Mark Pascall And Kaj Löfgren On Building Regenerative Cities And Funding Community-Led Solutions

Mark Pascall is a social entrepreneur, systems thinker, and a leading voice in decentralised technology for social good in Aotearoa, New Zealand. He’s the co-founder of The Wellbeing Protocol, a platform reimagining how funding flows, putting power directly into the hands of communities through participatory micro-granting.

Mark has spent the last decade exploring how blockchain, open-source tools, and collaborative governance can shift systems from top-down control to grassroots empowerment. He previously co-founded BlockchainLabs.nz, was executive director of the New Zealand Blockchain Association, founding partner of Metacartel Ventures and developed one of New Zealand’s first university courses on DAO governance.

Kaj Löfgren is the founder and CEO of Regen Melbourne, an engine for ambitious collaboration, in service of Melbourne. Powered by an alliance of more than 200 organisations, Regen Melbourne is the catalyst and host of a portfolio of Earthshots that are moving Melbourne towards a regenerative future.

Kaj is also a Senior Advisor and facilitator at Small Giants Academy, where he is a guide on a number of the SGA programs including Impact Safari Scandinavia: the Future of Cities and most recently the Mastery of Systems Leadership.

A Civil Engineer by training, Kaj also holds a Masters of Economic History from Lund University.

Mark and Kaj discusses how regenerative thinking, social innovation, and decentralised technologies are transforming the way communities govern, fund, and flourish, and reimagining economic systems to empower hyperlocal leadership and grassroots initiatives to drive systemic change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you each share a bit about your backgrounds and what led you both to this world of social entrepreneurship and community development?

[Mark Pascall] - My background is in open source software engineering. That’s what I’ve been doing for most of my career, and I ran a software business for about 15 years.

Around eight years ago, I became fascinated by this new emerging world of decentralised technology, Web3, and blockchain, especially with new governance models that were being enabled by this technology.

I came across this concept called the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO’s), and I became enthralled by the potential of using those patterns to reimagine how we organise ourselves.

That led me onto a whole lot of fascinating projects, and I started to see how many of our current institutions (particularly around funding, welfare, and community support) are designed in ways that disempower the people they are supposed to help.

I started thinking about how we might use decentralisation to re-empower hyperlocal groups so that they can make their own decisions. That led to the beginning of The Wellbeing Protocol about four years ago, and since then we’ve been doing some very interesting things.

[Kaj Löfgren] - I’m an engineer by training, but during my second year of university, I discovered an organisation that was just starting in Melbourne called Engineers Without Borders.

I ended up spending most of my time while studying hanging out with the cool people who were starting this incredible organisation, which was trying to put a humanitarian heartbeat at the centre of a pretty conservative engineering profession in Australia. This was back when we were having a mining boom about 20 years ago, and there was a lot of energy in the engineering sector.

I spent the first part of my career with Engineers Without Borders, and then transitioned into working at the intersection of impact investment, social entrepreneurship, and social finance for about 10 years with a family office called Small Giants.

We were pioneering how you move money with purpose, and how to do that in a way that’s holistic, systemic, and goes beyond single-point solutions while looking at network effects and placing collaboration at the core.

I then took a bit of a hiatus and went to Sweden, where my family’s from, and took my young kids over there. I completed a Master’s in Economic History, which spoke to my long-held passion that we need to understand how large economic transitions have happened in the past to better understand what we’re currently going through.

I think it’s well understood we’re in a macroeconomic transition, so let’s think about how that’s happened before and what we can learn to harness the current transition for good.

When I returned to Melbourne, we ran straight into the Black Summer Fires at the end of 2019. This was an epic fire event up and down the east coast of Australia, which blanketed both Melbourne and Sydney in smoke. Then, a month or two later, Melbourne was thrust into some of the longest lockdowns as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic anywhere in the world. We had all of 2020 in lockdown.

It was in the context of these big crises (the Black Summer Fires and the COVID-19 lockdowns), Regen Melbourne emerged as a place-based response to those new conditions.

Kaj please share a bit more about Regen Melbourne. What does a regenerative future in your eyes look like for cities? How can collaborative platforms and organisations like Regen Melbourne start driving progress towards that vision?

