Mentorships for a Regenerative Future

I am on a mission to improve how we use land in our cities.

I believe we can reimagine cities where people live in smaller communities within cities, meet their basic needs locally, and restore wild nature where they live.

Today, in 2025, every daily need — food, housing, water, transportation, and waste management — comes with conveyance and fossil fuel energy use. As we improve how we use land in cities, we must simultaneously be training a new workforce.

Young people will need to be knowledgeable about renewable urban systems: – ecological land management -regenerative organic agriculture -smaller waste management systems -smaller renewable energy systems -smaller, onsite water collection, cleaning and storage systems

Imagine a network of Eat Grow Learn Centers where trained and mentored young people find meaningful and productive work in their own communities and neighborhoods.

My Eat Grow Learn model is based on the lifecycle of a plant and a plant community. A plant community is a system that functions in the same way as a single plant. These plant communities are connected to each other through a vast soil microbial network.

Local plant communities define our local ecology. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have more than a hundred plant communities or local ecologies. All of these plant communities are interconnected and thrive as a regional network to sustain all terrestrial life in our region.

A plant is rooted in one place and yet it meets all of its lifecycle needs. Plant communities make their own food and handle their own waste. They collect water, store it, release it, and chemically alter it. They make their own compost. They reproduce the plant community system and provide energy for its offspring to thrive, as well as all organisms that are born, live, and die in that system.

This mentorship program is how that vision takes root.