How to Start a Bioregional Group on Hylo That Your Place-Mates Can Find

Why organize your place on Hylo?

Every kind of organizing needs a good communication tool for the time between in-person gatherings. You need a way to share upcoming events, keep projects moving, plan ahead, and make decisions together.

Email listservs are still common, and plenty of people are comfortable with them. But a listserv is a megaphone: one person broadcasts to many. There’s no way to organize information, and group conversations quickly dissolve into tangled reply-all threads. The sender holds all the control and all the responsibility, and when they hit capacity, the whole group stalls.

WhatsApp and Signal groups are easy to use, and Signal is encrypted and independent of Big Tech. A group chat works great, until it doesn’t. Once a group reaches a certain size and level of activity, the stream becomes impossible to keep up with, and there’s nowhere to hold shared projects or important information. These tools weren’t designed for groups trying to get things done.

Hylo is. Here’s what it offers place-based groups:

• A map of your community. See your members, events, and activity laid across the landscape of your region. Neighbors can discover and connect with people who live nearby.
• Mutual support built in. Requests and Offers let neighbors help each other, and every fulfilled exchange builds trust. Local cultures of mutual aid are the foundation of community resilience.
• Shared decision making. From polls to proposals to participatory grantmaking, your group can make collective decisions about your shared landscape, and even distribute funding (if available) to local projects.
• A structure that matches yours. Hylo’s nested groups let you mirror how you organize on the ground: one regional group with watershed, city, or neighborhood spaces, or spaces for working groups and shared interests. Independent but connected subgroups can be added later as your network grows.
• Your data stays yours. No tracking, no selling, no surveillance. Hylo is open source and community governed.

Put together, this means your group can do more than talk. It can grow from a handful of committed people into a living network across your bioregion: one where newcomers find their way in, knowledge spreads, leadership is shared, and neighbors who care about the same watershed get to meet each other and eventually make decisions together about the land they steward.

Setting up your group

1. Create the group. Anyone can create a group on Hylo for free. On the web (recommended for group management), click “+” > Create a Group in the lower left corner.

2. Fill in the basics. Name your group and add a purpose, avatar, and banner image. Most importantly, set your Location, either as a city or address, or by drawing a polygon around your bioregion. For now, we recommend setting visibility to “Anyone can find and see” and access to “By request, with approval.” You can change any setting later. Click Create Group.

3. Decide what you want people to do. You’ll land in your new group space. Before you configure the menu, get clear on how you want members to participate:

• Gathering in person or online? Make sure the Events view sits near the top of your menu.
• Growing a culture of mutual aid? Prioritize the Requests and Offers view. (More advanced mutual aid features are coming soon.)
• Sharing local resources? Build a resource library from posts in your group or from external links.
• Guiding people toward specific actions? Create a Track, a structured pathway that walks members through a process. For example, a “Getting to Know Our Bioregion” Track could cover your watersheds and water sources, energy, ecology, culture, local challenges, and the major resilience and regeneration efforts already underway.

4. Write your Welcome page. This is the first thing new members see, so tell them who you are, what the group is for, and what to do first.

For more depth, read the Hylo Group Steward Guide. Have a question about setup or how to activate your group? Ask in Hylo Community Organizers.

Make your group discoverable

Before you open the doors, seed the space. Post a few upcoming events and key information, and invite a handful of collaborators to start engaging. A group with some life in it is far more inviting than an empty room.

When you’re ready to welcome more people in, take two steps to be visible on Hylo:

1. Go public. In Group Settings > Privacy & Access, set Visibility to Public. An option will appear to Apply for Public Visibility. Appearing in Search and the Public Map and Stream is a privilege on Hylo for groups with a prosocial purpose, and Public Visibility is granted by the platform stewards.

2. Connect to Bioregional Commons. Bioregional Commons is a global group for place-based practitioners and a growing hub for discovering bioregional initiatives around the world. Once you’ve joined Bioregional Commons yourself, go to your group’s Settings > Related Groups, click Join Parent Groups, find Bioregional Commons, and click Request. When your request is accepted, your group will appear on Bioregional Commons’ Related Groups page. Other groups you may want to connect to include the BioFi Project (if bioregional finance and local/circular economies feel relevant to your group) or TIBC Community (if you are based in Turtle Island / North America). Feel free to make a post in those groups about your new group, so that any folks local to you can join!

Then spread the word online and offline. Share the group’s link in your listserv or group chat (often) and encourage folks to join. Make a flyer that explains your group’s purpose, add a QR code with your join link, and post it on bulletin boards around town. Share it at local events, and maybe host something yourself.

Start catalyzing local change

Start by listening. Before launching big initiatives, ask your members what they love about this place, what worries them, and what they want to see change. A simple poll or discussion post can surface skills, land, tools, and relationships you didn’t know your community had.

Host something regular. It can be as simple as a monthly potluck. What matters is that it’s recurring and consistent, so people can count on it. Rhythm builds resilience.

Pick one tangible project. A seed swap, a tool library, a creek cleanup, a skill share. Small, visible wins give people a reason to show up again and show newcomers what the group is about.

Let structure grow with energy. Create Spaces within your group for specific projects, topics, or towns. When a Space gets busy, you can spin it off into its own child group.

Don’t be the bottleneck. Invite others to co-steward the group and nurture emerging leaders. If you’re still building trust with co-organizers, you can assign admin roles with specific, limited responsibilities.

Focus on relationships and trust. Organizing is all about relationships, so be prepared to put in the time with people. Spend time visiting with folks who are involved, or you’d like to be, as much as you can to grow trust and learn about what your constituents really want. When you make mistakes or when conflict emerges, prioritize accountability and repair.

Resource the stewards

Organizing locally, in-person, or online is a big job, and folks who do it deserve to be resourced for the work. My dream is to see folks all over paid to organize bioregions and regenerate the land. More and more jobs are popping up to do this work as part of local and state government. Another approach is to apply for grants to fund yourself and your team.

In the meantime, here are some resources about how to organize your bioregion:

• What is a bioregion? From Regenerate Cascadia
• Find your bioregion, by bioregions.earth
• A Brief Introduction to the Bioregional Movement and Bioregional Congressing, by Karie Crisp
• R3.0 resources on bioregioning, online dialogues, and bioregional knowledge commons
• BioFi Project activation guide (if you’re interested in innovative local finance options)
• Here’s a great roundup from the Bioregional Weaving Lab
• Organizing Guide: People, Power, Change. Not specifically place-based, but a great guide to organizing in general.

In my next blog post, I’ll share a way to use Hylo’s Paid Groups feature to allow a bioregional community to collectively pay an organizer for their stewardship.