[Kaj Löfgren] - I’ve had the privilege throughout my entire career of spending time in the impact ecosystem leading organisations, supporting partner organisations, and looking at it from a portfolio perspective to see some of the patterns that were emerging. This was not just in Melbourne and Australia, but around the world. When we had these big interruptions in 2020, I was given the opportunity by Small Giants to look at some of the long-term trends that we could tune into as a result of these disruptions.

We ran a whole series of big Zoom calls exploring the future of energy, finance, income, jobs, health, and a range of other areas. One of the themes that came up was: what is the future of cities?

While we’re always interested in regenerating landscapes, ultimately, if we can’t grapple with the complexity of large urban environments (especially in the context of the climate emergency and social foundations like isolation and connection) we won’t be able to navigate the next century particularly well. Cities matter greatly.

We ran a major Zoom forum asking: what is the future of cities? We invited our friends Kate Raworth, who wrote Doughnut Economics, and her husband Roman Krznaric, a great philosopher in his own right. We explored the future of cities through a Doughnut Economics lens. That forum kicked off what became a six-month collaborative research project aimed at answering the question you’ve just asked: what does a regenerative future for a city look like?

My answer is the same as the one given by more than 500 people who participated in that community research process. A regenerative Melbourne is one that is knowledgeable, full of life, collaborative, connected through the diversity of its cultures, affordable, and enabled by the economic and governance systems that support it.

These are a whole bunch of nice words that we came up with as a big collective, and we put that vision statement out. But we also realised that accompanying this kind of collective vision statement, it needs to be backed up somehow.

It needs to be made rigorous, so we kicked off a process of downscaling the Doughnut Economics model. We took these words and this vision statement for Melbourne and backed it up with a significant data exercise, which resulted in something called the City Portrait.

If you go to our website at doughnut.regen.melbourne, you’ll find a beautiful interactive digital portrait. It actually shows what we mean by a knowledgeable city that’s full of life, connected through its culture, and collaborative. It also provides metrics for all of these elements, showing how far away we are from that vision, but also how tangible it can become.

It’s not just a vision that we hold, sit around, and enjoy; it’s something we can actively pursue. We can lean into the practice of moving towards that vision, and ultimately, Regen Melbourne is an expression of how we do that.

We’re made up of three main parts. The first part is the vision I just described. The second part is a portfolio of what we call “earth shots.” These are wildly ambitious projects designed to take us towards that vision, and we currently have three of them.

The third component is what we call the Systems Lab, which is a knowledge and action research platform. It pulls together wisdom from traditional and formal knowledge systems across Greater Melbourne and channels that in service of our collective vision.

You can think of the earth shots as the action, the projects where we try to regenerate our rivers, activate participatory streets, and reimagine regenerative food systems. Then we have the Systems Lab, which functions like our think tank, where we conduct the action research that underpins those projects.

To bring it all together, we describe Regen Melbourne as an engine for systemic collaboration across and in service to our city. As you mentioned in your introduction, that engine is powered by about 200 organisations. We’re all working together through the earth shots and the Systems Lab to achieve what we describe as transformational change.

Mark, you’re the co-founder of The Wellbeing Protocol, and I’d love if you could share a bit more about this organisation and how it’s working to reimagine systems and empower communities?

[Mark Pascall] - Our big vision is to create a wellbeing economy as an alternative to the capitalist system that we’re all engulfed in, this system that drives behaviours around individualism, private property, and competition. We’re saying these things actually aren’t good for us as humans. The system is pushing us in a direction that is, to be honest, making us unwell.

We started imagining what a new economic system might look like that actually favours localism. Localism is a fantastic way to support alternative forms of capital that are good for social capital, experiential capital, and natural capital. That’s the big vision. But at a more practical level, as a first step towards that broader vision, we’ve been focusing on rethinking how funding flows. We’re trying to redirect some of the existing capital that comes out of our tax system for social welfare and philanthropy. How do we start redirecting that to hyperlocal community groups?

Right now, if you’re a local informal group, say you want to create a community garden, address child mental health at your school, or do anything good, it’s really hard to get funding. There are all these hoops, long application processes, complex reporting, even for small amounts of money. Essentially, you have to beg; the system is about begging.

