Bioneers is a life-changing conference and the source of tons of media, but it’s also an incubator, a connector, and a catalyst to action. Here at Bioneers, we try to measure our impact, not through traditional ROI but through “Return on Influence” and “Return on Engagement”. Together, we’re making that happen.

Here’s just one powerful story about what we’re achieving together:

When we booked ocean farmer Bren Smith to speak at the 2016 Bioneers Conference, we knew that his work was one of the most powerful breakthroughs we’d seen in many years. (Thanks to our partners at the Buckminster Fuller Institute for finding him!). It’s on the scale of Paul Stamets’s mushroom magic, and Joel Salatin’s regenerative farming mojo. We had referred Joel to Michael Pollan (who then made him famous in the best-selling “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) – so we shared Bren’s keynote with Michael. He promptly tweeted it out to his 500,000 Twitter followers.

Bren’s GreenWave ocean farming is authentically revolutionary. It produces abundant, high-quality food while radically sequestering carbon. It filters and purifies water, providing habitat for local biodiversity. It also introduces a key innovation: partnering with terrestrial farms to provide them with organic compost and fertilizer – helping local organic farming to scale up, while dramatically reducing pressure on land and farmlands. Last but not least, GreenWave ocean farming creates a shining opportunity for economic democracy, by providing a very low-cost entry point for small producers to make a right livelihood while restoring the Earth.

Bren told us his small team has been working overtime, trying to keep up with the tsunami of interest that has engulfed GreenWave since the Bioneers conference:

• GreenWave now has nearly 100 people wanting to start farms in CA.
• Internationally, Bren now has requests to start farms everywhere from South Africa to the Baltic Sea and the Georgia coast.
• Representatives of Tribal Nations have reached out to plot an Indigenous ocean farming outreach program.
• A former staff member at the California Coastal Commission has joined GreenWave, to help California farmers move through the challenging permitting process – a critical and imperative step.
• Wesley Clark Jr. and other influencers are exploring how they can support efforts to build a GreenWave reef in California.
• GreenWave received a $30,000 donation from a Bioneers attendee to sponsor an ocean farmer.
• A donor is ready to seed a fund to launch a wave of entrepreneurial ocean farmers with a lens of social, racial and economic justice.

And this is only one success story, among many.

Millions more people are going to be searching for Bioneers – looking to us for vision, real solutions and deep wisdom, whether or not they know it yet! Let’s step up our game and bring a restored world into being.

Join us in giving voice to solutions – donate to Bioneers today.