We hope for prize money to spread the word of their work to inspire more people to get involved with the regenerative movement.
There are at least two prizes in this category, with each being awarded up to £25,000. We aim to award one prize to a small scale project in this category.
The Awards went to two organisations sharing a prize fund of £50,000.
Below are the recipients and other short-listed projects.
Buzuruna Juzuruna Association started with a small idea in 2016: to produce heirloom (non-hybrid, non-GMO) seeds and make them available to local communities in Lebanon as part of wider efforts to work towards food sovereignty.
Lebanon is deeply dependent on imports for sustenance: 80-90 percent of wheat is imported and farmers mostly rely on imported hybrid seeds. The ancestral knowledge needed to produce seeds has also been lost with a huge generational gap in Lebanon in the agriculture sector and little knowledge transmission.
With the help of friends and other local permaculture initiatives, Buzuruna Juzuruna Association set up a training curriculum with a focus on agroecology practice. It provides everything that is needed to begin food production (seeds, compost, seedlings, bio inputs, information).
In addition to this training, the Association has also:
This practice (agroecology, building circular economies, equality) is part of Buzuruna Juzuruna Association’s regenerative approach.
The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) is an international organisation and vibrant community of practice that has been at the forefront of regenerative living and sustainable development for three decades.
Since its founding in 1995, GEN has united ecovillages, intentional communities, and grassroots initiatives worldwide, offering tools, frameworks, and inspiration for creating a world rooted in regeneration, resilience, and harmony with nature.
GEN’s network spans every continent, comprising thousands of ecovillages that serve as living laboratories for sustainable living. These communities provide holistic solutions to global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequity.
In 2025, GEN will celebrate its 30th anniversary, a milestone marking three decades of innovation, collaboration, and impact. This moment offers an opportunity to reflect on GEN’s achievements and launch bold initiatives to advance its vision for a regenerative future, building on its legacy to address today’s urgent challenges.
At this transformative moment it seeks support to enhance its services, share knowledge globally, and accelerate the shift to a nature-centric world. Its key priorities in 2025 include:
Dalia Association is a community foundation established in 2007 with the belief that Palestinians should control their own resources for durable development for future generations.
The Association mobilizes and properly utilizes the resources necessary to empower a vibrant, independent and accountable civil society by acting at the grassroots level, through community-controlled grant making.
Dalia Association community development approach focuses on four dimensions that ensure holistic community development: Ecological, Local economy, Social, and Cultural.
Communities are empowered by being able to control their own development through identifying problems within their community and enacting their own solutions deciding their needs and priorities.
Dalia’s approach in based on the following pillars:
Dalia means “grapevine” in Arabic. Almost every Palestinian home has a vine tree, which symbolizes that with care, a grapevine can feed, shelter, and provide beauty for generations. This is exactly what Dalia does: it enables Palestinians to become their own community partners, decision makers, and supporters.
Earth4Ever was established in 2019 to cultivate ecological health and empower marginalised farmers, with a focus on creating resilient farming models that prioritise soil health, water conservation, biodiversity, and nutrient-rich produce.
Its Vad Permaculture Demonstration Farm in Palghar, Maharashtra, India, serves as a hub for outreach and training programs. It also partners with indigenous women farmers and local NGOs to transition from chemical farming to regenerative, biodiverse systems.
Over the past five years, Earth4Ever has:
In the last 18 months, these efforts have generated 1,650 kg of fruits, herbs, and vegetables; 2,280 bunches of leafy greens; and 101 types of produce, grown on just 35,000 square feet of land.
This impact sparked a significant mindset shift in local communities, including with partner NGO, Sukhbhumi India Trust. It has now adopted permaculture principles across its other projects and been approached to train women farmers in Central India, showcasing the power of Earth4Ever’s efforts.
Forests Without Frontiers (FWF) was established in 2019 to restore and celebrate nature with the help of music and arts.
Coming from the global music scene, its founder originally wanted to give something back to the Romanian landscape she grew up in, which has been decimated by illegal logging. FWF has grown from that initiative.
In the context of a threatened and degraded natural environment, FWF collaborates with local people and partners to restore ecosystems through tree planting, tree tending and community events enriched with visual and auditory storytelling. The organisation believes in taking a whole ecosystem approach – supporting trees and forests, wildlife and people, music and art – all at once. It believes in preserving and restoring natural and cultural heritage together, recognising that they are intertwined.
FWF work is based on three driving principles:
Grassroots Economics Foundation (GrE) is a nonprofit organisation focused on empowering marginalised communities by developing decentralised economic systems, promoting social equity, and facilitating ecosystem restoration.
Founded in 2009, it has created innovative financial tools like Community Inclusion Currencies (CICs) and the Commitment Pooling Protocol, which help communities manage local resources, foster mutual aid, and regenerate ecosystems through practices like agroforestry, soil conservation, and water management. By merging traditional systems of mutual aid with modern technology, including blockchain, GrE has built resilient and inclusive economic models.
GrE operates in diverse environments across East Africa, including urban, rural, peri-urban, and refugee areas, especially in Kenya. These regions face common challenges like high unemployment, limited financial services, and environmental degradation due to deforestation and unsustainable land use. Despite these issues, these communities possess valuable cultural heritage and traditional ecological knowledge. GrE taps into this wisdom to restore ecosystems and reinvigorate economic and social structures.
Since its inception, GrE has:
Permayouth Women in East Africa is a group of four women who have been leading a wide range of permaculture education and food growing programmes, as well as activating Permayouth and Permakids groups in their communities.
Programmes have included:
The programs are free and respond to the kinds of support people ask for and the interests they show.
