An Initiation into Enduring Prosperity

Updated March 16, 2026

We wrote this for wealthy individuals who understand the likely consequences of extreme inequity, and for heads of family offices who sense that the system is working as designed, with horrifying results. We wrote it for entrepreneurs who know that another AI tool cannot carry us through the crucible we've arrived at, and for leaders who cannot unsee the signals of paradigm shift. We wrote it for business owners who confront unprecedented levels of uncertainty daily, and for anyone who understands no one but us can build the alternative.

There is another way.

We're inviting you into the founding of a Regenerative Finance Node in New York City. Over six months, a small group of mavericks, financiers, entrepreneurs, city leaders, academics, and makers will deepen their knowledge of the field, connect with the most compelling practitioners, build a rigorous vision document, and stand up a working group with real skin in the game, putting real money to work to learn and gain returns.  We'll have launched the NYC Node within the year. The details are at the end of this piece. We start here because we want you to hold that destination in mind as you read what follows.

Finance can be a nutrient. It's possible to design our financial instruments to support life in all of its diversity, to circulate, to move where resources are most needed, to reanimate local communities, to create meaningful value for investors, growers, makers, sellers, buyers, and citizens alike.

Regenerative finance aims to do all of this. It is an essential component of regenerative economics, which starts from a radical premise. We can design our economy to be in service to human flourishing. At its core, regenerative economics is a set of design principles that heal some of our most familiar and outdated binaries:  stewardship/profit, scale/place, care/ROI.

Grounded in current science (and, not incidentally, affirming much indigenous wisdom), regenerative economics arises from three core axioms.

• All healthy living systems operate along a set of principles that include circulation, dynamic balance, responsiveness, and right relationship.

• The human economy is one such system, subject to the same dynamics.

• For the economy to return to health it must align with those principles.

And because the alignment is fractal, every part of regenerative economics embodies the whole.

Its proponents include John Fullerton at Capital Institute, Rebecca Henderson, Ernesto Van Peborgh, and Samantha Power among many others. Donella Meadows laid down many of its core tenets starting in the 1970s. Wendell Berry, whose work the mainstream spent decades pushing to the margins, articulated with characteristic lucidity how a thriving economy should work, rooted in place, in affection, in stewardship. Retrieving that wisdom and restoring it to the center is part of what the movement demands.

Regenerative finance, a fractal of regenerative economics, is nothing less than an audacious reimagining of how money functions.

What It Looks Like in the Wild

The Field Guide to a Regenerative Economydocuments a growing body of early experiments. Three stand out.

Structured as a franchise with certain characteristics of a cooperative, the Bendigo Community Bank Model arose in response to the contraction of banking services and economic decline in rural Australia. Three hundred and five community bank branches now operate across the country, in rural towns and urban centers alike. Through local decision-making and empowerment, Bendigo has infused more than A$1.5 billion into local communities to date. A$37 million has gone to local shareholders in dividends. A$125 million in grants has funded local projects.

Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union (BCoop) helps its members build and retain more of their hard-earned wealth and keep it circulating to promote what Jane Jacobs would call "the reliable prosperity" of the communities where they live and work. BCoop now holds about $23 million in assets, up from around $300,000 in 2001, and membership has grown to 6,000. It extends between 40 and 50 small business loans annually, in amounts as large as $250,000 but averaging $20,000 to $22,000, making it among the most active business lenders in Kings County by number of loans extended.

Kate Poole, a comic artist and partner in her family's real estate investment trust, has dedicated herself to moving inherited wealth into the control of communities from which it was extracted. She redistributes capital through low- or zero-interest loans to friends, family, cooperative businesses, and groups in her Philadelphia community, with the bulk of her investments flowing into CDFIs and community investment opportunities focused on racial justice and shared power.

The emerging field also includes companies across the globe, Interface, Gore-Tex, and Patagonia among them, that have adopted core principles of regenerative economics. Much of what feels new about regenerative economics and finance is very old, like regenerative agriculture, and remains standard business practice in places like Japan. Certain cultures have organized their economies around regenerative principles for centuries and have the holistic wealth to show for it. That track record should give us hope.

