Hawthorne Valley Association
Description
Félix de Rosen:
"HVA’s success can in large part be attributed to an “ecosystem logic” in which relationships and resource flows are nurtured, both within HVA’s own programs and in/with the wider Hudson region.
The farm store sits at the heart of Hawthorne Valley’s internal economy, functioning less as a profit center and more as a circulatory system. With annual revenue approaching $10 million, the store supports several hundred local farmers and value-added producers, and employs 55 people. The majority of its net proceeds (about $300,000, a 3% profit margin, respectable for retail) flows back to support the farm’s educational and ecological work — everything from training new farmers to hosting visiting school children and summer camps. When the farm chooses to delay the first hay cutting so bobolinks and other grassland birds can fledge their young, sacrificing income for biodiversity, the store’s revenue helps cover the gap. The store also makes direct payments to the Waldorf school, helping families afford tuition and creating what Martin calls “a very much closed loop” that allows HVA employees to send their own children there.
In addition to these regular transfers, HVA has built a system of internal lending that keeps capital circulating within the community rather than flowing out to banks. Departments within HVA borrow from each other for short-term cash flow needs, and for larger purchases — a new truck for the farmers’ market, for example — one department might loan another its savings at rates that benefit both: higher than a savings account would earn, lower than a bank would charge. Everything runs separately on the books, but the flexibility to move money consciously between departments means financial strength in one area can shore up needs in another, keeping resources rooted in place. “There’s an internal balancing happening all the time,” Martin explains. “We’re constantly asking: how does this serve the whole?”
Beyond circulating resources within itself, HVA functions as what Martin calls an “economic mother organism” for the region, incubating businesses and seeding new organizations that then take root independently."
(https://thebiofiproject.substack.com/p/relationship-is-the-strategy)
Governance
Félix de Rosen:
1.
"Instead of a rigid hierarchy, HVA uses circles of shared responsibility. For instance, the school, the farm, the place-based learning, and the research programs all have distinct leadership, but come together regularly to discuss shared resources, overlapping needs, and potential synergies. Decisions are made not by fiat but through dialogue, rooted in a shared sense of responsibility to place.
This governance philosophy is deeply imbued with the spirit of Rudolf Steiner, the 20th-century Austrian teacher and philosopher whose ideas helped shape the organization’s foundations—from education to agriculture to economics. Steiner emphasized a holistic view of human life as inseparable from nature, spirit, and community—an orientation that resonates deeply with bioregional thinking. His vision laid the groundwork for practices like Waldorf education, biodynamic farming, and associative economics—each rooted in attentiveness to place, process, and relationship.
Steiner’s idea of associative economics suggests that producers, consumers, and stewards of capital should work in conscious coordination to meet real human and ecological needs, rather than compete in pursuit of profit. It imagines an economy that is transparent, cooperative, and aligned with the long-term wellbeing of people and planet. At HVA, this framework shows up in values-based pricing—where the price of goods sold reflects ecological and social costs, not just profit margins—as well as transparent supply chains and decision-making that weighs the health of land and community alongside financial sustainability.
This kind of work requires courage. In a world dominated by metrics and speed, choosing to go slow, stay relational, and hold complexity is a radical act. Martin thinks about how we evaluate success in a regenerative economy. Traditional metrics, he argues, often fail to capture what matters most. “We’re not just tracking dollars,” he explains. “We’re asking: Are people growing in their roles? Are the relationships getting stronger? Is the land getting healthier? These are the indicators that matter if you’re trying to nurture a living system.”
2.
"As HVA’s community has matured, as its operations have expanded, and as interest in regenerative, place-based economies has grown globally, HVA is beginning to ask a new kind of question: how does it broaden its impact without compromising the relational foundations it depends on? This is the heart of the challenge facing many place-based, community-rooted initiatives, from Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, a 70,000-strong federation of worker cooperatives, to the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, a coalition of 30 Indigenous nations in Peru and Ecuador working to co‑govern a vast rainforest bioregion, protect ancestral lands, and build a regenerative economy.
Over time, informal trust and shared culture can carry tremendous weight — mediating decisions, shaping priorities, and guiding how resources move. But as the potential to scale rises, as outside partners seek to learn or collaborate, and as funders look for replicable models, those unwritten structures can become hard to translate. At Hawthorne Valley, this tension is felt most clearly in its financial practices. As Martin reflected, “We’ve been able to do so much with so little because of deep trust, but when it comes to inviting in larger pools of aligned capital, the informal trust web only goes so far.”
Right now, when HVA needs capital for a major project, Martin calls on friends, through an informal network of relationships built over decades, as he did for the school heating project. It works, but it requires what he calls “sweating bullets and scraping” each time, starting from scratch with every need. What he envisions instead is an internal revolving loan fund that HVA could draw from for large infrastructure upgrades, especially projects where grants are reimbursable or where savings eventually pay the fund back. As HVA and its peers imagine the next era of regenerative finance, they are beginning to ask what kinds of institutions could hold and circulate slow, trust-based capital at the scale of a bioregion. The internal revolving loan could be networked with other organizations in the region to support projects in the wider region. And indeed, Martin is already part of a team working to build a bioregional financing facility for the Hudson Valley."
(https://thebiofiproject.substack.com/p/relationship-is-the-strategy)
Myceliating a Network of Place-Based Regeneration
Félix de Rosen:
"Hawthorne Valley was never designed to be a blueprint. It grew out of a specific landscape, with specific people, shaped by decades of shared meals, hard seasons, and small miracles. When asked about how to broaden impact, Martin explicitly rejects the language of scale. As he puts it: “Scale is not a word that I use very often. I think of spreading, myceliating, actually connecting dots. Scaling, for me, can too quickly run into some of the same problems that we’re trying to work to resolve.” For Martin, the work isn’t about replicating HVA’s model or growing bigger; it’s about making visible the relationships already forming between farmers, educators, land stewards, and other bioregional initiatives, then deliberately strengthening those connections so the whole network becomes more resilient and coherent.
This connecting of the dots is already happening. The people and practices connected to HVA have long acted as connectors in the broader Hudson Valley, linking food producers to educators, artists to farmers, donors to grassroots visionaries. Since 2010, Martin has been tracking how much HVA spends within 30 miles of the farm, studying the multiplier effect in the local economy. Rather than growing HVA as an institution, the priority has been growing the health and coherence of its context.
Looking ahead, HVA is exploring how this mycelial approach can become more intentional: regional learning journeys, peer exchanges between bioregions, community-rooted fellowships, open-source documentation of its internal practices, and new institutions that can hold memory and accountability across generations. The goal is to contribute to a wider movement of place-based regeneration by sharing the core principles—relational governance, trust-based finance, and ecosystem logic—that make bioregional economies possible. Whatever forms regenerative economies take, they will be rooted in the quality of relationships — social, economic, natural — we build."
(https://thebiofiproject.substack.com/p/relationship-is-the-strategy)