What is Regeneration for ReFi San José?
Many of us first encountered the term regeneration while working on the land. We first heard it mentioned as “soil regeneration”, this process of nurturing, improving, making our soil healthier and more diverse than before.
Now we apply the concept to our relationships and practices: with our planet, with other fellow humans and animals, and with ourselves. This nurturing process Involves how we do business, how we produce our food, how we collaboratively foster the ecosystem services available and how we take care of each other's emotional and physical well being.
The Key for ReFi San José:
Regenerating our relationships and practices applying the best of web3.
Regenerative Finance (ReFi) is a movement that reunite a diverse and global group of founders, activists, innovators and leaders looking to apply the best of web3 to the benefit of People and the Planet.
We have seen a first wave of ReFi mostly focused on carbon credits, with a global first and more reactive/punitive approach. This first wave emerged from our collective fear and urgency in front of Climate Change. And it has been powerful, and it is working to some extent. But we wonder, what comes next?
We believe the second wave of ReFi is emerging at the same time in many places of the World. And one of those places is Costa Rica. A second wave that emerges from Hope and Abundance, focused on local-first initiatives that are collaborative and that help us find what multidimensional wealth could look like.
To be at the center of this second wave of ReFi innovation, San José needs to be that connector between rural and urban experiences. Between web2 and web3 solutions. Ensuring that the lack of learning and innovation opportunities in rural areas is something from the past.
Young people from rural areas should find enough vibrant, exciting opportunities to make a living locally, have an impact and create wellbeing for them and their regions, instead of moving to the city in the search of a better future.
The resources and the capital should flow directly to the places in which regeneration is happening. Also San José needs to ensure that urban-marginal, peripheral neighborhoods suffering from a high concentration of cement and asphalt, become focus of regeneration of green spaces, increasing the commons in the city too.
San José needs to inspire the growing impact, startup, web3 ecosystem, full of founders, developers, designers, community builders looking to create value and have impact, to focus their energies and creativity into co-creating the next stage of businesses, what we call Collaborative Businesses (DAOs), those digital collectives sharing decision making and financial benefits that will deliver regenerative products, services and experiences.
These new emerging collaborative businesses are going to be supported and interconnected by ReFi San José, bringing financial resilience to our city and our country.
San José also needs to envision a better version of PSA to help conserve our biodiversity. Which new mechanisms for conservation, ecosystem services valuation and climate resilience can we co-create on this new wave?
Many needs, but we need a place to start. And a methodology. We choose to craft our initial actions in three steps:
1. Mindset change: un-learning old ideas and re-learning about regen concepts, web3, financial resilience, what is regeneration for us? What is ReFi? What is web3? positioning these concepts and building community around their intersections. In practice this means: urban and rural events/meetups/workshops, digital events, experiences, field visits and exchanges. And thanks to our first meeting as ReFi Costa Rica (March 12th) many interconnections and collaborations already emerged.
2. Co-Design: Co-creating ReFi projects with a Costa Rican flavor, co-designing new collaborative businesses, finding interconnections between existing projects, helping web2 successful ideas to move to web3. In practice this means: workshops, incubator for current and emerging ReFi leaders, access to seed funding for inclusive projects.
3. Tech: co-creating the tech our vibrant ReFi ecosystem needs, fostering local skills, redirecting current web3 creative pools to develop ReFi Projects. In practice this means: Web 3 tools & tech knowledge workshops, hackathons, collabs with existing ReFi web3 international projects.
For our initial Gitcoin Campaign we proposed to launch Verano ReFi Costa Rica 2023: Regenerating our Optimism, an inspiring collection of ReFi events to share what is possible and what is already happening in ReFi in Costa Rica; and also we want to kickstart ReFi San Jose website with our own ReFi San José Learning Path, a self paced introduction to ReFi in Spanish.
Verano ReFi Costa Rica 2023 is a series of ReFi inspired events that will be held in Costa Rica with support of ReFi San José, ReFiSpring and Asoblockchain Costa Rica. This idea emerged after Verdes and CofiBlocks organized successful ReFiSpring sponsored events in September 2022 and January 2023 that raised a lot of interest from regenerative practitioners, web3 enthusiasts and changemakers looking to explore new ideas and connections on ReFi.
Each of the events will be independently organized by ReFi San José founders and we will co-organize a closing event in San José, to showcase the founders and other regenerative and ReFi projects that are already being developed in the country or in their ideation phase, to exchange ideas, and connect in meaningful ways to further consolidate San José as a ReFi lab.
ReFi San José Learning Path is a self-paced introduction to ReFi and the ReFi Ecosystem in Costa Rica, inspired by the Cambiatus Learning Path. This is a piece of learning content that ReFi San José envisions to contribute to the web3 commons, it will be hosted in our website and Github repository, to make it available to any other Spanish speaking community to fork and adapt it to their contexts, or to other cities to adapt into their native languages.
Support our work and help us take our first steps into this vision. Join us and contribute via Giveth here.