Learning Opportunity
Bringing a Bioregion to Life
Join us for our 2026 residential Bioregional Learning Days to explore the practice of bioregioning with a cohort of fellow learners. Step inside systems change and come alongside us to experience our work from the inside. Leave with what you need to take your next step towards acting and advocating for change at bioregional scale. July or September dates. New non-residential rate available!
Bioregional Learning Days 2026
This residential course is a 5-day immersion into place and practice for bioregional practitioners from the UK and beyond. With dedicated time to co-design and collaborate, the 2026 courses are designed to deliver the “why” and the “how to”. You'll learn essential core competencies for bioregional practice, tools and techniques, nuggets of wisdom about systems and complexity, along with examples of regenerative work happening in South Devon and beyond. The programme blends different forms of learning indoors and outside, including small-group discussion and design, a journey or two beyond the farm, sensing practices, shared meals and campfire chats. Grow your skills and apply the learning with your collaborators at home.
Ideal for bioregional practioners from the UK and beyond, join our fully-hosted July and September courses at Lower Sharpham Farm. For July, we are also now offering a non-residential option for those in South Devon who are looking for bioregional training.
The learning will begins on Ambios' working farm overlooking the River Dart in South Devon, with its rewilding fields, market garden, beautiful views for reflection and a barn, complete with hay bales. Your guides will be the BLC team who are experienced and skilled practitioners, alongside the Ambios team and special guests.
What you will learn on our bioregioning course; how to:
- Understand your place; rivers, soils, communities and culture
- Apply knowledge and skills for starting or developing bioregional practices
- Grow a citizen knowledge network to forge new pathways
- Design for regenerative action within many sectors, including food and farming
- Convene, communicate, map; processes and techniques
- Lead joined-up action in the face of change
- Develop a Bioregional Financing Facility to support more regenerative projects
- Model collaborative ecosystem restoration, including the arts.
What to expect
BLC's residential course is an opportunity for bioregional enthusiasts to learn a gentle systems approach for social, environmental and economic change. It's also an invitation to experience South Devon in new ways–to gain an understanding for how a bioregion actually works and how to identify potential within it.
If you are on a regenerative path, this bioregional training will demonstrate how to gain the agency needed to take action for adaptation. If your focus is already bioregional practice, develop your skills and learn new ones. Bring your unique knowledge, experience, intuition, ideas and curiosity.
The programme will emphasize learning together how to deepen belonging, sense for ourselves, record information and data about the world around us, how to interpret and share that data, how to better convene, collaborate, design and communicate. Why? To be able to make the case for the devolution of decision-making and resources to community level so as to influence the form that funding takes and make organisational and governance decisions.
Arrive Monday afternoon for a welcome dinner, and depart Saturday in the morning after a "Breaking Bread" community lunch on Friday and an arts-led evening of reflection in the barn.
Key information
Where you will be staying
The venue for our course is Sharpham Barton Farm, home to Ambios. Ambios deliver training designed to help trainees access or progress a career working in nature. The working farm is part of the Sharpham Estate, 550-acres on the banks of the River Dart, set within a National Landscape Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The market town of Totnes is just a few miles away.
Breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner will be prepared by a local chef from organic produce where possible, some directly from the farm. Dining happens family-style around a long wooden table in the large, comfortable barn space with its open plan kitchen/dining area, cosy sofas and woodburner. It's a homely and relaxing place to come back to after a day of learning and being outdoors.
You will be staying in the adjoining bunkhouse in private rooms with shared bathrooms. Bedding is provided but bring your own towel. Laundry facilities and WiFi are available and there is mobile signal although limited use is encouraged. The way of life on the farm has sustainability firmly in mind. Food miles are kept low and a proportion of electricity comes from onsite solar panels. Parking onsite or close by.
“The site has all the rejuvenating natural charm and supportive community culture you could hope to find.”
Ambios trainee
“I woke to the sound of birdsong and sunshine. A lovely fire burned in the large, bright communal room and bookshelves laden with books on everything from birds to anthropology made me feel very pleased to have landed in this idyllic spot.”
Ambios trainee
More about Ambios
Ambios deliver vital nature recovery training throughout the year, helping trainees upskill for employment. Working with Rewilding Britain, they are helping to facilitate a network of people based in Devon, who are interested in, or taking action to rewild land, collaborating with land owners/managers, educators, social scientists, government bodies, ecologists, farmers, researchers, artists, community and interest groups and students.
On the last evening of the course, Ambios will be hosting a community feast in the barn called "Breaking Bread", inviting guests to join the cohort, creating a wonderful, convivial event with new voices joining the conversations, growing the opportunity for connections and friendships to be made.
More about BLC
Bioregional Learning Centre is a place-based, systems-change organisation rooted in South Devon. We work at the scale of the bioregion – the living landscape of rivers, soils, cultures and communities – to grow the capacities, relationships and infrastructures needed for a regenerative future. The bioregional approach is coming to be seen as an effective and systemic response at local scale to the polycrisis.
Our work weaves together:
- Learning and leadership for systems and regenerative practice
- Networks and partnerships across civil society, public bodies, academia and business
- Bioregional projects that connect ecology, culture, arts, governance and livelihoods
- Story, data and sense-making to help people read and respond actively to the health of their bioregion.
BLC also hosts the emerging Bioregional Learning Alliance (BLA) – an informal but growing international circle of practitioner-educators and learning centres (from Costa Rica to Catalonia, Ireland to Hawaii) who are pioneering bioregioning in practice. One of the ambitions of this peer to peer learning community is to share bioregional practice that can be adapted and delivered in different bioregions around the world.
Want to join our course?