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At Regenerative Farms, we’ve always believed in the power of community-driven innovation—and we built the Regeneration Hub model to be a beacon others could follow. Today, we’re proud to share a powerful example of that vision taking root and scaling globally.

(photo credit: Aaron Kalala Karumba, Founder/Director of the Association Paysanne pour l’Autosuffisance Alimentaire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, moving a new seed oil press imported from manufacturer in China, installing the new press at their Regeneration Hub near Uvira, DRC in July 2025)

RF’s Regeneration Hub Model -Designed for Replication Through Partnerships with Companies in Natural Products Industry

RF was created based on the Hub model which was pioneered by our local partners in Indonesia as well as the Peruvian Amazon. The support organization of Regenerative Farms began taking shape, with our ideas and programs being cultivated by our Founding grass-roots partners as early as 2017. The goal for the organization was to create a facilitation and support organization to help share knowledge across the globe with other grassroots community leaders with regenerative enterprises designed to incentivize forest protection. Another goal was to share the model with larger NGO’s, social enterprises, funders and governments who could adopt the model, and scale up the financing of women’s empowerment and forest and land restoration through regenerative enterprise.

After nearly a decade of hard work, long hours, and lean start-up sweat equity, the network of grassroots leaders is finally seeing its dream realized. The vision for replication by others in the natural products industry is finally coming true. Clean beauty pioneer and founder of True Botanicals, Hillary Peterson, recently launched her own nonprofit—Food Forest Network in 2025—that she based on her own experience as a natural product brand founder, but replicating and inspired in large part by many hours of advising provided by Regenerative Farms, and our detailed playbook on how to start a Regeneration Hub model. After a year of close collaboration and advising provided by RF Founder Mary Johnson, Petersen is now trying her own hand at supporting the creation of a support organization that will help the local partner introduced to her by Regenerative Farms -Seed Savers Network Kenya, in building their own “Community Regeneration Hub”. The pilot will allow Petersen, an expert in marketing and fundraising, to raise funding to support the project with the aim of installing infrastructure and services to enhance rural women farmers ability to process their avocado harvests into high-value avocado oil and earn more by a partnership for sale/export to her company and network of manufacturers, with plans to expand eventually into mango seed butter too- using processing equipment sourced from Petersen’s South African manufacturer equipment contacts.

RF’s Hub Incubation Program- Designed for Accelerating Financing, Ease of Replication & Scaling of RF’s Global Impact for Women & Environment

The launch of Petersen’s “Food Forest Network” marks a major milestone in RF’s mission to catalyze a global movement. And it builds on a growing legacy of companies and communities who have joined forces with RF over the past eight years.“This is exactly what we envisioned when we created Regenerative Farms,” says Mary Johnson, RF Founder. “We set out to develop a replicable model—we called them Regeneration Hubs—with the intention that they are about far more than crop processing -they are a center for supporting all aspects of community enterprise development, social programs that empower women, and incentives and tools plus easy access to training and finance, so it is easier for rural communities to protect and restore their ecosystems. We created this model and support organizations because it filled an important gap in the system that must be fixed if nature based climate solutions will be able to scale up and make the impact needed in the timeframes required. We created an “Easy button” -a model, tools, and training materials that could be taken up by aligned industry leaders in the private sector like Petersen, as well as governments, and civil society NGO’s, allowing many to get involved in helping communities ethically and equitably gain the resources they need to scale land restoration under their leadership. It works because off-takers of natural products grown by rural farmers/forest collectors also need this solution, so they can reduce their business risks to disruptions to ingredient supply chains from climate disruptions. Our hope is they will use the Regeneration Hub model as envisioned, to provide equity and justice, better livelihoods, and incentives that provide mechanisms for the empowerment of rural women, not just the production of agricultural products.”

