The Vision Is A Remembering.
Our Vision
We envision a flourishing and resilient Front Range Bioregion — now and for future generations — cultured by living relational networks and governed by decentralized Commons infrastructure. We see our Front Range neighborhoods managing their shared resources with intelligence and kindness, cultivating vibrant cultural expression, and flowing knowledge and care among different generations and communities.
Our Mission
Our Mission is to backbone the establishment of the Front Range Commons with care-based programs to foster solidarity within our communities and bridge to displaced original ancestors of these lands.
1) We host small Solidarity Suppers to nourish and council with elders, mothers, and community leaders.
2) We offer Commons Teach-Ins to educate people on the history, present, and future of the Commons, particularly as it relates to our responsibilities to the land and to each other as denizens of the Front Range.
3) We run Neighborhood Resiliency Programs to help neighborhoods organize their resources, relationships, and intelligences for healthy, vibrant community and clear, shared preparedness in case of disaster.
4) We raise money for the members of the Front Range Bioregional Commons to allocate to regenerative cultural and ecological projects along the Front Range using BioFi coordination and disbursement technologies.
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The upstream forest steward and the downstream farmer must coordinate regardless of their politics. The conservative rancher and the progressive permaculturist share an aquifer. Place creates relationships that ideology cannot sever.
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The revolution is not in the rhetoric — it is in the routine. We learn by doing: planting seeds, sharing meals, telling stories, showing up.
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Knowledge, land stewardship practices, and governance tools belong to the communities that create and use them. We share what works so others can adapt it. No one owns what we share among us.
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We are not designing a master plan for the Front Range. We are cultivating the conditions for good things to emerge — starting narrow and tangible, letting patterns spread like mycelium through healthy soil.
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Indigenous peoples have practiced bioregional regeneration and coordination on this land for millennia. Much of our work is a return, not a novelty. We approach this with humility and a commitment to honoring and working with the wisdom-bearers that precede us.
What Guides Us
“Our mutual interdependence is the basis of our mutual responsibility for care and reciprocity.”
WHY WE AREWhat we are really up to…
SPIRIT exists to empower, weave, and coordinate a distributed movement of local leaders engaged in economic re-localization, indigenous revitalization, neighborhood resilience, and bioregional regeneration. By lifting up and connecting existing regenerative initiatives, projects, organizations, and communities, SPIRIT serves as connective tissue for the bioregional movement on the Front Range.
We work for the Front Range Commons by building shared infrastructure, creating community-led grant-making rounds, and making regular rhythms of convening to nourish and connect the tenders of this place. Eventually, the Board of SPIRIT, we pray, will be comprised of indigenous leaders, elders, and devoted civic stewards who represent the demography of this bioregion.
SPIRIT is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit building the connective tissue for bioregional coordination along Colorado's Front Range.
This institution exists to serve the Commons, not to perpetuate itself. We are a nonprofit that acts as the vessel that interfaces with the existing world of foundations, governments, and formal partnerships. We are a transitional stewardship team handling the institutional work: education and programming, grant management, fiscal sponsorship, and legal operations.
All while we organize towards the establishment of the Front Range Commons.
The Front Range Commons
The FRC is a forming decentralized, member-governed network dedicated to cultural and ecological stewardship, and community-led resource allocation; a space where anyone can contribute, propose projects, share resources, and participate in organizational governance.
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(noun): A geographically and hydrologically defined area characterized by distinct ecological features that together form a coherent biocultural home.
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“The Commons” points to the living realities of shared place — the commonality of the ecologies and resources for which all residents of a place share responsibility, and on which all residents depend.
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A Bioregional Commons recognizes the wellbeing of human and natural systems (neighborhoods, watersheds, ecosystems, soil) as shared resources that the people who live in and depend on that land collectively steward.
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Remembering our embedded belonging to the living world invites us to reimagine our social, cultural, and economic systems according to ecological webs of relationships.
Commoning on a bioregional level directs our attentions and energies to where we can directly relate to the consequences of our stewardship, labor, and care.
Feeling inspired? Let’s weave.
Inquiries. Projects. Partnerships. Knowledge. Questions?
We would love to hear from you.