Living Regions Lab

Every region is a living system. We help yours thrive.

IBE’s Living Regions Lab partners with community foundations, funders, and regional leaders to build regional capacity to work as a whole. We do this by revealing a region’s unique character and potential, guiding strategic investment, growing catalytic projects into their full promise, and convening the region to reflect and renew after a crisis or period of sustained effort.

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Why This Work Matters

Regions hold the systems that shape our lives. Caring for the whole is work that belongs to everyone — yet no single entity is responsible for it.

Housing, water, health, jobs, land — the systems that support life are shaped at the regional scale. But most organizations work at smaller scales or on single issues. Data lives in silos, plans and responsibilities stop at jurisdiction lines, and the work of acting on lessons learned rarely has a steward.

As regions navigate change and complex challenges, fragmentation, duplicated efforts, and lack of a coherent strategy result in missed opportunities and wasted resources. There is another way. By seeing clearly what makes a region unique and what it can become, regional leaders can move strategically toward investments and efforts that grow vitality, viability, and the region’s capacity to shape its own future. In working this way, efforts compound: each investment reinforces the others and the whole becomes stronger than the sum of its parts.

“The Intersections report provides a new way to look at data and think about how we function as a region, and a new way of understanding our region’s interdependence. This report has been a catalyst in starting important community conversations about how we can work collaboratively to address our common challenges.”

Kristin Todd

President & CEO, NoCo Foundation

Rooted in Regenerative Development

Where conventional planning views a region as having a set of problems to fix, our work starts from a different question: What is this place at its essence and what is it capable of becoming? The Lab draws on IBE’s decades of regenerative development practice and is part of the Regenesis Institute’s Global Research & Development Network.

How We Work

A structure for growing regional vitality, not a one-time study or activity

A region is not a collection of separate problems — it’s a living whole, with its own character, assets, and potential. Living Regions Lab helps communities work in service to that whole through an evolving cycle — not a single study or intervention, but through ongoing efforts to help the region adapt, evolve, and thrive. Each cycle strengthens the next, building increasing levels of capacity for collaboration, cohesion, and strategic action.

Sensemaking & Reporting

See the whole region clearly.

Our community-engaged research brings together data from across sectors and organizations, layers in lived experiences, and culminates in a visually rich, publicly shareable story of your region’s unique essence and the forces and trends most relevant to its future. The resulting Living Regions Report features the wellbeing indicators that matter most in your region and because it is built with, not about, the community, offers an immediately actionable springboard for collective action.

Enlivening Initiatives

Put investments to work.

We help regions realize the full potential of their projects and initiatives in creating systemic benefit. Because complex efforts tend to collapse into simply getting the work done, we steward them in ways that keep higher-level potential alive: throughout implementation, we facilitate workshops and meetings that map connections, bring unfolding dynamics into focus, and leverage the university’s research capacity and technical expertise. In this way, we help projects and initiatives adapt and evolve as the region itself keeps changing.

Collective Strategizing

Find where action multiplies.

With shared understanding of the region’s uniqueness, we provide structure for regional leaders to explore what the region is capable of becoming in a changing world. This is deliberately spacious work: time to learn together, lift above day-to-day demands, and see the whole picture. From this shared vantage, we lead the group to identify strategic initiatives, interventions, and investments that will meaningfully contribute to wellbeing, no matter what the future holds.

Reflecting & Evolving

Pause, learn, and renew.

Some moments deserve a pause: when a major effort concludes, when natural disaster strikes, after a long period of strain. At these times, regions and the communities that inhabit them need time to reflect and choose where to focus their energy next. We design and facilitate that pause, helping people remember the uniqueness of their region and how to keep it evolving rather than collapsing or calcifying. Pauses take the form of guided retreats, structured after-action reviews, or community listening sessions that feed into the continual cycle of becoming.