Subawardee

Grasslands 2.0, UW-Madison

Project Lead

Project Description

We work with several Wisconsin communities in Learning Hubs, place-based conversations focused on achieving community-wide goals that include range of outcomes such as clean water, flood mitigation, healthy soil, and profitable farming enterprises. These conversations are framed by a process we call Collaborative Landscape Design and its 5 core elements: Connecting People, Envisioning Novel Landscapes, Designing Supply Chains, Planning Enterprises, and Institutionalizing Change. Our ‘theory of change’ is that significant, iterative, and deliberative engagement in this process at regional/watershed levels of spatial resolution is critical to collectivizing individual voices as these communities take ownership of their shared futures and create a path towards that future. The power of these voices, demanding and working toward transformative change, should be impossible to ignore by actors in ‘the System’ – manifested as public policies and private markets – and help drive and incentivize change. Grassland 2.0 is embedded in a network of partners including farmers and practitioners, supply chain managers, investment firms and financial services providers, non-governmental, municipal, state and federal partners all interested in advancing genuinely regenerative agriculture that provides for our wants and needs today, while building capacity for future generations to do the same.  This work is collaborative and practical, but also explores the theories of how to transform social systems, such as the coupled socio-ecological system that is agriculture.  Within our academic institution we train students and work with staff and other faculty to understand and be part of these collaborative systems of engaged research.

Award Amount

$68,685