Regenerative Education
Helping your school unlock it's potential
HeartBridge Collective uses Regenerative principles to help schools unlock their potential instead of just maintaining the "status quo."
How Can Regenerative Principles Help Your School?
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Increase teacher engagement and connection to purpose
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Increases teacher and staff agency and autonomy
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Fixes communication problems between administrators and staff
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Increases organic innovation instead over external "best practices"
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Establishes a culture built on community strengths
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Allows for evaluation and evolution of roles
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Decreases teacher burnout and disillusionment with leadership
What does Regenerative mean?
Our idea of Regeneration comes from the theory of Regenerative Design. This theory describes the processes that organizations can use to restore, renew, or revitalize their own sources of energy and resources. Regenerative organizations use a Living Systems approach to create resilient, equitable, and sustainable systems that integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature.
A Regenerative Organization is built on the idea of living systems. A living system is the complex system that makes up the biology of most organisms. They are open, self-organizing, and interact with their environment. They are maintained by flows of information, energy, and matter. Regenerative organizations model themselves after living systems because of the processes that encourage life to continue to renew and evolve. This is contrasted with systems that are modeled after machines.
What is a Living System?
What is A Regenerative School?
A Regenerative School is a living, evolving, and naturally functioning organization built on the foundations of increasing the health and well-being of every member of the "ecosystem" of the school. In this model, schools are operated as if they were living organisms who exist to grow and nurture its members.
This is in stark contrast to the mechanistic, industrial model that schools have followed since the 20th century. In this model, members are treated as cogs of the overall machine. Teachers and staff are the tools meant to fashion students into products ready for the job market. This model has no interest in health and well-being, outside of keeping the process constantly moving.
The Principles of Regeneration
Regenerative organizations rely on principles and frameworks, instead of the rules that must be followed in the more traditional, mechanistic organizations. These principles help guide an organization but are not designed to rule decision-making. Each situation is unique and requires critical thinking, which can be decreased by “best practices.” Let’s take a look at the principles that a Regenerative organization can use:
Holism: We design and operate with the understanding that we are living beings and that life creates the conditions necessary to sustain itself. Therefore, we believe we need to create organizations and living systems that sustain the living beings that work and exist in them.
Evolutionary: Living systems maintain a dynamic balance with their surrounding environment and adapt to constant change. Regenerative organizations are designed to evolve and change, strengthening their resolve to be relevant in the future.
Interdependence: Living systems actively and consciously create the conditions necessary to sustain life. Therefore, we must consciously care for those relationships and conditions that are interdependent with the health of the organization. We need a thriving community of team members, clients and partners for abundance and resilience to emerge as well as thriving environments to support them.
Developmental: All members of living systems are in constant growth and development and the health of system is dependent on the health of its members. We design and operate our organizations in a way that creates the conditions for all members to grow and thrive in conjunction with the health of the system.
Uniqueness: An unfinished being needs to have the ability to develop, including systemic thinking skills and personal mastery of their state of being, in an uncertain and volatile world. We operate under the belief that every person is original and has the potential for individual genius.
Potential to Flourish:
In a living system, potential is life itself. There is energy that exists in potential that is waiting to be released. As we model our organizations after living systems, we bring awareness to the need to focus on the potential of each member. In this way, we can help build processes that ensure that all members thrive and flourish.
