Following on from four years of listening, capacity building and collaboration with community-based regenerative enterprises in parts of regional Australia hardest hit by the 2020 bushfires and floods, Regen Labs has identified a critical gap around the lack of suitable finance available to those regenerative enterprises. 

We believe that a well-designed and well-run Regen Community Investment Fund can play an important role in unlocking the potential of regenerative enterprise, and help catalyse a bigger shift to a regenerative economy that breaks cycles of disadvantage in regional areas and supports vibrant, resilient, healthy families, communities and environments.

Impact Theses

We will test and iterate on our 3 ‘impact theses’, namely, that a Regen Community Investment Fund can have outsized positive impact if…

1. It adopts a place-based and systemic approach: taking a systems view in each place, aligning and leveraging other funding streams (e.g. philanthropy, government, corporate), potentially involving distributive models (eg. place-based ‘sub-funds’).

2. It focuses on enterprises that are community-centric (e.g. regenerative enterprises that feature community ownership, community wealth-building, preferential community custom/procurement) and holistic by design (social + environmental + local economic benefit).

3. It focuses on enterprises that have replicable models, and the Fund supports the efficient replication of those models both within and between regions.

Over the next few months we will test and further develop our ‘impact theses’, and validate key dimensions of the Fund against the needs of two ‘communities of interest’  (place-based regenerative enterprises and catalytic funders) and explore the potential for different flows of funding to meet those needs. If you’d like to be kept up to date as we progress, please register below.