Our Impact

2024 Update

We're proud of the organization you are helping us build and would love to share a few highlights of Soil Centric’s 2024 impact:

Let’s Start with the Stories: We love to tell stories because by opening one up to other people, species, and cultures, stories help shape who we are, what we value, and where we’re headed. In her Q & A series, our esteemed colleague Judy Schwartz interviews trailblazers in regeneration while expanding our thinking about what is possible on the climate front. This year we featured original interviews with Koen van Seijen, host of the lively Investing in Regenerative Ag podcast, beaver-advocate extraordinaire, Brock Dolman, and Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a champion of pastoralists and author of the eye-opening book “Hoofprints on the Land.” Congratulations to Köhler-Rollefson who was recently invited to be a 2025 Bellagio Fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation. Additionally, Diana wrote an essay about her experience at Regeneration Academy in rural Spain that we posted here. This month Diana was invited back to the “Flipping the Table” podcast. Listen to her conversation about finding strength in nature’s innate power of renewal with host Michael Reid Dimock.

Local to Global: In May we were very humbled to learn that Diana was recognized as one of 25 Women Shaping Our Future by the French initiative ChangeNOW. Such global recognition is energizing and affirming. In July we received the welcome news that Soil Centric was the recipient of the $5,000 in funds raised by the town of Fairfax California’s annual Ecofest. We love how these acknowledgments span the local to the global. They remind us that regeneration can take place all over, and it starts where you are!

Support Given: In October, thanks to new gifts made to our Intergenerational Fund, we were able to help four more people attend the “Grazing for Resilience” intensive shepherding camp where participants learned skills that are in high demand in the arid west. And this Holiday Season we were also able to support pastoral communities in Zimbabwe via the Igugu Trust.

Cultivating Leadership: The 2024 Regenerative Action Ambassadors were an incredible group of emerging leaders. This second cohort came to us with deep commitment and ambitious projects. During our nine-month learning journey together, world-class speakers shared their challenges and successes, giving us a more comprehensive understanding of how to regenerate our landscapes, climate, and communities with integrity. Thank you to Byron Shelton, Senior Program Director at the Savory Institute; Neal Spackman, a specialist in regenerative blue economy, water, soil, and food systems; Cole Bush, owner of Shepherdess Land & Livestock; Anthony Myint, Executive Director of Zero FoodPrint; Alexandra Groome Klement Director of Programs at nRhythm and Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin CEO of Tree-Range Farms. The speakers tell us that they look forward to these conversations because the RAA participants bring so much thoughtfulness and energy. In fact, Kyle is still charged up from organizing and facilitating the 2024 RAA program! Next year, we are offering two cohorts (February - June and September - January ‘26). Apply by January 15th for this leadership development program.

Soil Centric is 100% funded by YOU - our community. Your generosity has helped us get this far! With four solid programs in place, and 50,000 people served through our online resources we are ready to grow and bring tens of thousands more people into this uplifting work. Here’s how you can help:

Make a tax-deductible gift supporting Soil Centric. (Paypal is great; Checks are even better). We know your inboxes are bursting with end-of-the-year requests. In making your decisions please note that there is zero excess here at Soil Centric and that any amount helps us to provide intentional, quality mentoring of future leaders, surface inspiring stories, provide one-on-one coaching, and keep our app loaded with fresh regenerative opportunities! (Sneak preview: Kyle’s hard at work designing and building the next version of SC’s web app so that we can reach even more future regenerators in 2025).
If you know of a business that is part of the 1% for the Planet network and would be interested in supporting Soil Centric’s mission, we’d love an introduction!

With gratitude to you and the work you are doing.

