Our Initiative in a Nutshell: Bioregional Organizing Team for a Northeast Bioregional Financing Facility

The Northeast Bioregional Organizing Team is a collaborative effort working toward bioregional regeneration of the Northeastern “United States.” Our principle proposed activities include co-developing a regional intertribal alliance for the regeneration of ancestral watersheds, drafting a bioregional regeneration strategy, hosting convenings, and creating a Bioregional Financing Facility to enable systemic and regenerative investments in support of bioregional regeneration. We are a diverse network, co-led by an intertribal alliance, working together to strengthen connections and enable resource allocation across communities in our bioregion.

Our Bioregion, challenges, and opportunities

Our bioregion is characterized by diverse yet related Native peoples that have been unified through their relationships with their ancestral waterways, both riverine and maritime, evidenced by related Algonquin dialects being predominant throughout the region. These relationships have been purposefully fractured by colonization, which has an enduring impact through multiple layers of imposed bureaucracy, siloing of knowledge, and the proliferation of administrative mechanisms preventing the development of holistic regeneration strategies and Tribal self determination. The region has also been a major cradle of industrialization, and continues to have a strong manufacturing base despite an ongoing legacy of industrial decline. While we are possessed of immense financial and intellectual resources, we are also characterized by tremendous inequality in access to decision making spaces and wealth building opportunities. Taken together, these dynamics have resulted in interdependent challenges of ecosystem degradation, rapidly rising costs of often poor quality housing, a lack of self sufficiency in food production, regenerated but fragmented and ailing forests, depleted migratory, freshwater, and marine fisheries, an incomplete clean energy transition, strong car dependence, and extensive brownfields and ongoing industrial pollution. These challenges embody a fragmented dominant paradigm and culture.

These profound challenges are being faced by a multitude of regenerative actors and organizations, presenting as seeds and rooted place based initiatives. These include resurgent Tribal governance and knowledge initiatives, a regional organic food movement and cooperative culture, agroforestry and forestry initiatives, regional and local conservation initiatives, community Justice organizations, a coalescence of bio-based material organizations, and many others.