Regeneration Nation Costa Rica presents:
Community Builders Convergence
Building Community is Better Together
Last year’s convergence was a huge success!
Click the button below to be updated when we choose the next date.
Clarity, Connection, and a Room Full of People Who Get It
Building Community is Better Together
Take your seat among other founders and pioneers of regenerative communities in Costa Rica, as we support each other with our presence, curiosity, experience, and wisdom, cultivating connections to empower the work ahead.
As you probably know, Costa Rica is home to one of the highest concentrations of intentionally regenerative community projects in the world. Many of them are run by thoughtful, committed people who’ve given years, sometimes everything, to their vision.
And most of them are quietly navigating some of the hardest parts alone.
Not because they want to. But because the challenges of building community — the governance experiments, the funding gaps, the interpersonal tensions, the structural decisions that keep getting deferred — can be hard to talk through with people who don’t share the same context.
In my 17 years in Costa Rica, I’ve come to believe that the thing most community projects are missing isn’t information, resources, or even experience. It’s each other.
This convergence is an opportunity to bridge that gap.
Why are so many committed to going it alone?
Community pioneers tend to be self-sufficient by nature. We’re people who decided to build something that didn’t exist yet. That takes a particular kind of independence and conviction.
But independence can become isolating and create bottlenecks in your development that can cost you in many ways.
Coming together stimulates conversations that shift things. There’s power in hearing someone ask the question you didn’t think to ask, or share the mistake they already made, so you don’t have to. Those subtle gems of wisdom don’t come through online research. They happen in person, with people who’ve been in similar terrain.
Attendees leave with clarity on decisions they’d been deferring for months, a fresh outside perspective on their most pressing challenge, and a small group of peers they can actually call when things get complicated. Some arrive not knowing what they need — and leave surprised by what the room revealed.
Our Mission
This event contributes to a living ecosystem of mutual support among regenerative community builders around Costa Rica, where our collective wisdom, experience, and encouragement make each project stronger, more resilient, and more impactful than it could ever be on its own.
Who Is This Event For?
This event welcomes members of regenerative-minded, community-focused projects in Costa Rica who are actively involved with the community’s development. Our goal is to cultivate relationships among project members across the country and collaboratively imagine solutions to common challenges that no single person or project can solve alone.
Our ideal attendees meet the following criteria:
- Invested members of a community project in Costa Rica
- Recognize that cultivating community is about more than selling lots to a residential neighborhood
- Value building bridges with regional communities
- Embrace the value of discussing common challenges with other community builders to discover and contribute to unique solutions
- Interested in exploring collaborative opportunities to empower their efforts and those of others
- Committed to showing up, contributing, sharing, and supporting each other
A little about your facilitator
My name is Jason Thomas. In 2009, I co-founded a permaculture land cooperative and education center in Costa Rica called Finca Fruition, and spent 12 years building, running, and learning, immersed in community living. While there, I began a podcast to understand the broader landscape of the regenerative movement here.
Since then, I’ve visited nearly 30 of Costa Rica’s regenerative community projects across 6 Ecovillage Tours, asking founders and long-term members insightful, revealing questions.
Revisiting many of these projects for the third year in a row has been perception-shifting, to say the least. That ongoing access has given me a front-row seat to what’s working, what’s quietly unraveling, and what most projects share in common, whether they know it or not.
The Community Builders Convergence grew out of my belief that the one thing every community project in Costa Rica could benefit from is each other.
Many of the founders I’ve met are navigating their hardest questions in relative isolation. Not because the information isn’t out there, but because the right conversations aren’t happening in the right rooms. I created this gathering to be that room.
I currently live in the Chirripó River Valley of Pérez Zeledón, where I’m actively working to support bioregional community development and have begun the potluck phase of a new intentional neighborhood, here on the mountain.
What will we discuss?
This is OUR event
It’s all about the group mind
This isn’t a conference. There are no keynote speakers telling you what to think or do.
Our scheduled sessions will focus primarily on two types of facilitated group discussions: topic-specific and project-specific. Instead of imposing my preferences to define the focus of this event, it’ll be formed by those who register to attend.
Upon registration, you’ll be asked to complete a short questionnaire to understand what’s most alive for you today regarding your community’s development, and to rank topics by interest. After we close registration, I’ll compile the responses to identify the strongest ranking topics. These will become the primary focus of our topic-specific discussions.
The greatest value that many of last year’s attendees described receiving, though, was during the project-specific discussions, or “Spotlight” sessions. Over the weekend, each participant will have the opportunity to bring their most present or pressing challenge into a Spotlight session, where the entire group focuses its attention on your specific situation and asks clarifying questions that help you see what you couldn’t see on your own. There’s room for advice at the end, but magic is in the process more than the outcome.
People consistently report that they received as much insight from watching others be in the Spotlight as they did when the attention was on them.
Participants have walked out of Spotlight sessions with a commitment to formalize agreements they’d been postponing, a clearer framing of a co-founder tension, or simply the relief of knowing that what they’re facing isn’t unique, and that others have navigated it and are there to support.
A few topic ideas that have been suggested so far include:
- Cultivating healthy communications, relationships, and understanding among members
- Finding new sources of funding
- Equity sharing
- Developing invisible infrastructure elements (community design, economic model, agreements docs, standard operating procedures, training manuals, etc.)
