Regenerating local communities involves fostering, restoring, and revitalizing social, economic, and environmental systems to create thriving, resilient, and sustainable places. Key strategies include empowering community-led initiatives, implementing circular economy principles, and adopting regenerative, place-sourced business models that restore ecosystems and strengthen local cultures.

Key Components of Local Regeneration:

• Community Ownership: Shifting control to local people, nonprofits, and businesses fosters authentic, lasting change.
• Regenerative Culture: Emphasizing social cohesion, diversity, and restorative justice to build resilient communities.
• Environmental Restoration: Moving beyond sustainability to actively restore ecosystem services, such as improving local biodiversity, water, and soil.
• Localized Economies: Supporting local manufacturing, circular economies, and small businesses to keep wealth within the community.
• Urban Redevelopment: Transforming neglected, high-density areas into vibrant, livable, and energy-efficient spaces.

Impact on Local Systems:

• Economic: Increases local resilience, creates jobs in sustainability and encourages local ownership.
• Social: Enhances quality of life, increases social cohesion, and empowers residents in decision-making.
• Environmental: Improves energy efficiency, reduces waste, and restores natural resources.

World Localisation Day, (June 21) is a day to celebrate and elevate the global localisation movement, and all those working to bring the economy back home, back to a human scale and back into relationship to it’s people and the Earth. Formed in 2020 as the global pandemic took hold, World Localisation Day was conceived to be a beacon to unite these initiatives under a common understanding, and provide the resources and inspiration for local economy networks to create change in their own community.

Regenerating Local Food

Regenerative mindsets, values and cultures of local communities are the foundations of equitable and sustainable food systems.

Food is more than something we eat to survive—it’s a part of how we thrive. And yet the way we produce food today threatens both people and nature, degrading our land and water, accelerating climate change and species loss, and making our farms and fields less productive over time.

Localization reconnects families and communities with nutritious, regenerative, and regionally produced food.

A movement is underway to relocalize our food. People are joining for many reasons, but chiefly because no other activity encompasses a greater range of benefits for life, health, soil, water, children, and the planet. Localization includes home and community food gardens, farmers’ markets, in-person and internet-based co-ops, community-supported agriculture (CSA), urban farming, and farm-to-table for schools and other institutions. Collectively, localization has the potential to transform food systems by supporting regional regenerative agriculture, fairer and shorter supply chains, and local decision-making.

Local Food Resources

Oshkosh Seed Savers – Oshkosh Seed Savers is a collective of food gardeners and seed savers of the Fox Valley in Wisconsin maintaining a collection of locally adapted garden seed. We share seed freely at local events and provide opportunities to learn organic food growing and seed saving methods by working with us in the OSS Seed Garden. We are all volunteers and operate as a non-profit organization.

More Oshkosh Area Local Food Resources – UW Extension Learners Garden, Sunnyview Community Garden, University Community Gardens, Solutions Recovery Club Garden, Steven’s Park Community Garden – see Truly Mutual Oshkosh map

Produce With Purpose Farm (Kaukauna) – Supporting your local food economy should be easy.

The Garden Neenah – Urban farm offering a wide range of produce and a number of local products.

Resources

Farmshed – Resource: Farmshed (Stevens Point and Central Wisconsin) – Farmshed’s mission is to grow a resilient local food economy.

The Conscious Food Systems Alliance – Resource: The Conscious Food Systems Alliance, convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.

Regenerative Food Systems – Resource: The Nature Conservancy. “We can shift to a regenerative food system, producing food on land and at sea in ways that work in partnership with the world around us. Together we can turn one of today’s biggest challenges into our greatest opportunity—a food system that goes beyond sustainable and creates positive growth for communities, economies and the planet.”

Food Localization – Resource: regeneration.org/nexus/localization Localization reconnects families and communities with nutritious, fair, regenerative, and regionally produced food.

Fair Food – Resource: Nourish Life “Everyone should have the right to healthy food, just as they should have the right to a good education for their children and access to adequate healthcare. Fair food is food grown in a way that is environmentally friendly, that is healthy, and that provides for the economic wellbeing of everybody in the system, from production to processing to distribution.”