Team Soil Centric,

Diana, Kyle, and Judy

2023 Update

Inaugural Cohort of Regenerative Action Ambassadors

In March as part of our partnership with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, we launched the first cohort of Regenerative Action Ambassadors (RAA). Thanks to dedicated funding for the program, we hired a coordinator to help lay RAA’s foundations. Throughout our online meetings, ambassadors were able to engage directly with leaders in regeneration including:

Jesse McDougall, first-generation farmer and co-owner of Studio Hill, a newly accredited Holistic Management Training Hub
Brittany Cole Bush, founder of Shepherdess Land & Livestock, a company engaged in climate-beneficial fire prevention using goats and sheep
Ryan Peterson, Chez Panisse alum and Associate Director of the Climate Farm School at Terra.do
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, CEO of Tree-Range Farms an enterprise transforming the food system through regenerative land practices, animal health, and family farmer profitability
Spencer R. Scott & Nick Schwanz, co-founders of Solar Punk Farms, a queer-run, regenerative agro-tourism working farm in Guerneville, California

Ambassadors were also provided with networking opportunities, a platform for open discussion, and one-on-one climate coaching. Feedback from our first cohort was super positive: 100% of them would recommend the program and would like to be invited to future RAA speaker sessions. Here are a few of their reflections:

“The Regenerative Action Ambassador program has been an invaluable source of support and inspiration, empowering me to cultivate my passion for regenerative living and agroecology.”

“Soil Centric's RAA program was a great space to connect with people passionate about regeneration! Thank you for creating somewhere special for people to come to share experiences and discuss ideas and learn from really awesome people doing meaningful work.”

“I appreciate the knowledge you have shared as well as your hopeful energy and enthusiasm for what the future could look like.”

“Being the first cohort of RAA was fun and exciting. I always looked forward to receiving the email that let us know what our agenda topics would be and who the next badass guest speaker would be. At the start of the program, I felt like I had a good grasp of “who’s who” in the regenerative arena but each and every guest speaker added to my knowledge. Not to mention adding to my connections!! This is an invaluable aspect of the program. I also appreciated having the opportunity for a free mentoring session. I got to brainstorm with a person I’d been wanting to meet for quite some time, and as a writer, her notes were creative and motivating. For anyone interested in trying to figure out what their role in the regen ag movement might be, RAA is a good place to start. Connections, resource guides, supportive cohort, and engaged Soil Centric staff is what you can expect. And as with most things in life, you get out of it, what you put in.”

Throughout our time together, our six ambassadors explored their paths and deepened their commitment to regeneration. Here’s how their regenerative journeys have unfolded over the past year:

Megan has become a monitor for the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification and has signed up to be the first person representing the environment on her city council
Abby worked the wine grape harvest in the Napa Valley
Haley learned the reality of what farming entails and is exploring ways to help advance regeneration outside of farm work
Gianna volunteered weekly at Alemany Urban Farm and learned all aspects of the operation
Jenny was awarded a Healthy Soils grant from the state of New Mexico for her farm
Ben is back at Alma Verde in Chile where he’s building a free permaculture school

Now that the RAA program is established, we will gradually expand the number of participants and are excited to keep building community through this program in 2024.

Intergenerational Support

Soil Centric’s Intergenerational Fund (IGF) was founded to honor Diana’s late mother, Suzanne Saunders Donlon, who dedicated herself to creating bonds across generations. The IGF is designed to help remove barriers to access for newcomers to regeneration eager to learn practical land-based skills. The 2023 round of funds provided direct support to the first intensive “Shepherd’s Bootcamp” this past October in Ojai, California. Shepherdess Land & Livestock used the IGF funds to help defray costs for four participants. Shepherd’s Bootcamp meets all of our criteria for the IGF: It is being run by trusted colleagues. By working with sheep and goats, Bootcamp attendees gain highly sought-after, practical skills that are critical to protecting environments from catastrophic wildfires, sequestering carbon, and enhancing biodiversity.

Purposeful Storytelling

We provide a counter-narrative to the paralysis engendered by climate-doomerism. We commission interviews with both established and emerging regenerative leaders, whose stories are full of applied hope and action! This year’s round-up included Judy Schwartz’s special interviews with Leah Penniman, Spencer R. Scott, and Nick Schwanz; a first-person account from the Cohens, a family farming regeneratively in the Catskills; and our regular summer book recommendations. (Note, it is important to us to pay speakers for their time and writers for their posts. Part of your support enables this). We also welcomed two new stellar advisors to our board: Brittany Cole Bush and Malika Vaz, Co-founder and CEO of Untamed Planet and host/director/producer of National Geographic Explorer.