You have to ask people in power to give you money. What we wanted to do (and what we started doing) was reimagining a system where a hyperlocal group could be given their own micro-treasury. We built a workflow governance tool that would allow that hyperlocal group to decide where the money gets spent in a fully democratic, transparent, and efficient way.

Essentially, money would stream into their micro-treasury and then stream out as micro-grants into the community. This is where Web3 and blockchain technology provide the substrate and infrastructure to make this possible.

It allows us to do it in a way that can scale through replication, so we can create thousands (even millions) of these hyperlocal nodes: hyperlocal groups doing good in a super easy and efficient way for funders.

That’s not just for the big funders like governments and large philanthropic organisations, but ultimately for anybody with excess financial capital to fund localism at scale.

We originally received a grant from the New Zealand government to explore this concept with an Indigenous community, the Māori Men’s Health Group. That was about two or three years ago. Through that project, we explored new voting and governance patterns using quadratic voting, conviction voting, and so on.

We built something, and it went well. Then we started talking to other people, and I went over to Australia and got connected with Kaj and what they were doing. Suddenly, we discovered all these people saying, “We want that! This would work for us.”

We’re now running trials in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.

If we’re looking at this, what role should government and philanthropy play in supporting regenerative and grassroots enterprises that are trying to create meaningful change or impact?

[Kaj Löfgren] - I’ll just take the opportunity to zoom out a little bit. For us at Regen Melbourne, the reason we designed the Systems Lab was to examine the long-term conditions that need to change for regenerative work to emerge.

It’s one thing to talk about single projects that make the world better. It’s another thing to ask: how can we shift the conditions that sit beneath the places we care about, in order for more of that regenerative work to happen? That’s the question the Systems Lab grapples with on a daily basis.

We look at five interconnected conditions. First: how do we measure things? How are we actually measuring in a way that serves life? Second: how are we telling stories of place that are different, stories that move beyond the current narratives we hold about our places?

Third: how do we move knowledge differently? How can research happen more collaboratively? Fourth: how do we govern and make decisions collectively? That’s important because I think a lot of people feel a lack of agency when it comes to shaping the future of their places.

Finally (and this is why we’re having this conversation) how does money move differently? How do we move money through our places in a way that actually serves them and ultimately serves the regenerative vision we have at Regen Melbourne?

I think that’s such a critical question, and it’s why working with The Wellbeing Protocol is so interesting to us. The current finance paradigm of which philanthropy and government are a part is pretty blind to the quality and magnitude of the risks our places are facing.

What I mean is that while there’s a lot of talk about the risks we face (particularly around climate) these risks also show up in democratic decline and the erosion of the social foundations of a place. The magnitude of these risks is so profound, and they’re exponentially increasing, that it’s almost too scary to look straight at. It’s certainly too scary for the finance sector to face directly.

The only exception to that, I’d say, is the insurance sector, which is starting to price in some of these risks over the short, medium, and long term.

But generally speaking, when you think about impact investing, philanthropy, and government, a lot of those sectors are struggling to grapple with the magnitude of the risks we’re facing. What we try to think about at Regen Melbourne is: how can we set up experiments?

Active prototypes where we get to move money differently, allowing us to be in closer relationship with the reality of the risk. One way we can do that is by looking at how money is moving on the streets of Melbourne.

We did a whole bunch of work on what we call 300,000 Streets, which is one of our earth shots focused on the streets of Melbourne. What we found was pretty obvious: lots of people want to serve their places more. They want to get involved, help their neighbourhoods, plant trees, and run street parties.

But what they kept running up against was the lack of speed in capital movement on the street. If someone wants to organise a community gathering and needs, say, $500 from the council, the grant process is huge. There’s also a complex training process just to shut the street for a party. The infrastructure around them wasn’t enabling them to do what they wanted to do.

When we learned about Mark’s work with The Wellbeing Protocol, it was so exciting because it allowed us to start solving that exact question: how does money move, not necessarily at scale, but at speed, in relationship with people on the street?

Philanthropy and government need to be in a much more intimate relationship with the changemakers in places. In Melbourne’s case, that’s not just entrepreneurs running organisations, but also the people in neighbourhoods who want to run a street party. These are people who aren’t part of an organisation but still need to access resources of some kind.

