Learning Opportunity
Bringing a Bioregion to Life
Book your place! Join us for our 2026 residential Bioregional Learning Days to explore the practice of bioregioning with a cohort of fellow learners on a working farm overlooking the River Dart in South Devon. Learn by doing and find out how a place can become a beacon for bioregional revitalisation. July or September dates available.
Bioregional Learning Days 2026
BLC's residential course is an invitation to taste, hear and feel South Devon. To get a sense for how it works. By deeply experiencing this place, you will learn to identify and understand the potential inherent in your place. You are invited to ‘bring your bioregion with you’, to find relevance within the learning using your own knowledge, experience, intuition, ideas and curiosity. Step inside systems change and come alongside us to experience our work from the inside and leave with what you need to take your next step towards acting and advocating for bioregional health.
Is this course for you?
Have you heard a voice saying ‘enough’? Maybe it’s your own voice, or the voice of many. As we 'fall together', we can learn to adapt well, growing our capacities for interdependence and resilience. If you are curious about designing for different possible futures, this learning experience will demonstrate how - through the power of bioregional collectiveness. If you are a changemaker, you will see how a bioregional narrative augments a regenerative path and gain the agency needed to take action for adaptation.
Lovingly put together by an experienced team doing the work on the ground, this course is about harmonising human activities with the natural systems of which we are a part - 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.
For those in South Devon, where a residential commitment may not make sense, we are planning non-residential opportunities to explore and rethink the place we call home. Please contact us separately to sign up on the waitlist for these.
What you will learn on the course:
• First steps and entry points for starting a bioregional journey, including rivers, soils and communities
• Applicable knowledge and skills for developing and expanding bioregional work
• Design for regenerative action within many sectors, including finance and food production
• Know-how from those making dents in old systems or forging new pathways
• Processes and techniques for understanding, sensing and mapping a bioregion
• The development process for a Bioregional Finance Facility
• Natural ecosystem restoration - collaborative modelling, including the arts
• Guidance for policymaker decision making in the face of change and crises.
What to expect
Our residential course is a 5-day immersion into place and practice for bioregional practitioners from the UK and beyond. Designed to deliver the “why” and the “how to”, you will explore theory, strategies, partnership working, long-term project development, story, data and sense-making in order to be able to apply a range of approaches at home with your own collaborators. The venue is Ambios’ working farm; learning spaces, rewilding fields, market garden, beautiful views for reflection and a barn, complete with hay bales. The learning will begin right here on the farm, boots in the mud.
The programme emphasizes practical ways of working, both locally and with other bioregions, and delivers essential core competencies for bioregional practice, nuggets of wisdom about systems and complexity, case studies, tools and techniques. Includes time outdoors, sensing practices, small-group discussion and design, a journey or two beyond the farm, shared meals and conversation around the campfire. Your guides will be the BLC team who are experienced and skilled practitioners, alongside the Ambios team and special guests.
Arrive Monday afternoon for a welcome dinner, and depart Saturday in the morning after a "Breaking Bread" community feast and an evening of reflection in the barn on Friday.
Come to our free webinar to find out more!
Join our free introductory webinar at 6pm GMT on the 5th of March, 2026. Join the BLC and Ambios team to get your questions answered and hear from previous participants about their experiences.
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?