In the spring of 1984, when my family was still living in NE Minneapolis the severe weather sirens went off just as the sky turned green and the wind began to make that unmistakable sound people compared to a freight train. A tornado was coming. A tornado ripped through the area, damaging Apache Plaza and tearing through homes, businesses, trees, and people’s lives. 

Years later, in the spring of 2011, I was living in the Cleveland neighborhood of North Minneapolis when another tornado struck. It carved a path across the area, uprooting trees, damaging homes, and leaving a visible scar that stayed with the neighborhood for years.
My family and friends were fortunate. We were not injured. But others were and those storms stayed with me.

Maybe you have never been near a tornado. Maybe your memory is a blizzard, a drought, wildfire smoke, flooding, extreme heat, or the quiet anxiety of watching the forecast and wondering what the next strange weather pattern will bring. That is the reality of designing now. Not panic but honesty.

The climate context around us is changing. Minnesota is warmer and wetter than it used to be. Heavy rainfall events are increasing. Storms may not follow the familiar patterns we were taught to expect. Some risks are still hard to predict, including tornado frequency, but the broader direction is clear: buildings, landscapes, infrastructure, and communities are being asked to hold more uncertainty than before.
And so are we.
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Part of resilience is self-correction. We learn. We name what helped. We name what was incomplete. We stop romanticizing wisdom we have not earned. We keep growing.

That same self-correction is needed in design, development, and economics.
For generations, dominant culture has treated land as inventory, water as infrastructure, labor as an input, and profit as proof of success. We have built systems that extract environmentally, stratify economically, and isolate socially.
We do not have to keep living this way. And we do have to adapt.

Not by simply defending ourselves from nature, but by remembering that we are nature. Not by making buildings slightly less harmful, but by asking how places can participate in healing. Not by chasing resilience as a premium feature, but by treating it as basic care for the people and ecosystems every project depends on.​

My parents spent much of their lives standing alongside people and communities that were too often treated as disposable or “other.” Through their relationships, community work, and willingness to learn from people across many walks of life, I was exposed early to many cultures, histories, and ways of understanding belonging. My dad grew up in a conservative household, but his time in the Navy in the Mediterranean Sea exposed him to different cultures and histories that reshaped how he saw the world. My mom, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, was active in the civil rights movement in New York City. Those pivotal experiences happened before my parents met and our family settled in Minnesota. Community building and ally-ship continued for them in the Midwest. Because of the relationships they built over time, including with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, African American communities, and others, I grew up surrounded by many different cultures, perspectives, and ways of understanding community. 
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​I grew up around people who believed dignity mattered, and acted like it. Looking back, I realize how much that shaped the way I think about design today. Social equity and diversity became more than abstract values for me. They became part of how I understand collaboration, community, and the responsibility of design.
This month, as we reflect on social equity, diversity, and participatory design, I keep returning to a simple belief: restoration must go beyond plants, water, soil, or ecological habitat. Restoration begins with people’s dignity.

 The built environment is never neutral.
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Every material choice, every displaced community, every wetland paved over, every public space created, and every system restored becomes part of a longer story. We inherit the consequences of past decisions, and future generations will inherit ours.

This is where the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Seventh Generation Principle is especially important. The idea that decisions made today should consider their impact seven generations into the future stands in sharp contrast to the short-term extraction and accelerated consumption that define much of modern development.


For us, this principle is not to be translated into some modern slogan. It is a challenge.
It asks designers, planners, owners, institutions and more to think beyond project delivery. Who benefits? Who carries the burden? Who was left out of the conversation? What relationships are strengthened? What systems are repaired? What will this decision make possible for people we will never meet? Then we can participate in healing.

When those most affected by development decisions are excluded from the process we run the risk of degradation. Many cultures, including Indigenous traditions, have long understood responsibility in more relational ways. When people understand themselves as part of a larger web of life, the idea of “other” begins to break down. Equity and diversity are not just social goals; they are conditions for healthier systems.

Participatory design is one way we practice that responsibility: by asking not only what should be built, but whose knowledge, memory, and lived experience should help guide the decision. 

Participatory design is not just a meeting format. It is a shift in power.

It is where social equity and diversity become practical. Social equity asks who has been excluded from shaping decisions. Diversity reminds us that different kinds of knowledge strengthen the whole - just like in nature. Participatory design creates the conditions for those voices to matter before the outcome has already been decided.

