Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy

Through collaborative storytelling Capital Institute’s award-winning Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy takes us to the places where the Regenerative Economy is already operating in the real world, supporting enterprises and practices that empower individuals, and that regenerate human communities and the natural systems upon which all life depends. Once we understand its principles and patterns, we see the Regenerative Economy coming to life in rural areas and in cities, in small, medium, and large enterprises around the globe, and in the networked relationships among them. To immerse yourself in the Field Guide's various stories (cateogized by Finance, Land & Food, The City, Ownership Models, and Doors of Perception), please visit Fieldguide.CapitalInstitute.org/Stories.html.

Content from this campaign

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Regenerative Qualities of the Circle of Aunts and Uncles
The Circle of Aunts and Uncles is a group of 35 friends in the Greater Philadelphia area who have come together to invest in relationship- and place-building by providing low-interest loans and a network of social capital to worthy, under-resourced entrepreneurs in their city. As the Circle’s founder Judy Wicks, former owner of Philadelphia’s legendary White Dog Café and author of Good Morning, Beautiful Business, explains, the Circle’s goal is to co-create, the “diverse, inclusive, and joyful community that we all want to live in.”

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Kate Poole and the Healing Power of Regenerative Investing
Kate Poole shares her talents as a comic artist to illustrate this story about the evolution of her personal investing philosophy, as she works to channel her inherited wealth to fund innovative projects and enterprises led by communities that have been the victim of an extractive economy. Kate Poole, 29, traces her inherited wealth back to her Jewish forebears on her maternal side.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

The Living Breakwaters at Conference House Park, a Project of Ambitious Regenerative Proportions
On the first of June—one of those rare days invoked by the American poet James Russell Lowell—we met our advisor and Patagonia's long-time chief storyteller Vincent Stanley, and boarded the Staten Island Ferry for a visit to Tottenville. The village is the last stop on the Staten Island Rapid Transit line, at New York City's and New York State's southernmost tip.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

The Regenerative Qualities of Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local
Becoming a cooperatively owned enterprise rather than a traditional, privately owned one was something Sheila and Dylan had contemplated for their new generation mom and pop grocery when it was initially launched. However, they quickly ran into the usual startup financing obstacles. “No bank would fund us even though we had perfect credit and a good business plan,” Sheila reports, “They were uncomfortable lending into gentrifying areas, let alone to a cooperative.” The two ended up raising the needed funds through an Indiegogo campaign, from friends and family, and by assuming personal debt.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Creating Visceral Delight With WholeTrees©
WholeTrees© Architecture and Structures makes structural systems from small-diameter tree trunks and their branching portions that can be used as substitutes for milled lumber or steel in many building types, both residential and commercial. Because it has engineered a higher market value for what would otherwise be a low value by-product of sustainable forest management, WholeTrees© has at the same time created an elegant solution for the otherwise extractive forest products industry to thrive as an active participant in the transition to a regenerative economy.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

New Resource Bank Thrives By Returning to Its Values Mission
The story of a formerly financially troubled California bank that saved itself and thrived by returing to its original values-based mission.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Sunrise Banks Empowers the Underserved to Achieve
Guided by a mission “to be the most innovative bank empowering the underserved to achieve,” David Reiling has grown inner city St. Paul's Sunrise Banks into a banking group with $900 million in assets, 6 branches operating in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and a national prepaid card business based in Sioux Falls, SD, representing 25 percent of revenues.

Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

The Bendigo Community Bank Model
Capital Institute

More from Capital Institute

  1. Regenerating Tottenville
    Through activating storytelling, Regenerating Tottenville unearths the history of New York City's southernmost tip, and, for the first time, reveals-...

  2. Regenerative Communities Network
    Building on eight years of documenting exemplary regeneration projects through the Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy and exploring the principles...

  3. Future of Finance Blog
    On the "Future of Finance" blog, we grapple with the critical challenges we face as we seek to transform our economy and our financial system in ways...

  4. Regenerative Capitalism
    Since our founding in 2010, Capital Institute and our collaborative network have been on a learning journey…searching for a path that would lead us...

  5. A Year in the Life of First Green Bank
    The "A Year in the Life of First Green Bank" project poses a critical question for our uncertain times: Can the tools of finance and banking be used...

  6. Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy
    Through collaborative storytelling Capital Institute’s award-winning Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy takes us to the places where the...

  7. The Superfiduciary Knowledge Project
    Never in the history of the world has there been such a concentration of investment power under the direction of such a relatively few institutions...