Behind the Scenes of the Pathfinder App

Our curated database of over 500 regenerative organizations, opportunities, and resources powering the Pathfinder App sets Soil Centric apart. By highlighting the incredible breadth of this emerging movement, we are helping to grow and spread talent much like a mycelial network. At the end of last year, we set a goal to double our app users, we’re excited to report that we quadrupled it to 4,000 in 2023. We’re not stopping there! To enhance our small team’s capabilities we kicked off a project to create an automation tool with a talented developer to help us tackle the tedious process of frequently verifying the status of each opportunity. Going forward this new tool will save us thousands of dollars and a ton of time!

2022 Update

Regenerative Storytelling

Our Regenerative Action blog is brimming with new voices. Your support allows us to amplify the stories of real people on their regenerative path. These stories illuminate the diversity of pathways into regenerative work, and your support allows us to compensate our writers fairly. Since most of our articles are cross-posted by our partners over multiple platforms, each story drives hundreds of people to the Soil Centric site. Some of our favorite 2022 pieces include “Grazing for Good” by modern-day shepherdess Brittany Cole Bush; Judy Schwartz’s Q & A with Houston-Based regenerative artist Cindee Klement; and “My Week at Climate Farm School” by aspiring regenerator turned Soil Centric team member Caroline Santinelli.

Our short monthly newsletter is another way we regularly engage with our growing community of users. As mentioned in our October letter, our engagement is consistently double the standard nonprofit open rate of 25.17%. What we didn’t say publicly is that our regular readers represent the “Who’s Who” of the Regeneration, Climate and Food movements – best selling authors, esteemed soil scientists, and global policy leaders.

Community-Building Events

In November we were finally able to meet once again in person with Bay Area friends at the Patagonia store in San Francisco for an author event with Kristin Ohlson. Kristin, a founding member of Soil Centric’s Advisory Board, was in conversation with Diana about Kristin’s wonderful new book: Sweet in Tooth and Claw - Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World (Patagonia Press, 2022). We stunned the store with our turnout. By the time we began, it was standing room only, as 50+ people across three-generations settled in to listen and learn. The evening included lively conversation about reciprocity, a raffle, refreshments and a book signing. Soil Centric was Patagonia’s featured non-profit for the event, and we are looking forward to future collaborations with this regeneratively-oriented company!

On World Soil Day (December 5th) we co-hosted a Climate & Food Systems salon for women. Together these bright female leaders discussed the connection between industrial food systems and the climate crisis with Robyn O’Brien, a Managing Director at rePlant Capital. Robyn outlined opportunities to redirect financial capital to scale climate solutions on farms, and Diana complemented Robyn’s talk by outlining paths for people to engage directly with regeneration.

Measuring Our Reach

In 2022 we added over 250 fresh opportunities to Soil Centric’s pioneering Pathfinder App. These opportunities range from practical courses to regenerative travel to on-farm apprenticeships that engage users in real regenerative work. We reached a milestone of 10,000 site & App visitors, a 35% increase from 2021. Soil Centric community members reached out weekly about how our resources are preparing them for job interviews, exposing them to opportunities they never knew existed, and generally deepening understanding of how we can work together to heal the Earth.

We’re also excited to include our own offerings in the Pathfinder App next year! With your continued support, we will be launching the first cohort of our Regenerative Action Ambassador program in February 2023 to spread the word about opportunities to heal the Earth.

Your support allows Soil Centric to be a leading digital resource for folks pursuing education and careers in the regenerative movement!

International Recognition

In February of 2022, the United Nations invited Soil Centric to become an Actor for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. As an Actor, Soil Centric helps amplify the UN Decade to ‘prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.’ We are honored by this global recognition, and look forward to continuing our impact on the global stage.

In our first international appearance, the DO Lectures invited Soil Centric’s Executive Director Diana to speak in Cardigan, Wales. (You’ll find a link to her talk, "An Invitation from Mother Earth" here.) The DO Lectures motto can be boiled down to “Don't just stand there, DO something.” With thousands of visitors to their website, they promote ideas that inspire change and promote new systems of thinking. We were reaching well beyond the proverbial choir and helping people understand the global potential of regeneration! The DO Lectures also led to our first climate coaching clients–vintners in the U.K.