My Rolodex of Village Design Consultants
A spotlight on my favorite regenerative village consultants
I just came back from yet another party with strangers where I couldn’t resist talking about my work with ecovillages.
I’m a radical, what can I say?
As such, my inner and outer circles are mostly people who are just as nerdy about building communities to regenerate the planet as I am.
So…let’s give them a shout-out.
Why I Am Not Village Consulting At The Moment
First a quick note. While previously I was consulting different village projects, I am not trying to do that anymore. I want to thank my friend Jonah (founder of Microgreens Consulting, check him out) for helping me clarify that this is not where my energy wants to go.
I see it as tending someone else’s garden.
At some point, I will open up again to that possibility if a particularly exciting project comes along, but right now my work at Ecovilla, Terrenity + this publication, Eternità, the VMM, and all the other projects I am working on, it doesn’t make sense.
Holistic Consultants
These incredible humans can guide you through the whole process of community design and creation.
Oscar Correa & Sonia Wendorff - Regen Tribe
These two are powerhouses. They are my colleagues and friends from
. They work very dynamically in changing spaces, and are key players in the emerging network state and startup society movement.They aptly understand community at the organizational, logistical, and cultural levels.
The Regen Tribe accelerator is only for projects at a certain stage of development, because the aim is to incubate the most promising startup societies and infuse them with regenerative principles.
We’ve worked with 18 projects to date.
Masters of culture design, they deeply understand what creates a real sense of community, and what does and doesn’t work when building a community from scratch.
Joshua Smith - BIOM / Lightsmith Design
Josh and I started as colleagues working on the Village Mastermind, and he is now officially one of my best friends.
I am fascinated and impressed by his mind, his systematic approach to design, and his meticulous collection of world building resources. He is the co-founder of BIOM, a design studio, and he has helped brand villages like Holos.
Arguably genius, he has several village projects approaching him for his services. I think he’s the village building scene’s best kept secret.
We share the dream of having a village building campus. I want him and his wife and baby girl to come live in the same community as me because I know we would have an awesome time.
Nico Alcala - Design Science Studio / re:build
The mind behind the village project la tierra, Nico is an out-of-the-box thinker, artist, and visionary.
He brings a kind of sophisticated whimsy to the projects he works on, like KA, a village project by MomentOM Collective that he is consulting as co-founder and project designer.
With re:build he ran these excellent design sprints to help village visionaries incubate their vision and create supporting documentation.
Now, he is part of the Village Mastermind as well, with a shared mission to design framework that crack the code on how to design, build, and operate regenerative communities.
Noteworthy Design Studios
I think there are more than just these ones, but these are the most professional ones, that’s for sure. I’m probably forgetting and will add to this list later.
Regen Earth Studio
Run by Eric Amyot and Kirsten Liegman, Regen Earth Studio is an accelerator for regenerative village projects. They also host Convergence events where project leaders meet in-person and collaborate, participate in working groups, and receive insights.
Village Lab
The Village Lab is a collective of people who actually live in community and teach regenerative whole systems design. They offer a variety of services from team facilitation, decision-making systems, internal economic design, and more.
Specialized consultants
Charlie Fisher — Dark Matter Labs, MOOS, TDF
Charlie is one of those quietly badass individuals. I met him when Regen Tribe was at MOOS in Berlin for the summer participating in the Cohere residency. He’s the main proponent of the self-owning house concept, and was working with MOOS to create distributed ownership models within the community.
Julia Becker — House of Regen, Regen Tribe
Julia is branding and governance specialist for new earth projects. Also working on the regenerative village to startup society spectrum, she is specifically investigating best onboarding practices.
Having hosted powerful transformative coliving experiences with House of Regen, she knows how to create culture and reinforce positive experiences for communities in shared spaces.
Alex is co-founder of Gaianet. While not traditionally in the category of village designer by any means, Gaianet is investigating how to create a regenerative network state. Here is their research paper for it, so in some sense, their organization is designing this idea.
They also consult on holacratic governance, a popular governance system in new earth projects and communities.
Florijn de Graaf — Smart Hoods
Florijn is an energy systems engineer that excels at making energy efficient systems, specifically in ecovillages and cohousing projects. He created an approach called Smart Integrated Decentralized Energy (SIDE) and used it in various projects.
He pops up in all the regenerative scenes I’m in, and I will finally meet him at Regen Week. He’s most famous for this ecovillage in the Netherlands:
Kelly Krezek & Joe Mcveen — New Earth Development
You really can’t get more niche than being experts in financial planning for regenerative community developments.
Kelly and Joe are a power couple and co-founders of this regenerative real estate devco.
They have consulted on 16 community projects and raised $750m for real estate projects while designing their own regenerative community in Costa Rica, Abundancia.
Check out their free masterclass “How to Plan & Fund Your Regenerative Land Project”
Fellow Ecovillage Researchers
These community-savvy friends help you find communities that suit you best, and stay active in the village building movement:
Tucker Walsh — The Lighthouse
Tucker was the first fully aligned person I met on my journey to become an ecovillage researcher. Formerly a consultant for Nuanu, in Bali, he lives in Colorado now and is building a coliving called the Lighthouse. Check out his podcast, Illuminating Life (here’s an episode where he interviews me and Nico).
I really enjoy this article he wrote about “Post-Healing Intentional Communities”.
Cynthia Tina — Community Finders, Community Founders Circle
Cynthia Tina is the founder of Community Finders and Community Founders Circle. She is a pillar for the Foundation for Intentional Community, and she organizes and leads ecovillage tours.
She is an all around down-to-earth person and an amazing link between the community wisdom of original community pioneers and modern ecovillage design.
Check out her Money & Community Course
There are many more in my spreadsheet, categorized by specialty, and I will be making future lists such as offgrid design specialists, masterplanning services, and architects.
The people in this particular list help move the main pieces of village design and are the ones that I personally know and have had conversations with.
If you want to promo yourself as a village design consultant or service provider, I invite you to introduce yourself and your work in the comments.
I sometimes like to joke that all my friends are village designers.
If you are nerdy about building villages, let’s be friends.
One of my affiliated partners, Community Finders, run by Cynthia Tina, offers services for people seeking ecovillages or building ecovillages. I highly recommend you join one of her courses to uplevel your ecovillage journey.
Use the code TERRENITY for $100 off your ecovillage tour.
Thank you 🙏
Impressive resource list. Thanks again for sharing