The Roots of Regenerative Farms: From Forestwise and Camino Verde, to Lush, Loreal and so many others

Regenerative Farms traces its roots as far back as 2017, when founder Mary Johnson—then co-founder of Terra Genesis International—collaborated with other innovative Cosmetics companies pioneering more ethical and regenerative strategies to grow the ingredeint base for their sourcing commitments. This is when Johnson noticed a gap in the system that had to be filled if ethical companies were going to have the amount of regeneratively grown ingredients they would need. Johnson worked with contacts including Camino Verde and Forestwise’s founders to document what they had learned in over a collective 40 years of working hand in hand with forest communities. Together we drafted a vision for the creation of RF, and began documenting the sucessful methods and approaches to create community enterprises, and supportive infrastructure. RF’s founding Hub partners who attracted grant and industry investment for infrastructure and start-ups, included:

• the Drylands Natural Resources Center (Kenya): Now a Moringa oil production hub, training center, and nursery serving farms run by 860 women farmers.
• Camino Verde (Peru): Cacao batch fermenters and solar dryers
• Jalisco Jojoba (Arizona): Jojoba oil from a family-run regenerative desert farm
• Forestwise (Indonesia): Rainforest botanicals and illipe butter

Today, a range of cosmetics companies and others source their regeneartively grown ingredients from multiple RF-Regeneration Hub partners. RF’s partners have expanded their sales to other conscious companies reaching the likes of True Botanicals, Loreal, and Pacha Soap Company, which sells soap that uses sustainably harvested Rosewood essential oil—sourced from reforested Amazonian land via RF’s Amazonian partner Camino Verde—pacha soap can be purchased at Whole Foods Markets.

RF now Growing a Global Network of Regeneration Hubs

From Latin America to Africa, to Appalachia,and beyond Regeneration Hubs are taking root:

• A 7,000-acre forest-farming incubator restoring a former coal mine in Eastern Kentucky
• A youth-led food forest enterprise and youth business incubator on Maui, Hawai‘i (Mālamalama Sustainability Center)
• Indigenous- and women-led Hubs in the Philippines, Ghana, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

RF’s Regeneration Hub partners collectively assist each other, helping speed-up development of Hubs and grow markets, making it easier for new Hubs to get off the ground. The Regeneration Hub case studies and playbook help explain the process and demonstrate vaiable pathways for local organizations to create community enterprises that uplift women and nourish families while also helping connect them with ethical companies ready to partner and purchase their products or fund tree planing campaigns to reduce broader climate risks to company’s ingredient-producing communities. It’s a model designed for the level of investment needed to regenerate the 2 billion hectares of degraded land that must be restored over the next half decade to have a real chance at reversing climate change.

“For me, the beauty of the RF model is that we can work with companies all over the world to grow to scale,” says Johnson, “all while creating income and opportunity designed to meet the needs of rural women, who are most vulnerable to the effects of the rise in climate disasters.”

Each Hub is designed to generate local livelihoods while healing ecosystems, growing superfoods, and linking grassroots producers to regenerative markets. Yet today, less than 2% of global philanthropic and climate investment capital reaches women- or Indigenous-led solutions—underscoring the urgency for funders to support this proven model ready to scale transformative impact for women and the Earth.

“This kind of replication—where private sector leaders like Hillary Peterson take what we’ve built and replicate it through their own companies and high-net-worth social networks—is how we envisioned our organization seeding systems change -with the hope the mechanisms we designed to intentionally uplift women will be retained once industry takes them up and helps us scale,” said Johnson. “We welcome others to contact us for training and adivsory services to help them learn to take up our model too, iterate on it, and help grow our ultimate collective impact. We celebrate those with the ability and courage to invest, and are grateful to all the donors who stepped up and supported RF’s start-up and the investments needed to get our Hub partners enterprises off the ground. We’re ready to help the next generation of regenerative leaders carry this vision forward—and time is of the essence.”

To date, staff from other global NGOs including the Rainforest Alliance, The Jane Goodall Institute, and Africa Peace Parks have all expressed interest in the RF Regeneration Hub model and its potential for deepening their gender equity and environmental goals. More interest from large foundations or affiliated donor groups is still needed to allow such partnerships to flourish.

To learn more about the Regeneration Hub model and the work of Regenerative Farms, visit www.regenerativefarms.org.

Make a Difference Today

If you believe in empowering women, feeding children nourishing forest-grown foods, and restoring degraded lands to fight climate change, we invite you to be part of this movement.

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