How to Fund A Regenerative Village

I was stoked to see the $100,000 quadratic funding grant from ma.earth run its first round on Gitcoin recently. The grant offered matching funds for public donations on regenerative land projects. They will be running future rounds, so stay tuned.

Seeing things like this make me happy to live in an age where the importance of regenerative communities translates to monetary value.

But wait, don’t we sort of want to build a world without money?

We are certainly at a juncture in history where we have to the tools to manage resources efficiently enough where people don’t need the coin to survive, but the constraints of the system are stalling us.

I’m not convinced we’ll forever phase out representative currency, but maybe I’m not radical enough.

Let’s put that discussion aside and talk about how to allocate capital to build robust, interconnected communities. The least we can do is build local-scale communities to practice mutual aid and meet everyone’s needs collaboratively.

I include some evasion strategies for those who want to experiment outside the monetary realms.

Let’s Get Funded (Understanding the Financial Landscape)

The goals here are to understand where capital can come from, cultivate awareness of who has capital and why they want to give it to you, know all the types of returns on investments you can offer, and be able to persuasively share the offer for others to be involved.

Ecovilla, the community where I live, is privately funded by impact entrepreneurs, who simultaneously sponsor an ecovillage orphanage and projects that raise money for endangered rhinos, among other things.

Strategies for Securing Funding