Opportunity Can Look Like a Toy

The regenerative finance movement recalls the early internet, when the mood began to shift. The curious and eager began joining the hobbyists and tinkerers who had already built primitive web pages and micro-communities. Once early adopters began seeing the possibilities, things moved very quickly, from barebones HTML to web-native companies worth billions of dollars, many still dominating our economy today.

Regenerative finance sits at a similar stage and carries similar potential. Many will dismiss it as a pipe dream. A few will sense the possibilities. That core group is enough to take advantage of what we see as an enormous opportunity to cohere the nascent movement, amplify it, and demonstrate how regenerative finance can deliver genuine and widespread prosperity.

We propose to make New York City a leading node in the global Regenerative Finance network. The five boroughs are home to many of the most skilled minds in finance, some of the most ambitious entrepreneurs alive, and a dense concentration of heretical creatives. We’re exceptionally good at translating the future into the present. We can draw on people who have had stellar careers in finance, technology, marketing, and making, and who are ready to lend their skills and energy to a new paradigm.

And there is another reason to begin today.

New York City's knowledge economy in finance, law, technology, professional services, and media generates an estimated 55–65% of the city's $1.354 trillion GDP and accounts for roughly 1.65–1.85 million jobs, with a median income of approximately $100,000–$110,000 per year. Workers in these sectors collectively contribute an estimated $10–13 billion annually in city personal income tax alone.

AI may hollow all of it out faster than any previous disruption, with job loss concentrated in higher-income brackets and likely accompanied by slower re-employment timelines. The argument we’re making is for urgency. Communities and institutions that begin building alternatives today will be the ones standing when the transition completes.

We're aware of the paradox of framing New York City as something akin to a capital of regenerative finance. The movement attempts to redress the unintended consequences of globalization and financialization, and it is emphatically place-based. Mechanisms developed in one locale or bioregion won’t necessarily make sense in other cities or regions. And yet New York City, home to dozens of microeconomies, is particularly conducive to experimentation. And we intend to send the work far beyond its borders, starting by inspiring other cities and leaders.

Your Choice

Some argue that in times of great destabilization, we must navigate three realities at once. The failing status quo. The turbulent transition space. And the desired future that aligns with our changed constraints. We expect you can recognize all three in a given week. Regenerative finance lives in that third horizon, which means it can appear nearly nonsensical from the vantage point of business as usual. Our banks, insurers, and governments have become skilled at describing what’s failing and what’s in flux. None of them can build a new system. They can hardly see it.

You have the capacity, and the responsibility, to choose what comes next. You can defend the status quo, and many will, because the familiar feels safer even when the numbers say otherwise. You can imagine the current system is fixable, that the right policy adjustment or technology will bend the curve back toward equilibrium. Or you can build something new, designed to align with life from the ground up. We’re inviting you to build.

The challenge runs deep. Today, regenerative finance is a young and fragmented movement. Many people, including heads of family offices, angel investors, and corporate leaders, are intrigued by the prospect of finance as a nutrient but are afraid to go first. We understand. 

What's made most of us successful over the past three decades, in tech, in finance, in building organizations, sits in direct tension with much of what regenerative economics asks of us. It contravenes familiar logic. It requires retrieving wisdom from the margins, from Wendell Berry, from indigenous land stewards, from the community bank organizers, from the cooperative founders who never got a TED talk. The retrieval feels risky, because it is. It also feels necessary, which is probably why you're still reading.

The regenerative agriculture movement shows us what’s possible. While far from mainstream, its progress over the past decade has been stunning. This is no accident. A cadre of mavericks understood that growing food in harmony with nature required profound culture change, across all scales, from individual hearts and minds to national institutions and global markets. And so they did more than focus on the fields. They simultaneously transmitted decades of technical expertise, made markets, opened the Overton window through story, and deployed capital to help farmers transition their acreage even when insurers balked. The mechanisms are available to us, the pattern legible.

The Path: NYC Regen Finance Node

We can begin today.

What We're Building and What We're Asking

We're standing up a Regenerative Finance Node in New York City, a working group of 15–25 founding members who share a conviction that the moment demands a new operating system for money.

We plan to launch within six months, with a start date to be determined. Each founding member contributes $10,000–$20,000 as skin in the game. We're building together, and the contribution reflects that commitment. The funds will cover operating costs as well as 5 scholarships for people ready to roll up their sleeves who require financial support - including members of Gen Z.

The time commitment runs approximately six to eight hours per month for the first three months, split between virtual sessions, reading, and in-person gatherings. The second three months will be a bit more intensive as we move into active fundraising and the Node launch.

We will structure the initial entity as a hybrid nonprofit/for-profit, the fastest path to getting started. We expect to shift toward a more innovative structure (steward ownership, for example) as the work matures.

Our advisory team will include leaders from finance, local government, nonprofits, academia, and key figures in the global regenerative finance field. We're also starting conversations with organizations doing the most interesting work in the space.

Months 1–3: See, Connect, Train

The first three months are about deepening, connecting, and building the conditions for what comes next. We convene online and in person to explore the field together, its history, its most promising protocols, the enterprises already built around these mechanisms. We visit sites where regenerative finance already operates in New York City. We read across genres and cultures, because language constitutes reality. What we cannot imagine, we cannot speak, and what we cannot speak is difficult to build.

We also expand the advisory team and open conversations with complementary organizations. We're looking for people who want a seat at the table and intend to use it.

The output of the first phase is a robust advisory board and a detailed, actionable vision document to stand up the NYC Node and anchor our Year 1–2 fundraise.

Training: Building the Nervous System for Work at the Edge

Being heretical demands courage. Sitting at a table with real estate developers, city officials, bankers, and citizens and holding a vision that hews to the principles of regenerative economics is genuinely demanding. It requires the capacity to sit with contradiction and paradox without constricting, shutting down, or defending a position. Our educational system never taught us how. Most professional development skips it entirely.

Training is woven into our model, though we recognize that members will commit to different depths. At minimum, we invite founding members to participate in immersive two-day workshops in Yiquan (Mindboxing) designed to build exactly the capacity the work requires. The practice shifts constant vigilance toward calm readiness, so that a state of lack gives way to one where abundant opportunity becomes visible and the daily seduction of polarity dissolves into the lucidity of integration. You can learn more about our training here.

Our reading and writing practice functions as a form of training in its own right. The texts are designed to expand the aperture of your vision to encompass more of life, its possibilities and contradictions, without collapsing.

We're asking founding members to cultivate the quality of nervous system coherence that building a new operating system for money, while the old one is still running, actually demands.

Months 4–6: Fundraise Sprint

The second three months are a fundraise sprint. With our vision document complete, our advisory board assembled, and our working group cohered, we’ll be able to quickly build out the Year 1–2 operating budget for the NYC Node. We’ll have the structure, the relationships, and the story. We need capital, and the founding members' early contributions will have given us the proof of concept that makes the raise possible.

We aim to launch the NYC Node by the end of Month 6. As a founding member, you will be instrumental in creating the enterprise and will be able to contribute across any of its four core dimensions of protocol development, mythmaking, funding, and market making.

A Darker Truth

Money that does not circulate rots. Concentrated wealth corrodes more than the individual who holds it. It curses bloodlines, wreaking havoc for generations. The Norse myth of Fafnir, which inspired both Wagner and Tolkien, is one of the perennial stories we tell ourselves about what gold does when it pools in a single cave.

We’ve seen repeatedly how deploying funds along the principles of regenerative finance restores health and balance, revitalizing individuals, families, and the communities they inhabit. The path, however narrow and difficult to see, exists.

The New York City Regen Finance Node is calling.