We're planting seeds in 2025

Without requiring the services of a crystal ball, there are a few things we already know about 2025: We know that it'll have 12 months and 365 days in it. We know our global political landscape has shifted. We know we'll be at the whims of an increasingly unstable climate. And we know, despite it all, that so many millions of us will spend the next 12 months planting seeds in the hope they might one day bear branches strong enough to hold our visions of a better world. Here, Regen Melbourne CEO Kaj Lofgren reflects on why these seeds matter now more than ever.

"We are now in the long emergency, the transition, the failure of the system. And this means that the status quo is holding on grimly."

This reflection closed out 2024, when, on a call with Nicole, Alison and our mentor Mark Cabaj, I asked Mark how he's feeling about the world. Mark has a lifetime of experiences working with communities in Canada and around the world navigating complex challenges in empowered and regenerative ways. Mark was Vice President at the Tamarack Institute for many years. He is a sage, offering potent and powerful reflections on our work.

I have also felt that the economic systems that hold us today are already in a long transition. Previous economic transitions like the emergence of Keynesianism after the Great Depression and then the Second World War, or the total take-over of neoliberalism in the 1980s, were seeded and started much earlier than a coherent public narrative took hold. When the story of our current transition is written, with the climate emergency, social inequality and rapid polarisation as its backdrop, I suspect the origin story will go back past this point, perhaps to the early 2000s and the GFC when the logic of neoliberalism started to comprehensively fail.

The second half of Mark's reflections on 2024 were more unexpected and stayed with me over the summer break. He reflected that "in this context it's no longer clear what it looks like to win. The stakes have never been higher, but with a population-level lack of agency and fragile change-making ecosystems, it's time to plant, without knowing when we will be able to harvest."

It's time to plant, without knowing when we will be able to harvest.

I started my working life at Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB), back in 2006. EWB was an early-stage non-profit, and with a small group of absolute legends we built a powerful movement of engineers who sought to put a humanitarian heartbeat at the centre of a conservative and all-too-often destructive industry.

EWB did great work and continues today as a potent force for positive change. In those early days we were inspired by a bunch of impact movements including Make Poverty History, Reconciliation Australia, YGAP and many others. The tone of this period was that together we could win a better future. We could end poverty. We could reconcile a divided country.

In hindsight, an unsophisticated reflection would be that we were simply all naïve. Perhaps we were. But I suspect it's more complex than this. In darkness, as Rebecca Solnit wrote at the time, hope remains a critical ingredient to sustain energy and build new movements for positive change. Importantly, Solnit also offers up a distinction between hope and optimism:

"Optimism is a form of certainty: everything will be fine; therefore, nothing is required of us, which is really the same as cynicism and pessimism and despair. Hope is recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality."

I also prefer to think of this time at EWB as the training ground for a generation of leaders of change. I look around and I see many EWB alumni in positions of influence today. I see them in the Regen Melbourne team, and I see them leading many of our partner organisations. In a direct way, EWB's founder Danny Almagor then co-founded the Small Giants Academy, which incubated Regen Melbourne into existence.

Most recently we saw the reality of this poly-crisis in graphic and tragic ways in the California fires. For us in Melbourne the memories of Black Summer were vivid, with the new realisation that urban environments and cities are not exempt from the flames. Our social and economic systems are bending to breaking point in real time. For change-makers interested in economic systems change, it is no longer possible to rely on single-point solutions, individual campaigns, linear theories of change or simple impact metrics.

And yet, we keep planting without always knowing when we will be able to harvest.

For Regen Melbourne, the work we're doing doesn't provide short feedback loops or follow neat and simple impact logic. Our transition towards systems that have new purposes and functions, that are built for adaptation, resilience and life, are represented by long and sometimes undefined signals of change. While we're hard-wired to chase instant gratification and for our progress to be clearly visible, it may be helpful to think of our work as generational, and the seed metaphor provides ample space for that.

And so, we need to sit in the epic challenges of this moment while retaining faith that together we will create valuable pathways forwards. At times when this feels shaky, I retain faith by believing that agitating at the underlying systemic conditions, not only the symptoms, matters.

While we may not control when we can harvest or who will do the harvesting, we'll keep planting seeds with our community in 2025. And together we'll nurture the conditions so that those seeds can ultimately grow into a healthy, safe and regenerative Melbourne.