Small regenerative communities offer a pathway out of current systems of exploitation, extraction, and separation. And yet, many community projects crumble because they don't have the tools to create and sustain responsible and conscious relational dynamics.

Regenera is a living laboratory for researching how to bring the surface and heal patterns of disconnection, from which a new culture for transformational community living can emerge. The purpose is two-fold: (1) to serve as a beta test for future long-term transformational community projects; and (2) to document experiment results and create blueprints that can be shared with other community projects.

Phase I of Regenera will take place in Europe from the start of March through the end of May. A core group of people will live together and experiment together for the full three months, along with partial residents and virtual members. Each month will begin with a three-day intensive, and throughout the remaining time, the group will engage in shared daily practices, group relational spaces, healing processes, and external community engagement days. The Regenera team will document the results of the community’s experiments, and share them through social media posts, newsletter updates, videos, and podcast recordings.

One of the main pillars of Regenera’s research is community and alternate financing models. The team is committed to revealing and healing conditioning and emotions around individualistic, defensive money ownership patterns inherited from modern capitalist and imperialist structures. This healing creates space to experiment with alternative community-based financial structures, including resource pooling, non-material value identification and transacting, and sourcing money and resources as a collective.

This GoFundMe is one of Regenera’s first community finance experiments.

The Regenera team members have a lot of stories about what it means to ask for money:

I (Nina) no longer want to operate in these disempowered narratives, where either I or other people are victims, perpetrators, or rescuers. I want to explore how to uncouple giving from receiving. I want to receive a donation without asking myself, what do you want in exchange? I want to believe that someone would want to give money to me and this project, without crossing their own boundaries or creating resentment.

So, I am starting here. Will you give money that will help cover our accommodation, food, and travel costs for Phase I of Regenera? Will you give money so that we can hold events that share our gifts and research with surrounding communities for low or no cost? Will you contribute so that someone who has a lot of non-material value, but not a lot of financial resources, can join our project? Will you contribute so that we can spend less time creating financial resources, and more time researching?

And will you only give the amount of money that you want to give, freely and easily, because what matters to us matters to you?

If you want to know more about what we are up to at Regenera, and how our experiments are going, our early documentation exists here via Substack: one perspective on deprivatizing intimacy; and another.

Cover photograph taken by Azul Bado Gonzalez at the ecovillage Tamera in Portugal