BIOFI project, suggests four institutional nodes become necessary:
* A Bioregional Trust
The long-term steward of the commons itself. The holder of place-based ecological intelligence, cultural memory, and intergenerational accountability. The institution that ensures that the logic of the watershed outlasts any particular political administration or investment cycle. Think less of a foundation and more of a living endowment — one whose principal is the biological health of the territory itself.
* A Bioregional Venture Studio
The incubator of regenerative enterprises and institutional innovations. The place where ecological restoration meets economic model, where a restored wetland becomes a water security investment, where a network of diversified farmers becomes a resilience premium in an insurance product, where traditional knowledge becomes the basis for a new category of natural products. Not charity. Not subsidy. Design.
* A Bioregional Investment Company
The channel for institutional capital into productive regenerative opportunities. The bridge between patient capital — foundations with perpetual mandates, family offices with legacy intentions, development finance institutions with nature mandates — and the actual enterprises and landscape stewards who need investment to transition, restore, and regenerate. The instrument that makes the Resilience Premium legible to fiduciaries.
* A Bioregional Bank
The circulator of financial resources according to the developmental logic of the territory itself — not the extraction logic of distant capital markets. A bank that understands that a farmer improving soil organic matter is building an asset, not simply managing an operating expense. A bank whose underwriting model includes biological capital alongside financial capital.
Together, these four nodes form an institutional architecture capable of connecting regeneration and finance without subordinating one to the other. Not a hierarchy. An ecosystem. Not centralized control. Polycentric coordination. Not extraction. Reciprocity."
(https://ernestopvanpeborgh.substack.com/p/the-window-has-opened-on-the-institutions)