Working assumptions
We have articulated some working assumptions for this collaborative project:
- There is a need to create a culture that allows us to foster and operate out of a different land paradigm, from exploitive and strictly market-based to restorative and stewardship-based.
- We need a range of strategies and models to create change, including land management practices, legal structures, contracts, policy, public support, and investment behavior.
- The best way to accomplish our vision and missions of change is in community, and in active relationship with actual landscapes.
- We need to cultivate a different investment mentality and practice with regard to land and food, broadening our view of return to include other benefits to land and community. Our actions as land stewards must take into account considerations of equity and inclusion.
- Leaving the design of a new food and land system to existing bureaucracies, power structures, and conventional land management techniques will not lead to restoration. Intervention is needed.
- We need to activate what is not being used, what is lying fallow as unseen potential. We are in abundance, under-using, and not reusing.
- We want to pay attention to both protecting land from development pressures and tending to availability/access for new farmers.
- We think that we have something to offer that others are not offering, given the combination of our convening expertise, our comprehensive view of the food/ farming/soil health landscape and accompanying resource base of innovative practitioners. Our convening approach and design is based on ten years of leading Play BIG gatherings, which has had significant success in moving wealthy individuals toward reimagining their whole financial portfolio towards their mission-directed activation.
- We are not seeking to create an organization. We offer these gatherings to nourish the movement towards regeneration.