- Training and keeping a competent and trustworthy team
- Sharing ideas with and supporting regional tico communities
- Organizing community efforts toward reaching common goals.
- Collaborative potentials in uniting the interests and efforts of multiple regenerative projects together
- (A full list of topics offered to vote on is in the FAQ, below.)
What did last year’s participants have to say?
It’s so nice to be around other people who are doing similar things, and at different stages in the process, showing equal or even more levels of enthusiasm, despite a lot of challenges they’ve already faced that I’m sure I’m about to face. So it’s nice to be amongst people who still believe in the vision and are still working hard to make it happen.
One of the most valuable moments was getting input on how to legally structure our community, something I’d been unsure about for months. I left with enough clarity to actually move on it. This was also the catalyst I needed to stop putting it off and start building out our invisible infrastructure.
We’ve started building community and came hoping to get off to a proper start without reinventing the wheel. The event was fun, and I left feeling enriched and inspired. All the conversations were interesting, even in moments when they didn’t seem directly relevant to my personal situation. What I got most out of the event was understanding how effective community planning is in solving common issues. I also appreciated the feeling of kinship we developed with these new friends who share a similar mission. I was comfortable, and more open to new possibilities.
This has reignited a fire. The fire’s always been going, but it’s been kind of like a fire in the background, and I’ve been off at the river. Now, it’s like we’ve come to the campfire, and the fire’s a bonfire. There’s nowhere to go but to community now!
I feel very grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be in this group, where there’s so much knowledge and wisdom, but equally important is the emotional connection with everyone and the ability to learn about their projects. It’s very impressive to me that there are all these people working on the same thing, in their own way, in their own place.
It’s been great to be out of the farm and have an opportunity to meet people who’ve experienced similar types of struggles that we have as we push forward with our projects. I feel encouraged knowing that there are so many other people who share our intention to protect our planet while also working to improve their human relationships. That’s, for me, the most important thing.
This has been a well-curated space where our individual talents and field experiences are enriching a collective vision. It’s the powerful realization that while our paths as community builders are personal, we are all walking together.
Where will we gather?
The location of the next event is To Be Determined.
Sign up for the waiting list below to share your preferences and help shape it!
Frequently Asked Questions
Who's going to be there?
Well, YOU, we hope!
Other than that, you’ll find a circle of intelligent, respectable, dedicated individuals, with a variety of skills and experience, who are both generous and worthy of generosity. Some attendees will have more experience in certain areas than others, but all will have plenty to learn and share.
This isn’t a presentation-focused event. We have YouTube for that. We’ve invited founders and members from a variety of community-centric projects around the country and we anticipate diversity. It’s a step aside from ego and prestige for the sake of collaborative connecting, learning, sharing, and growing.
What are we going to discuss?
The topics are shaped entirely by the people who register. Upon signing up, you’ll complete a short questionnaire ranking which subjects are most alive for you right now. I’ll compile the responses and identify the top 4–6 topics to focus on in our group discussions over the weekend. Find some of the topics suggested most frequently below.
Beyond the group discussions, each participant will also have time in a Spotlight session, where the entire group focuses its attention on their specific project and current challenge. People consistently report receiving as much insight watching others be in the Spotlight as they did when the attention was on them.
Some of the topics that have been suggested so far include:
(A full list of topics is available upon registration)
- Equity Sharing
- Developing member agreements
- Finding new sources of funding
- Collaborative potentials of multiple regenerative communities working together
- Project management
- Attracting and training a reliable staff
- Cultivating community cohesion amidst member transience
- Governance systems
- Cultivating healthy communications and relationships among members
Will there be presentations?
Not in the traditional sense. This isn’t a conference, and there are no keynote speakers.
If someone attending has direct, lived experience with a successful solution to a topic the group is discussing, they may be invited to share briefly — followed by open Q&A and group discussion. That’s very different from someone telling you their theories or what you should do.
The exception to this is that the Florestral community will offer a presentation-style session about their own journey — their governance, their challenges, and how they’ve navigated them. Learning directly from our host site, a community that’s been living this for a decade, is one of the things last year’s participants said they most wanted.
If the group wants deeper dives on specific topics beyond what the weekend can hold, I’m happy to organize follow-up online sessions. That’s what Zoom is for.
Can I come for just one day?
We understand that life is full, but to maintain the integrity of the container, we’re not encouraging day visits or selling day passes.
That said, if you purchase a ticket and can’t make it to some portion of the event, you’ll still be welcome to join us for as long as you can manage.
Will it be bilingual or just English?
The event will be conducted primarily in English, with organic Spanish translation provided by bilingual participants, which is likely to be the majority of those present.
I have credit with Wordly.ai, a real-time text translation app used by multinational organizations, which I’m willing to donate to the event. It would require participants to speak into the app on their phones or headphones, and it won’t cover the full weekend — but it’s an option we can deploy for key sessions. Another option we can experiment with is the Microsoft Teams live text translation feature.
If full bilingual coverage is important to you, reach out and we’ll figure it out together.
This is your path to enhanced clarity, renewed energy,
and a network of people you can actually call when things get hard.
You’ve been building something meaningful,
Embrace its place in the bigger picture.