Shifting systems is a massive undertaking, and our approach needs to be flexible enough to allow for enormous complexity yet rigorous enough to allow for tangible progress. As Regen Melbourne enters its fourth year of existence, CEO Kaj Lofgren walks through our evolving model for systemic impact in 2024 and beyond.

Regen Melbourne was co-created in 2020 in the wake of the Black Summer and the midst of Covid-19 lockdowns. As I write this reflection, my house has just been plunged into darkness and I have lost internet and phone coverage. The epic storm that rolled across our city this week is a stark reminder that we are living through rolling social, ecological and economic shocks. From fires, wind and floods, to economic crisis, to divisive election and referendum results, global conflicts, and evermore scientific evidence of the climate emergency.

At the same time, and perhaps connected to this context, there is a growing awareness of the need for more systemic approaches to our interconnected crises, and a more open exploration of alternative paradigms and worldviews.

Siloed, cause-based projects and initiatives – whether they relate to climate, community, social justice or any other pressing issues – are essential, of course. But we need to find ways to shift the systems these individual causes exist within and depend upon in order to accelerate the change we need. This is the work of Regen Melbourne: to help organise, catalyse and connect organisations to be of greater service to Melbourne, while simultaneously shifting the systemic conditions in their favour (that is, in favour of human flourishing within environmental boundaries).

As 2024 begins, this piece is a reflection on how Regen Melbourne’s strategy and approach have evolved over the last three years, and what this means for the year to come. Although our ecosystem continues to evolve, our commitment to our place and to the principles of regeneration and systems change remain stronger than ever.

Our first evolution: setting our vision and purpose

In late 2020, together with over 500 people and 50 organisations, we embarked on a six-month collective sensemaking exercise, framed by the localisation of Doughnut Economics. We ran large workshops online, conducted interviews, hosted round-tables and spent countless hours in conversation with alliance partners.

Together, we co-created a collective vision for Greater Melbourne, developed the Melbourne Doughnut, and proposed a new way of working together across sectors and silos. In April 2021 Regen Melbourne released our foundational report, Towards a Regenerative Melbourne. This document captured the emerging possibilities present in the disruptions of 2020, and the driving ambition that so many of us felt was both thrilling and necessary for the future of our place.

By the middle of 2021 the first evolution of Regen Melbourne was complete. Regen Melbourne had moved from a community research experiment during lockdown to become a network of organisations committed to a collective vision for Melbourne. This was captured by a profound and yet simple collective expression: we all felt the deep need to better serve our city. It is also fair to say that, at this phase in Regen Melbourne’s evolution, everyone involved was taking a leap of faith. Lots of questions remained about how we could do this work together. How can we organise differently in service of Greater Melbourne? What does this even mean in a systemic context that prioritises competition and specialisation? What is the role of a organisation, like Regen Melbourne, working at a systemic level? How could we actualise a vision that encompasses so many moving parts across such a large scale?

In this first evolution a simple scaffold was enough. We had a growing alliance of partners, a strong collective vision and purpose, and an emerging roadmap of activities to pursue.

Our second evolution: landing a theory of change

Over the next 18 months we experimented together with the RM alliance through many forms of gatherings, workshops, picnics, parties, and roundtables. And through a variety of activities like storytelling initiatives, project incubators, research initiatives and larger projects like the Swimmable Birrarung. We initially tested the potential of Regen Melbourne becoming a city-wide movement for bottom-up change, drawing on existing issue-based movements, enrolling the public and finding collective alignment.

We learned a lot about the role of organising, the deep desire individuals and organisations had for working in service of place and the power of a collective vision in action. We also learned about the difference between broad-based movement building and systemic convening. While there was an initial intuitive sense that movement building could be impactful, in practice the experience was one of replication and noise-making rather than finding tangible pathways to impact. We were hyper-conscious of the urgent need to add tangible value through our work and it increasingly felt like movement building wasn’t the best way of doing this.

At the same time, we had more and more conversations about the difficulties for organisations, community groups, businesses and government to collaborate across silos and sectors. While a bunch of existing collaboration between organisations existed, this almost all took place within economic siloes (business, government, civil society) or was oriented to the short term alleviation of symptoms of the current system, rather than pursuing deeper transformation. Two key questions emerged: how could we support diverse organisations to collaborate across sectors and siloes? And how could we organise organisations in pursuit of a much more ambitious vision for change?

“our focus moved away from a movement-based response to crisis and towards supporting organisations to get into formation for systemic change. Regen Melbourne became a platform for ambitious collaboration, in service of our city.”

Subsequent explorations revealed that there was a big gap in systemic convening and our focus moved away from a movement-based response to crisis, and towards supporting organisations to get into formation for systemic change. Regen Melbourne became a platform for ambitious collaboration, in service of our city.

As these insights emerged, our work convening a small number of actors around the idea of a Swimmable Birrarung/Yarra River was also progressing strongly. This work borrowed from decades of work in collective impact methodology and combined this with more recent work in systems thinking and challenge-led innovation frameworks. As the work took shape around the river, it inspired other major themes or challenges being pursued across the alliance, including around thriving citizenship (Participatory Melbourne), regenerative food systems (Ending Food Waste) and hyperlocal regeneration (Regen Streets). These themes aligned with our aspiration to add detail to the Melbourne Doughnut to further understand how Melbourne is performing in relation to the safe and just space defined by it, building on the examples from other cities globally (Measuring what Matters). Taken as a collective, these initiatives became a portfolio of projects: Swimmable Birrarung, Participatory Melbourne, Ending Food Waste, Regen Streets and Measuring What Matters., Each created a tangible pathway towards our collective vision and became an opportunity for unique coalitions of partners to come together and act in service to place.

