How We Work:

The Issue

Communities are often held back from making positive change by lack of a way to take all aspects of a problem into account, and use creativity, confidence, initiative, participation, and hard work to make change. The broad problem is ‘how can we use what we already know, combined with outside viewpoints and knowledge, to make proactive, positive change in harmony with the environment, the culture, and our values’?

BioRegions uses the Holistic Management process (Savory and Butterfield, 2016, Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment, Island Press, 3rd Ed.) in a long-term, bottom-up and top-down approach to exchange people and information and facilitate positive change through community partnership projects. We work with people and organizations at all levels.

Objectives

• Show how the holistic process can lead to improvements in environmental, social, economic and infrastructure wealth for people and organizations from individual to regional scales
• Show how participation in the holistic process can increase capabilities for initiative, creativity, transparency, forward thinking, civility, and cooperation/collaboration
• In areas where we work, make improvements in the status and condition of the Program Focus Areas of Whole Community, Education, Environment, Health, Traditional Skills and Knowledge, and the Arts
  Help the entities we work with to make progress towards becoming ‘ideal’ with respect to their values and vision [an ideal park, an ideal county, an ideal health promotion program, etc.]
• Accomplish mutual learning and appreciation for environment, society, and economy