Our story

How it began

Songqiao and Yaki met at the US-China Climate Summit in San Francisco in 2018, both having worked in the social and environmental field for about a decade. After watching a ballet show, wandering through the streets staring through windows of closed bookshops, exploring parklets and having Indian food for late night supper, they parted ways. Over the next year or two living in opposite places of the planet, they talked about the intersections of climate and other issues and the importance of emotional engagement in advocacy. They talked about co-organising a rotating climate art exhibition at COP and various locations in Asia, but somehow, the conditions were not sufficient to the sprouting of the seeds sown.

COVID times offered the deep reflection and fermentation needed. By the time Songqiao and Yaki reconnected, both of them had gone through what felt like a lifetime of events and realisations. The introspective practice that many started during lockdowns, and the big “why am I here on Earth” and “what if I die tomorrow” people started asking during these times evoked the will in both of them to offer a series of multi-day experiences, to small groups of people, that deeply connect both inner and outer wellbeing and sustainability. Songqiao’s work partner, Faye, joined in this early incubation stage. The trio drew on their lineages with Regenesis, Schumacher College, Fritjof Capra, Theory U, Plum Village, and the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, invited Roberto Fraquelli from Schumacher College to join as co-designer and co-facilitator, worked closely with the first local host, the Mykunda Community in Xilai, Sichuan, China, and finally, in May 2024, the first Future+ workshop took place.

From workshops to community

We worked with Borneo Laboratory in October the same year to offer the second workshop in Kuching, Malaysia and with Earth Company in May 2025 to offer the third workshop in Bali, Indonesia. Every workshop was filled with unique place-sourced wonders, from sitting in a tea meditation watching the sunrise in front of Mount Gongga, to chanting inside the mossy, ferny Fairy Cave, to dancing in spirals with our eyes closed at the black sand beach at Kelecung. Each was a moment of awe that shifted how we related to ourselves, to each other and the more-than-human world. All workshops sought to introduce the concepts of regenerative development and design through a combination of theory/frameworks, dialogues, sharing circles, embodied movements, play, practice and plenty of time in “nature”.

Following the three workshops, the Future+ community of over 60 people are now spread across Asia, starting projects, activating places, weaving knowledge and wisdom and practicing living regeneratively - being conscious of their own states of being and evoking and sustaining collective will for change.

What regeneration means to us

There are many ways of understanding the term regeneration, but as in Tao Te Ching “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name." The languages we use to describe anything are merely symbols. We invite you to hold this description lightly, and test it against your own experience.

Systems theorist Gregory Bateson once said that "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think." To us, one of the key elements of a regenerative world is a re-harmonisation between the human and more-than-human world. No longer are humans separate from nature but instead are reconnected as part of nature. Like the more-than-human world, humans who live into regeneration continually evolve, sense and respond, grow and connect networks, experience rhythms and cycles - times when we expand, grow, produce and times when we contract, die, decompose and rest.

Another elegant way of understanding regeneration is co-evolution. Evolution is syntropic (the opposite of entropic), where life creates more life. Co-evolution happens when all living systems - humans, non-humans and places - live into their unique potential, adding value to the larger systems they are nested within. This concept of “nested wholes”, that each of us is nested within a larger whole such as our family or organisation, which in turn is nested within a larger whole such as our community or industry, is critical because it implies that diverse ways of being, thinking, knowing and doing can co-thrive as long as we are holding the greater whole.