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This is how a funder enters the Learning Journey: not by selecting a project, but by being caught by a particular living relation of the Nalubaaga Bioregion — and writing a letter that begins a kinship with it.
In Buganda tradition, Omukago was an ancient covenant through which people of different clans became kin — bound by mutual obligation, while each remained fully themselves. It did not dissolve difference into sameness. It created responsibility across it.
We see the funder–community relationship as needing exactly this: kinship across difference, without either side dissolving into the other. When you begin a covenant here, you are not signing a contract or approving a grant. You are entering a relationship of mutual responsibility with a living relation that is seeking renewal.
Because you become accountable to the thriving of a specific kin — a bird, a tree, a water body, a fungus — rather than to an organisation, the relationship resists the quiet drift that has troubled trust-based and place-based funding before. A totem cannot be charmed, and it cannot soften bad news.
The Learning Journey is designed for funders — philanthropies, foundations, family offices, impact investors and institutional funders.
If you are rooted in a place and sense it holds answers for systemic transformation, you may instead be looking for our Activating Bioregional Consciousness programme. You are warmly welcome there — express your interest here →.
When a totem catches you, that recognition is already the beginning of kinship. The letter simply gives it a form. Wetland Attuners and elders read each letter through a deeper listening, and either welcome the covenant or gently redirect it to a kin that fits better. You declare an intention; the place discerns whether the affiliation is right.