Much of its work takes place in refugee settlements in both Kenya and Uganda, and all four women have direct experience of being displaced and understand the daily reality of life in these communities. Community permaculture projects provide spaces where people from diverse backgrounds, including refugees from different countries and ethnic groups, can work side by side, fostering mutual understanding.
Through their collaborative efforts they have seen once-degraded landscapes come back to life with green and bird song. Reforestation efforts are restoring tree cover and sequestering carbon. A diversity of plant species has been cultivated to restore habitats, support pollinators and maintain balanced ecosystems, reducing reliance on chemicals.
Permayouth Women in East Africa receives support from the Ethos Foundation and the Permaculture Education Institute.
Pervolarides Thessalonikis is a growing grassroots voluntary movement for social mobilisation and cooperative actions in Greece. It unites locals and refugees and builds resilience for its community and vulnerable people through solidarity and social actions.
Activities have included:
Through the evolution of relations and networks, Pervolarides Thessalonikis progressively established a holistic regeneration approach based on the relations that form throughout the food cycle. From seeding, cultivation, crop collection, processing and cooking, to reclaiming, reprocessing and redistributing food that would be wasted.
Pervolarides Thessalonikis creates democratic hubs where people of all ages, ethnicities and social status come together to express freely and equally, to co-create with their neighbours and to collectively offer support and resources to those in need. Here, abilities, ideas and resources unite and form dynamic social actions and strong supportive networks, empowering people to overcome exclusion and discrimination and to heal from divisions and inequalities.
Australia’s Indigenous Rangers (land stewards) are vital: bringing together ancient knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, with modern tools like drones that monitor coral changes, forest fires and land degradation. Their work is highly valued as they achieve both environmental and employment outcomes, alongside wider social, cultural and economic benefits.
Indigenous Ranger Programs have created more than 2100 jobs in land and sea management around Australia since 2007 and yet in Queensland only 20% of Indigenous rangers are women. That’s where the Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network (QIWRN) comes in.
Established in 2018, QIWRN provides a forum for Indigenous women rangers to:
The network has helped build the next generation of women rangers and is helping to increase the number of Indigenous women caring for and regenerating their Sea Country (the sea and coastal environment), with very limited resources. Despite the lack of funds, the programme has trained over 240 women, encouraging new conservation approaches by sharing knowledge and telling stories. Members of the network have gone on to find work as rangers in Queensland or in conservation elsewhere.
Indigenous peoples make up less than 5% of the human population. But they manage or hold tenure over 25% of the world’s land and support 80% of global biodiversity. Less than 11% of the global wildlife ranger workforce is female, and so this project believes that scaling approaches to welcoming more indigenous women rangers is more crucial than ever.
Sítio Semente works with syntropic and medicinal agroforestry systems to regenerate degraded areas and to promote the health and resilience of ecosystems and communities.
It is located in Brasília, within the Cerrado biome, the second-largest biome in Brazil and one of the most threatened in the world. About 50% of its vegetation has already been deforested, mainly for agricultural expansion. The Cerrado faces serious risks of losing its endemic biodiversity and water resources, as it is home to the headwaters of the main river basins in South America.
Its main objective is to transform human impact on the planet by developing agroforestry practices that promote harmonious coexistence between people and nature. It shares knowledge through courses, visits, hands-on experiences, and consultancy services.
It began in 2005 with the aim of regenerating degraded areas through syntropic agroforestry systems, producing food, and achieving economic self-sufficiency. In the 19 years since, Sítio Semente has:
Spirit of the Sun (SOTS) is an Indigenous Womxn-led organisation that was founded in 2002 on the belief that effective and sustainable community development work recognises the intersections of culture, community, economy, and health.
After its founding, SOTS worked primarily on reservations, assisting various communities with economic development. In 2010, its strategic focus shifted to include programming in the Denver area of Colorado, US, responding to a need to empower the growing number of Native youth and young adults moving to urban areas.
In 2019, Spirit of the Sun began to focus its work on Indigenous regenerative agriculture and has been caretaking land ever since. At garden and farm spaces across Denver, SOTS works towards preserving the cultural practices of Indigenous foodways by growing traditional, bioregional foods and medicines. The land is cared for using Indigenous foodways to restore ecosystems, feed the community and preserve Indigenous cultural knowledge for future generations. SOTS also maintains a seed library of heirloom and native seeds – connecting the project to past and future generations.
This work promotes Native and Indigenous self-determination, and resiliency by addressing systemic environmental injustices and food apartheid through Indigenous food-systems sovereignty, traditional foodways, and Indigenous climate justice. Through working with local Native and BIPOC communities, SOTS seek to strengthen economic and cultural resilience through Rematriation and ancestral ecological practices, soil remediation and knowledge sharing.
Support Humanity Cameroon (SUHUCAM) is a grassroots development and environmental organization, with the objective to build inclusive, self-sufficient and sustainable communities and a world where people live happily in harmony with one another and with nature.
SUHUCAM is an accredited organization with the three Rio conventions and the United Nations Environment Program where they represent voices of communities on the frontline of Climate change.
Its key areas of intervention include ecosystem restoration, regenerative agriculture, climate change adaptation, livelihood support as well as water and sanitation. Its work focuses on women and youths in hard-to-reach communities in Cameroon.
In 2019, SUHUCAM launched Bamunkumbit Integrated Community Forest (BICFOR), a transformative initiative to restore 151 hectares of degraded land while enhancing the livelihoods of local and indigenous communities.
Since the launch of the project, several activities have been implemented to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacities of local communities. Specifically: