Featured – The Rising Foundation

Future Whenua

Executive Director — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:50:42 +0000

TThe Future Whenua Collective is an innovative initiative focused on regenerating the land and fostering deep community connections across Aotearoa, New Zealand. It operates on a cohort model, selecting ten proven regenerative leaders to engage in a 10-week learning journey, culminating in a three-day gathering. This process involves collaborative discussions, skill-sharing, and the creation of an archival video pitch for each project. Funded participants receive $1,000 for their time, with an additional financial pool distributed through sociocratic decision-making. Inspired by the need for grassroots-driven environmental stewardship and resource allocation methods, the Collective aims to build a bioregional fund, attracting significant philanthropic support to empower local communities and enhance ecological resilience. This initiative embodies the principles of sustainability, collaboration, and holistic care for both the land, its people, and our kin, envisioning a future where interconnected efforts lead to a thriving, regenerative society.

Rainbow Labs

Executive Director — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:44 +0000

The Pathhacking Accelerator, a dynamic 12-week after-school STEM Accelerator Lab in South Los Angeles for LGBTQ+ high school youth, aims to combat the profound underrepresentation and systemic challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in the STEM fields. Rainbow Labs designed this program meticulously to bridge gaps in STEM education for LGBTQ+ and LGBTQI+-BIPOC youth, providing hands-on activities and mentorship in pivotal STEM areas like coding, robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. By pairing students with LGBTQ+ and LGBTQI+-BIPOC mentors who are professionals in these fields, the program offers strong role models and fosters an inclusive environment that celebrates diversity and promotes representation.

The program structure is robust, featuring bi-weekly, 90-minute sessions that allow students to engage deeply with the curriculum and develop their skills through direct interaction with their mentors. Complementing these sessions are field trips to leading STEM companies and guest sessions by professionals from major corporations such as Google and Amazon, which will provide real-world context and further learning opportunities. The project’s culmination is a Youth in STEM Panel event, enabling students to showcase their projects and network with industry leaders and peers. Rainbow Labs designed this event to affirm and strengthen community connections, enhancing the participants’ confidence and encouraging them to envision a future where they are active, recognized contributors to the STEM fields. Through this project, Rainbow Labs seeks to inspire and equip the next generation of LGBTQ+ STEM professionals, ensuring they receive the support, resources, and recognition they deserve.

Feed Black Futures

Executive Director — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:53 +0000

The project by Feed Black Futures (FBF) seeks to address systemic racism and oppression that have led to limited economic opportunities, food apartheid, and over-policing in Black communities. FBF aims to catalyze Black community interdependence by providing financial and labor support to install edible home gardens for Black Trans, cis women, and Gender Non-Conforming (GNC) caregivers. Through partnerships with Black regenerative farmers and social enterprise training workshops, the project empowers participants to grow their food, develop business skills, and access market opportunities. FBF also plans to implement a cooperative communication platform to facilitate community connections and market access. By leveraging ancestral knowledge and fostering economic empowerment, FBF endeavors to combat food insecurity and promote self-sufficiency among marginalized communities.

Sociocracy For All

Executive Director — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:43 +0000

Sociocracy For All (SoFA) aims to spread the use of egalitarian, sociocratic governance. SoFA provides content and training, supporting networks and communities of practice among people in similar sectors and language groups.

The Metasynthesis and Research on Sociocracy (MARS) project systematizes, advances, and curates the research on sociocracy and in decentralized, consent-based organizations in general. MARS has a special focus on three focus areas:

Team performance
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
Psychological safety

It will provide high-quality information for practitioners on what research shows in useful measures around those focus areas in the context of self-management. We hope to build a stronger case for our work and our colleagues to strengthen the movement overall. We’re also excited about stimulating more academic research on sociocracy and helping to focus that research around questions that are particularly useful for the field.

Agroecology Commons

Executive Director — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:26 +0000

Agroecology Commons cultivates knowledge sharing, community action, and global solidarity for decolonized land stewardship, collective healing, and justice within the food movement. We are building infrastructure for our incubator farm that provides participants from Agroecology Commons’ Farmer Mobilization, and annual Bay Area Farmer-to-Farmer Training a portion of the land to grow crops, hone skills, and launch their farm dreams with mentorship and cooperative support. The incubator farm offers shared infrastructure, tools, materials, and seeds while creating opportunities for beginning farmers to be in right relationship with land, place, and culturally appropriate food. For years to come, this farm will be covered with ancestral crops from around the world including Sierra Leone, Iraq, Philippines, Italy, and Japan to name a few; songs in many languages will be sung, and people will be cooperatively tending, growing, and learning together.

Currency Designer Guild

Executive Director — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:42 +0000

The Currency Designers Guild (CDG) creates a community of practice for individuals to co-create and prototype regenerative currencies and incentive systems in service towards a more equitable, regenerative human ecosystem. CDG is an initiative by Commons Engine to create the first decentralized community of practice for currency designers committed to the creation of regenerative economies at the local, bioregional and global levels. The mission of the CGD is to:

Create an ongoing dialogue and community of practice with regenerative currency designers who are committed to creating real-world experiments.
Explore, prototype and field test structures that empower the emergence of socio-economic systems that contribute to greater abundance, equality and freedom.