Capabilities that realise the ‘islands of future potential’.

In 2024 Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures team commissioned Really Regenerative CIC to produce a study of what conditions and capacities might enable communities to steward holistic, regenerative transformation of their places, at the level, longevity and depth required by the polycrisis.

During that study we also documented some of the key qualities and capabilities of the individuals and teams leading the projects we interviewed which were not published in the original report Place-Based Community-Led Regeneration. Thanks to support from JRF, we are able to produce and publish this second document in which we focus on what we learned about those capabilities.

As with our first study, we have supplemented the content with Really Regenerative and our founder Jenny Andersson’s own decade-long study of place-based regenerative design and development, much of which was documented for her study: Places For Life. We have also been allowed to bring in some critical illustrative case studies from other sources such as the research study by Leen Gorissen, Karla Bonaldi, Piet Haerens and Lénia Rato, commissioned by the Belgian Federal Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment.

Really Regenerative’s own journey, studying and supporting many place-based community-led regenerative projects around the world helped to to deepen our understanding across the different fractals of place, from neighbourhood to bioregion.

Three Nested Levels of Work

There are three nested levels of work present in this document. To be effective, regenerative practitioners must pursue capability building across all three nested levels of work.

1. INNER: Inner development, growth and transformation to a living systems self, mind and being.

2. OUTER: Relational development to be able to nurture ‘right relationship’ with others, and support the emergence of ‘right relationship’ in communities, teams and organisations.

3. SYSTEMIC: Systemic transformation; shaping the sociocultural, economic and ecological conditions to meet the demands of the polycrisis, and to meet the dream of regenerative futures.

The 2022-25 DESIRE consortium. Contributing to this study by uplifting place-based potential in 8 locations in Europe.

Creating the conditions for ‘right relationship’.

Life is a process. It is a process of exchange. Oxygen comes into our lungs and carbon dioxide goes out. Trees soak up moisture from the ground, turning sunlight into sugars and build their bodies from the carbon that they create.

For humans to be in right relationship with non-human living systems and even other humans requires a system where critical value-adding exchanges occur at all scales in reciprocal and co-mutually nourishing relationships, rather than just commoditised transactions. Entangled, dynamic, diverse and collaborative relationships are the foundation of this process of life.

Life recognises the interconnected interdependency of all parts of a living system, adapts and responds to evolving context, celebrates and insists on the affirmation of diversity by striving to create the most possible difference.

In both the period of study for Andersson’s Places For Life and during our study for Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2024, we have seen relational capacities as foundation to regenerative work.

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