With the support of the Cisco Foundation and our Regional Resilience Fellows, we’re expanding the Open Impact platform to source community-published resources, templates, and curricula from projects across our network. Imagine a global dashboard that shows real-time progress across our efforts, populated by locally sourced data, stories, & adoptable solutions—improving together in a global community of practice.

Our Regional Resilience Fellowship program is focused on supporting, showcasing, documenting, and growing innovative, locally-driven projects, networks, & service providers operating within a particular geographic area and/or sector. With efforts spanning 16 countries, these fellows are recognized as playing a crucial role in fostering collaboration, solutions innovation, and knowledge exchange within their respective regions or sectors.

The Center for Regeneration leverages public-private partnerships to convene communities with the social, technical, and financial tools they need to address coordinative and funding challenges.

Emerging from a partnership with NC A&T State University, the largest HBCU in the U.S., the Center’s first activities focus on supporting transitions to regenerative practice in our food systems.

One of our first efforts in partnership with the Small Farms Research and Innovation Center (SFRIC) at NC A&T leverages our digital organizing tools to more effectively deliver, monitor, and report technical assistance to underrepresented, minority, socially disadvantaged, and beginning farmers and ranchers.

By both expanding the existing reach of Extension and community partners while streamlining reporting, we’re growing access to state and federal funds to further support these communities and our local food systems in North Carolina and beyond.

We’re also working with SFRIC to launch a virtual Resource Library to make curricula, research, media, and other resources more accessible to small farmers. By quantifying value and measuring access, we can grow public and private support for these programs, and better understand community needs in the advancement of future research & materials.

Next, we’re partnering with others to expand the resource library in areas like ecological restoration, community wellbeing, funding, and governance.

We are supporting the Okyenhene Environment Foundation in Ghana in organizing a conference of traditional rulers from across the West African region, to discuss the development and application of indigenous knowledge systems in the fight against climate change, food shortages, and climate inequity.

The conference aims to produce a set of actionable collaborative projects and enhance ongoing sharing of best practices in the region, while amplifying these traditional approaches globally.

The Amazon and Andes regions—home to much of the world’s biodiversity—are deeply interdependent, yet their challenges are often addressed in silos.

In partnership with Academia Biospherica, Acción Andina, TreeAngle Foundation, and El Puente, we are convening an interdisciplinary group of nonprofits, NGOs, Indigenous and local community leaders, scientists, community projects, and regenerative practitioners to facilitate cooperative resource exchange across the region.

We’re working alongside the team of El Puente and their indigenous-stewarded ecological projects in the Amazon to model a more resilient and participatory model for funding and reporting.

Supporting projects along the pillars of sovereignty, regeneration, education, and reciprocity, El Puente has adopted the Open Future Fund structure, featuring a blended funding model and a participatory pool that will be stewarded by the Council of Originary People and Nations and the IMCF.

In partnerships with Indigenous communities and organizations globally, Open Future Coalition is launching a Digital Resource Library for Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Solutions.

The tool will support the documentation and application of traditional practices in local territories, while provide contexts for intercultural connection and exchange within a framework of sovereignty and reciprocity.

Today, there are 3 private dollars for every public dollar in the U.S. Land Grant University System. Private matching requirements for public grants further exacerbate gaps in access to public resources.

We’re working to close these gaps by facilitating new financial tools that pool private and in-kind resources and loan guarantees, unblocking paths to access and returning resources to local communities.

We are working with demonstration projects globally to learn how they’re currently gathering data, and how we can best make these processes simpler.

At the same time, we’re supporting their transition to community-driven metrics, by listening and learning what types of quantitative and qualitative data best support their own decisionmaking processes. By supporting community impact validation, we can also provide paths to economic equity.