At the core participatory design is an approach that attempts to involve a variety of stakeholders in the process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is truly usable. It’s co-creation, it’s deep listening and it’s about making a real effort to build a table together with people instead of simply inviting them to sit at an existing table. It’s a commitment to finding design potentials that are more equitable even if that is more challenging.

At Tikun, we see participatory design as one of the clearest ways to practice social equity in the built environment. It means moving away from design as something delivered to a community and toward design as something developed with a community.

That requires more than asking for feedback after decisions have already been made.

It means creating processes where lived experience, cultural memory, accessibility needs, ecological knowledge, community priorities and more can shape the work from the beginning. It means trying to communicate in ways that include instead of trying to influence. It means building trust before asking people to contribute. It means treating community members as knowledge holders, not obstacles to efficiency.
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This is especially important in regenerative work because regeneration is fundamentally relational. A building cannot be regenerative if the process used to create it is extractive. A place cannot restore community if the people most affected by it were not meaningfully included in shaping it.
For us, participatory design is cultural design. It is how values become a process.

For several years, Tikun has worked with Envision Community as it has navigated arguably one of the most challenging of human systems, the affordable housing system. Through many wins and setbacks they continue to develop an intentional community model co-created by people with lived experience of homelessness.
Envision’s work begins with a simple but often overlooked truth: housing is not only about placement. It is also about belonging, stability, healing, connection, and the ability to participate in shaping the community around you.

Too often, people who have experienced homelessness are treated as recipients of services rather than co-designers of solutions. Envision is working from a differen premise: lived experience is knowledge and expertise. People who have navigated homelessness, housing systems, recovery, trauma, isolation, and survival understand things that professionals, funders, designers, and institutions often miss.
That is where participatory design becomes essential.

With Envision, Tikun’s role has not been confined to physical space. Much of the work has focused on the social infrastructure that makes shared power possible: meeting structures, plain-language materials, decision-making processes, role clarity, facilitation support, reflection practices, and ways of helping people participate without being tokenized.

This work has included supporting conversations about Sociocracy (renamed Equal Voice Rules for the organization), restorative practices, leadership roles, community expectations, and the shift from simply having people with lived experience “at the table” to building a table where their knowledge can actually co-shape the outcome. 

​That distinction matters.

Representation is not the same as participation. Participation is not the same as power. And power is not real unless people have the information, support, trust, time, and authority to influence decisions.

Through Envision, we have learned that participatory design requires scaffolding. It asks us to slow down, translate complex ideas, make decisions visible, create feedback loops, and design for different ways people process information and build trust. It also asks institutions and professionals to practice humility: to recognize that expertise is not only technical, academic, or credentialed.

In regenerative design, we often talk about restoring ecosystems. Envision reminds us that community itself is an ecosystem. Social connection, mutual care, shared leadership, restorative practice, and dignity are all forms of infrastructure.
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This is what June’s theme looks like in practice: social equity as a commitment, diversity as a source of wisdom, and participatory design as the process that helps turn dignity into something people can feel, practice, and build together.

At last year’s Living Future Conference, David Orr raised the idea of a Hippocratic Oath for the built environment. Medicine has long carried a shared ethical commitment to protect life and avoid harm. Architecture and design do not yet have an equivalent industry-wide oath, even though the built environment profoundly shapes human health, ecological stability, social connection, and climate resilience.
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That absence matters.

Designers influence how energy is used, how resources are extracted, who feels welcome in a space, and whether communities are strengthened or fragmented. That level of influence carries responsibility.

For Tikun, “do no harm” cannot only apply to the present moment. It must also include doing no harm to our ancestors through forgetting, extraction, or erasure. It must include doing no harm to future generations through the systems, buildings, and environments we leave behind.

Honesty and self-correction are part of that oath.

They ask us to slow down, listen more deeply, admit when our assumptions are incomplete, and make room for the people closest to the impact to help shape the outcome. That is part of the oath we are trying to practice at Tikun: to work toward a built environment that leaves no one out, poisons nothing, and contributes to repair instead of degeneration.

This month, we invite you to look at the places and systems around you through a participatory lens.

• Who has been included?
• Who has been left out?
• Whose knowledge is treated as expertise?
• Whose dignity needs to be restored?
• What would change if the people most affected by a decision helped shape it from the beginning?

