Susan Bosak founded the Legacy Project, a research and education group for wisdom-in-action, to empower generations in creating a living legacy in this critical moment in human history. As part of the story of Bioregional Earth, particularly the Living Flows Fund, she's working with wealth holders and stewards to help them find their path to flow wealth in a way that matters.
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
— Frantz Fanon, political philosopher
What are we missing in trying to read this world by the inappropriate scale of our small bodies and minuscule lifetimes?
— Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, science historian
Destiny suggests that the effect of our life is to exceed the length of our life. Therefore, today never ends with today.
— Craig Lounsbrough, pastor and counselor
Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where humankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery – not of nature, but of itself.
— Rachel Carson, marine biologist and author
Sometimes you are born into the ending of a world. What are the things worth doing? Stop worrying about making sense of it all. Look for pockets where you can practice operating outside the dominant logic and make good ruins. Put the pieces back together in new ways.
— Dougald Hine, author and social thinker
In the time of the Seventh Fire, New People will emerge. They will retrace their steps to find what was left by the trail. Their steps will take them to the Elders who they will ask to guide them on their journey.
— Edward Benton-Banai, Indigenous leader
The Legacy Project explores what really matters. People want to make a connection to something bigger, a generational rhythm. You need to get your bearings in eternity.
We help people with time (your lifetime in the context of lifetimes across generations) and place (your life place, or bioregion). This becomes your legacy – and the legacy project of our time. To take on the personal and collective challenges of this moment in history, we need a bigger story – the story of Bioregional Earth that brings humanity back into balance with life itself. What can your role be in this story?
As one of the Co-Stewards of Bioregional Earth, Susan Bosak recently wrote Philanthropy for the Real World. It's not obvious how to effectively flow money, especially in these times. We can choose where we put the energy of our money – with awareness, care, and wisdom. We need to reflect on an honest pathway forward for wellbeing in the broadest sense. It's about using money not just to "help," but to bring that money alive as part of the web of life. We can find a much better way to organize work on the ground and more effectively flow funding into it.
The long history of humanity has been one of deep harmony with all other life on Earth. As planetary and social systems unravel, we need to find our way back into that balance. That's what matters. That's what has always mattered.
Return of Legacy (ROL)
Will you plant seeds for trees under which you'll never sit? Susan Bosak talks about Return of Legacy (ROL).
Legacy is very much about the choices you make every day that add up. Money is part of those choices. In the financial world, few metrics are as central as ROI: Return on Investment. It's about profit. It's about making more money using your money. ROL is a different path for wealth stewardship, beyond financial gain. The question moves from "What will my money do for me?" to "What will my money do because of me?" You shift from making money to making money meaningful.
We can start to see that money is a how, not a what. Money isn't a thing. It's a practice – a practice that precedes and exceeds the "thing" we identify as "money." Giving doesn't happen in a vacuum. Giving depends on worlds, reinforces worlds, and creates worlds. That's the living power of ROL. The word "return" means to come back again. It implies a cycle, like the birds returning every spring. In the same way, when you return money into circulation as an intentional choice to manifest what matters, you get a return of meaning writ large. In the context of the regenerative story of Bioregional Earth, it's a choice between a path that continues to destroy life or a path that stewards the continuation of life.
Money carries our intention. It's how we can live out right relationship. If we use money with integrity, it carries integrity forward. ROL flows your money, your stories, and your care with integrity.
We're forging a radically different path for wealth stewardship through a Living Flows funding ecosystem that offers an ROL through strategic social and ecological regeneration flowing from the local to the global. Beyond just bestowing money, it's about keeping the energy of money alive in a living flow through time.
Offerings
If money in the context of ROL is a practice, we want to give you a chance to explore and build the muscles of that practice. We're offering ways to practice a new way of flowing wealth in the context of what matters in this moment.
The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect.
— Rebecca Solnit, writer
Our offerings are for wealth holders and stewards/advisors, philanthropic foundation staff and advisors, board trustees, and family office professionals. They are not about tax implications, succession planning, governance, or securing a long-term endowment. They are about what really matters at a personal and global level, in the context of the real world and the time we're in.
There are three levels of engagement, bringing in knowledge and expertise from both the Legacy Project and the Design School for Regenerating Earth. Stepping Stones are a good place to start. Immersion is a deep dive. And North Star is highly personalized.
Stepping Stones
The present moment is a stepping stone to the next moment, as your life becomes a stepping stone for future generations. Each stepping stone leads to wiser action. Stepping stones actually become milestones in the mastery of the practice of ROL in the story of Bioregional Earth.
The Stepping Stones offering is a place to start, and one leads to another. Stepping Stones consists of a series of 2-hour group webinars that explore different concepts and systemic insights around wealth, ROL, regeneration, and Living Flows. Bring your curious mind as we offer a thought-provoking opportunity to shift the way you move with money. Play with ideas in an open, relational space. There can also be opportunities to connect with those doing regenerative work (ecological and social) on the ground. See what resonates for you.
Immersion
Take time to be in this moment so that it becomes all moments. Be in the real world, the natural world. Immerse yourself – and you will become part of the story. It's grounding, restorative, and perspective-shifting. Find clarity and coherence. Said Albert Einstein, "Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."
The Immersion offering takes place at the Legacy Project's site The Cedars, nestled in 100 acres of environmentally-protected land at the headwaters of the Beaver River in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion (Toronto, Canada). The Cedars is also the central site for the GTB Bioregional Learning Center, with a network of other sites and programs across the bioregion. We welcome intergenerational groups, with the Dream Exhibit based on the award-winning bestseller Dream.
You arrive to The Cedars not as a place you visit, but as a place you belong. From the indoor Natrium with the handcrafted Legacy Table to the walking trails, we enter into relationship with the land as a partner, teacher, and model. The Immersion is an in-person, 1-3 day, deep-dive experience around what ROL and Living Flows mean in your life and in the world. This is about shifting story so that wealth, stewardship, social and ecological regeneration, reciprocity, right relationship and legacy can be experienced in new ways.
North Star
The North Star is the only star that doesn't move in our sky. We can count on it. When the world is a difficult place, we need to see Earth as part of the bigger universe. We come from stardust. When we remember that, we can set our own internal North Star, to keep us on the right path. If we follow the North Star, it can help us find our way back home – into balance with all life. We look up to the stars to remember our dreams, and down to our feet on the ground to make those dreams real and create a living legacy.
The North Star offering is personalized, one-on-one guidance on how to flow wealth in a way that matters. We become your legacy coach. What's the legacy thread in the wealth you have? What patterns are part of the ways you presently give? How can you locate yourself in life place, and in the time context of ancestors and future generations? What's your North Star for ROL?
Specific themes emerge and take shape through ongoing discussion over several weeks or months, based on your schedule. This offering may also take the form of working with a single family or foundation office.
What Do You Want Your Legacy to Be?
You need to own it. Legacy is not an idle question, especially in this global moment. It's a sacred generational responsibility in the story of humanity.
Most of the time – 99 percent of the time – you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely – by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute – you get the chance to do the right thing.
— Lauren Oliver, author
Right now, it makes sense to do something worthwhile with your money while it's still worth something. ROL can be life changing – for you and for all life across generations. You start by taking an unblinking look at reality, you identify the values you want to express in right relationship, and you take a step in that direction. We can help you take that step.
Reach out to us at the Legacy Project to find out more about upcoming offerings.