What Mark has built, and what we’re excited to test here in Melbourne, is a mechanism that enables that kind of activation at a community and street level. That feels incredibly exciting to us, and it’s already producing interesting results.

Regen Melbourne acts as a convener and organiser, so when we run a pilot like this, we can then ladder it up. We can take it to local government, to state government, and explore how we engage other funders in new ways of moving money.

Do you have any thoughts or comments you’d like to share on government and philanthropy and their role in building this movement further?

[Mark Pascall] - As Kaj said, we’ve been trying to solve this problem of hyperlocal funding efficiency, getting small grants out to people on the ground through an efficient, transparent new mechanism. That’s really our focus.

It’s about overcoming the challenge Kaj hinted at with traditional philanthropy and government, which typically operate through a top-down, rigid hierarchical system. It’s slow, and it’s hard, especially when you’re talking about small amounts of money. Often, those systems just won’t bother, or they’ll delegate, and you get this hierarchical chain of organisations, each taking a slice for infrastructure costs, so very little money actually reaches the street.

We’ve tried to change that model completely. We’ve created a direct flow mechanism that strips out inefficiency and makes it super easy for what we call intermediaries (partners like Regen Melbourne) to flow the money from funders directly through to hyperlocal groups.

It’s about shifting power. A big part of our work on governance has been about making it easy for small groups of people (everyday people, often with old technology and slow phones) to make decisions around a pot of money. That’s not a simple thing to solve, but it’s the challenge we set ourselves, and it’s been working well.

[Kaj Löfgren] - Something just popped up while you were talking, Mark. I spent quite a long time in the impact investment and social finance space, and the constant conversation in that world was: how do we increase the quantity of money going into impact? That was the consistent metric, trillions of dollars towards impact was the rallying cry at all the impact investment conferences.

What I’ve learned from spending time in that world, and then diving more deeply into the language of complexity, systems investing, and non-linear change, is that there’s a reckoning coming for impact finance. This reckoning is about shifting away from focusing solely on the quantity of capital as the key metric, and moving more towards conversations about the quality of capital. How these mechanisms are designed is actually much more important than the quantity (at least in the short term) in order for us to find new ways of doing things that we can then potentially scale.

But that requires smaller experiments, better designed, in lots of places at the same time so that we can learn more. I think that’s why, for us, this is such an exciting part of our work.

Could you both just touch on some of the strategies you’ve implemented when you’ve encountered barriers to shifting these systems, and how you navigated those challenges?

[Mark Pascall] - One of the barriers we’ve encountered is really a mindset issue, as I mentioned earlier. Institutions (government, philanthropy, community organisations) are built around control and compliance. As these organisations grow, that focus on control becomes increasingly important, and the system just gets worse. It becomes more frustrating for the end user, which is typically the community member.

There’s often this underlying belief that communities can’t be trusted to manage money or make decisions without oversight. We know that’s not true, especially when it comes to smaller decisions, which can often have a big ripple impact. Whether it’s $100 to get a family to an event or some other local initiative, there are amazing things that come from community decision-making that have truly amazed us.

There’s an ingrained bias in the system that leads to a very slow, paternalistic, red tape-heavy process. On top of that, we’ve also come across technical and structural barriers. Many funders still rely on outdated grant systems that aren’t built for transparency or flexibility. There are also legal challenges, especially when it comes to giving away free money. For example, in New Zealand, the Charities Act presents extra barriers that make this more difficult.

To overcome some of these challenges, we’ve focused on two things: building trust and building proof. We’ve designed tools that are super simple to use and highly transparent. Anyone can see where the funds are going and who voted on what.

A critical part of our model is working with local partners like Regen Melbourne. They sit between the funder and the community groups, bringing local knowledge and working directly with communities in ways that feel safe and culturally aligned.

We’ve been running lots of small, low-risk trials to demonstrate to funders that it works. We say, “Don’t just trust us—watch it work on a small scale. If it does, put more money in and let it grow organically.”

[Kaj Löfgren] - I was going to start from the same place that Mark did.

I think there’s an imagination deficit. It’s hard not just for government and people in positions of power, but also for communities to see beyond the current state of conditions in a place or a system.