By the middle of 2023, the next tier of scaffolding for Regen Melbourne was taking shape. We now had a clear vision and purpose, a growing alliance of partner organisations, and now five major projects (pathways) to convene around.

Our third evolution: developing a methodology and measurement system

With a much better understanding of our role in “organising organisations”, we set about testing and refining our work. Workstreams were established within our projects, with our small team convening around more and more specific programs of activity.

We were guided by a diverse set of best-practice methodologies and frameworks from around the world, including Doughnut Economics, collective impact, challenge-led innovation, anchor collaboratives, community wealth building, systems thinking and open innovation processes. In the second half of 2023, clear patterns in the work began to emerge. Although our work remained necessarily messy and non-linear, discrete phases of work could be identified that provided stability and guardrails to our team and a clearer understanding of our role to our partners.

The SOIL model for systemic transformation was developed in September 2023 and described our phases of work as we embark on the systemic convening of wildly ambitious projects.

The first phase recognises the need for dedicated Sensemaking, a hyper-relational, pattern-spotting exercise to determine an ambitious collective orientation. This is followed by an Organising phase to create new formations of organisations in alignment with the ambitious orientation. In tandem, a conscious Insights gathering and generation process continues to ensure our work is powered by the deep knowledge held across the city. And finally, potent and tangible Leverage Points (completing the SOIL acronym) can be identified (both existing and new initiatives) that, when delivered as a portfolio of interventions, can tilt a system towards transformation. With this methodology, each of the projects in our portfolio could be tracked through these non-linear steps, providing clarity on our role in the system and greater tangibility to our work.

In parallel with the evolution of our methodology, our creation of a City Portrait for Greater Melbourne, a multi-pronged research initiative defining a holistic measure of progress for the city, was also progressing. Through an epic feat of collaboration across six universities and dozens of knowledge holders from academia, industry and government, the Greater Melbourne City Portrait, was publicly launched at the State Library on the 13th of November 2023. This ambitious interactive data platform gave our work a tangible way of measuring our goal of moving Melbourne towards a regenerative future. We could also now track our collective progress. Of course, the City Portrait does not measure any one organisation’s contribution (including Regen Melbourne’s) towards the ‘safe and just space’. Instead, it moves beyond traditional single-organisation inputs, outputs and outcomes and embraces all the feedback loops, relational fabric, multi-order effects and emergence that contribute to systemic transformation. Through this process, it became evident that the creation of a City Portrait was not a one-off baselining exercise, but rather served to establish a measurement structure for systemic change across the city.

Through these developments, by the end of 2023 our scaffolding had matured even further. We had a clear vision and purpose, an ever growing alliance of partners, a portfolio of projects, a clear project methodology and an overarching measurement framework for the work.

Our next evolution: refining our project portfolio and introducing enabling collaborations

We begin 2024 once again in reflection mode, feeling proud of our work and also impatient at the obvious urgency for change. Our journey so far has been both challenging and rewarding. The need for systemic work is increasingly obvious, but the constraints to going beyond simply treating symptoms remain.

Our portfolio of projects is evolving in 2024, with each initiative continuing to move through the SOIL methodology. Regen Streets and Ending Food Waste (soon to be renamed) are commencing the Sensemaking process. Participatory Melbourne is transitioning into the Organising and Insights work. Swimmable Birrarung is exploring tangible Leverage Points for change. And Measuring What Matters, following the delivery of the City Portrait and the evolution of this platform to represent our measurement system, is shifting out of our project portfolio entirely and becoming a thematic focus area within our RM Lab. Our work on the City Portrait continues of course, with the refinement of existing data, the collection of new data to fill gaps and the introduction of time-series and spatial data. We will also be more directly mapping our portfolio of projects to the elements of the City Portrait and exploring use cases with partner organisations.

“We begin 2024 once again in reflection mode, feeling proud of our work and also impatient at the obvious urgency for change. The need for systemic work is increasingly obvious, but the constraints to going beyond simply treating symptoms remain.”

Perhaps the most significant strategic development in 2024 is the overt introduction of “enabling conditions” that support the achievement of our portfolio of projects. We know from our explorations and from case studies around the world that transformational work cannot be successful without a shift in fundamental enabling conditions. These enabling conditions include how research and knowledge are developed and disseminated, how capital moves through a city, how policy is decided upon and developed, and how the story of our place is told. Of course, many of us have been working on transforming these subsystems for a long time, but we feel it's time that Regen Melbourne centres these enabling conditions alongside our portfolio of ambitious projects.

Hence, in 2024, we are starting the year with a new way of holding our understanding of the role of research (progressed through the existing RM Lab) and capital (a collaboration soon to be announced). We are also pursuing emerging partnerships around policy and media to better develop these spaces. Our work in these enabling conditions will be oriented both towards the transformation of each (e.g. how can we break down the assumptions and structural barriers that prevent capital from flowing in service to systemic change), as well as how each condition can better serve each of our projects. We can’t wait to dive deeper into these enabling collaborations and look forward to your ideas and contributions.

We feel so lucky to be the custodians of Regen Melbourne; co-created social infrastructure designed to raise our collective ambitions and deepen our systemic impact. The work continues…

Yours collaboratively,

Kaj Lofgren
CEO, Regen Melbourne

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