Open Session: Regenerative Futures & Fellowship
This open session commenced with a welcoming acknowledgment of participants’ diverse territories and identities, setting the foundation for exploring the comprehensive research framework that guides the Rhizome Fellowship. The Culture Hack Labs team presented their extensive 2024 research on “Pathways to Regenerative Futures,” which emerged from interrogating the philanthropic obsession with carbon-focused climate solutions.
The research revealed that 74% of climate funding (2018-2022) reinforced technological and market-based solutions, claiming GDP and carbon could be decoupled, despite evidence showing this approach maintains growth paradigms while ignoring fundamental causal drivers. Using Culture Hack’s five-step methodology (Ask, Listen, Understand, Recode, Hack), the team conducted 28 in-depth interviews across six key areas and identified 12 narrative communities, mapping them on justice and ontological axes.
The research found that most narrative gravity remains in the “carbon fixation” quadrant (lower left), while transformative work happens in the upper right quadrant, focused on relationality and regeneration. This led to the core reframe: “Possibility Models” – real-world experiments that transform breakdowns into possibilities, described through the metaphor of “islands of coherence” that can shift entire systems to a higher order (drawing on complexity science and imaginal cell biology). The slides for this presentation can be found here.
The framework identifies five interconnected pathways to regeneration:
- Restoring Justice, Restoring Life – Decolonization and ecological Healing
- Economies of Regeneration – Transforming economic systems toward regeneration
- Land Back to Right Relations – Land redistribution and new ownership models
- Bioregional Community Governance – Community-led governance of bioregions
- Healing the Spirit, Healing the Earth – Cultural and ontological shifts through transpersonal experiences
Fellowship Application Information:
- Timeline: Applications open May 2-16, selections announced June 6th
- Program runs: June 13 – November 28 (90-minute sessions every 2 weeks)
- In-person gathering: September 15-21 in Costa Rica (mandatory)
- Team requirements: Primary lead + supporting member (only lead travels to Costa Rica)
- Commitment: 90% attendance required, no personal stipend, full travel/tools covered
The application focuses on: Personal background, project feasibility, narrative impact potential, alignment with pathways, community benefit, and systems change capacity.