A lot of our work initially was about creating environments, forums, and workshops where people feel safe enough to go beyond what currently exists. When we worked on the vision for Greater Melbourne, we wanted to create a clearly articulated vision for a transformed Melbourne. That plays out in each of our earth shots. One of those earth shots asks: how do we make our major river, the Birrarung, swimmable again?

That’s a joyful, inspiring call for greater imagination. Can we imagine something that feels almost impossible right now? Let’s put it on paper, talk about what it would take, and grapple with its complexity in a real and tangible way.

Maybe the second significant barrier is getting everyone to understand—particularly when doing place-based organising at scale, which is what we’re trying to do here at Regen Melbourne—that when we say collaboration, we don’t necessarily mean consensus.

We don’t even mean coordination. It’s much closer to the idea of coherence: recognising that any action we take is in relationship with lots of other actions being taken towards, say, a swimmable river. But that doesn’t mean we all have to agree on everything.

As long as we’re aligned with the broad vision we hold for a city and a place, then collaboration for us is much more about coherence. To help navigate that complexity, we’ve built what we call scaffolding, or collaboration architecture. We’ve built three earth shots, really clear calls aligned to a vision, backed by an organising method that arranges our partners into what we call pathways: dedicated pathways toward that vision.

For example, along the riverfront, there might be pathways focused on governance of the river, engineering approaches to clean it, or data pathways to measure water quality. We cluster people across all the different layers that need to transform. Once we do that, we end up with a portfolio of collaborative interventions, a collective sense-making portfolio for how we take the next best step forward together.

The two main things are: first, addressing the imagination deficit by helping people see what’s possible, and second, grappling with what good collaboration really means. For us, as I said, it’s much more about coherence than it is about consensus or coordination.

Please share some inspiring projects or initiatives that you’ve seen creating change, and any books or resources that you would recommend to our audience?

[Kaj Löfgren] - There are three international organisations that we’re deeply connected with at Regen Melbourne. The first is the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which is based in the UK but has teams in many places around the world. They work with cities and communities globally that are grappling with the Doughnut Economics framework. I’d encourage everyone to check them out.

The second is the TransCap Initiative, based out of Switzerland. They are specifically exploring the question of how money moves differently and are doing significant work in many parts of the world.

The third is Dark Matter Labs, who we work very closely with at Regen Melbourne. They are doing cutting-edge, often place-based work, thinking deeply about how we transform systems. Those three organisations are diving into the depths of systems thinking and complexity work in practice.

In terms of books that complement those themes, obviously Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth is a key recommendation for anyone interested in new ways of thinking about the economy. Another essential read is Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato, a wonderful economist from Italy, now based in the UK. She wrote about mission-oriented innovation, which is essentially the framework that underpins our earth shots.

I’ll recommend two more books that stare directly at the reality of the polycrisis we’re facing. One is Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the other is Juice by Tim Winton, which I’m reading at the moment. Both are harrowing reads, but I think a little dose of reality is good for us as we grapple with this work today.

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[Mark Pascall] - Regen Melbourne is certainly an inspiring project from our perspective. We were also quite inspired early on by the town of Frome in southwest England. They conducted a fascinating three-year public health study. If you Google “Frome study,” it was covered by The Guardian and The New York Times.

It was a remarkable study where they measured hospital admissions and invested in community initiatives. They saw a 4–7% drop in hospital admissions simply by investing in community. They implemented social prescribing where, instead of giving patients Prozac for anxiety or depression, the GP would prescribe joining a gardening group or similar community activity. They did amazing things there. I even went over to meet the team behind it and was really inspired by their work.

Funding the Commons is another initiative worth mentioning. They’re a blockchain-based group running conferences and educational events around funding and decentralised funding systems.

As for books, Lost Connections by Johann Hari was one we read early on and found insightful. Another is The Third Pillar by Raghuram Rajan. He’s the former head of the Indian Reserve Bank and ex-Chief Economist at the IMF. He describes how society is built on three pillars: the free market, the state, and the community. Over the last few hundred years, we’ve seen a massive power shift towards the free market and the state, leaving the community pillar behind. We need to rebalance these pillars to move forward effectively.