​The built environment reflects what we value, who we listen to, who holds power, and what kind of legacy we choose to leave behind.
At Tikun, we believe design can be a form of stewardship and healing. Not because design can solve everything, but because every project gives us a chance to practice a different way of being in relationship with people, place, and future generations.

I didn’t arrive at this understanding through science or philosophy first. I arrived at it through lived experience, by returning again and again to a place where beauty, function, memory, and belonging were inseparable for me. 

My deepest connection to the natural world was, and in many ways still is, at our family cabin in New Hampshire. My maternal grandparents, immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, lived modestly in New York City. During the Depression, my grandfather acquired an acre of land through logging work. That acre became more meaningful to our family than anyone could have imagined. This year marks 100 years of our family stewarding that place. As a kid in those woods, I would sit and watch leaves moving in the wind, stop and listen to water slipping over stones in the nearby creek, examine rocks and wonder how they were made, or stare at light shifting through the trees. Long before I had the language for it, I was drawn to the quiet intelligence of the natural world and to the way its beauty was never separate from how it lived and worked. Before I knew the word, I was already experiencing biophilia. 
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Some designers put more focus on aesthetics than how a building feels. When questions like, “how can the building feel better, be healthier and cost less to manage?” are asked, we can have a more powerful impact on the people that use them. When designing buildings we like to keep the following key questions in mind to help us align with the natural flow of energy:

1. Where could the building be losing energy first?
   Is it through the roof, walls, windows, or air leakage? Identifying the weakest points in the building envelope is the first step toward improving efficiency.
2. How can daylight do more work?
   Natural light is a free and abundant resource, but it needs to be managed carefully to avoid glare or overheating. We’ll explore strategies for maximizing daylight while minimizing its downsides.
3. What does comfort look like in different seasons?
   Summer comfort doesn’t have to mean constant arctic blasts, and winter comfort doesn’t have to mean broiling in oppressive heat. We’ll look at ways to create balanced, consistent comfort year-round.
4. Where can simple moves outperform expensive add-ons?
   Sometimes, the most effective solutions are also the simplest. Shading, sealing, insulation continuity, ventilation strategies, and zoning can often deliver better results than costly, complex systems.
5. How do we make efficiency legitimate to occupants?
   A building that’s easy to live in and easy to run is more likely to be used efficiently. We’ll explore ways to make energy flows visible and intuitive for occupants.

These questions and more help guide our approach to building design, helping us focus on the highest-leverage moves that deliver the biggest comfort gains and cost reductions with the least mechanical complexity.

Regeneration as a Collective Practice

Beyond the glow of festivals, winter is nature’s invitation to rest, reflect, and regenerate. Dormant fields prepare for spring’s awakening; communities gather to take stock and set intentions. For us, this rhythm is at the heart of regenerative design moving beyond sustainability to practices that heal, restore, and invite flourishing. 

​At Tikun Collective, regeneration means:

• Healing land and water through mindful projects.
• Restoring the social fabric by designing spaces for connection.
• Slowing down to listen, learn, and co-create with the communities we serve.

This season, we honor traditions that encourage us to rest and reconnect not just as a pause, but as a powerful step toward collective flourishing.

The Roots of Remembrance: From a Day to a Month

​The official recognition of a month-long observance began in 1990 with a joint resolution approved by President George H. W. Bush. However, the movement to honor Indigenous peoples nationally has far deeper roots, tracing back to the early 20th century and the relentless advocacy of figures like Dr. Arthur C. Parker.
A Bridge Between Worlds: Dr. Arthur C. Parker

Born in 1881 on the Seneca Nation’s Cattaraugus Reservation to a Seneca father and a mother of a Scots-English descent, Dr. Parker was a prominent Seneca archaeologist, scholar, and fierce public advocate. Living and working between two worlds,  his bicultural perspective was instrumental in his life's work.
Unlike many of his peers, Dr. Parker became a respected scholar largely through hands-on apprenticeship, museum mentorship, and self-directed study, rather than a conventional college path. His notable contributions include:

• Pioneering Archaeology: He served as the first state archaeologist at the New York State Museum, using his position to fight against the erasure of Native knowledge and material culture.
• Cultural Preservation: He collected vast Iroquois and Algonquian material culture and documented Seneca traditions, publishing important works like The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet.
• National Advocacy: He was a co-founder of the Society of American Indians (1911), a pan-Indian organization that advocated for cultural survival over forced assimilation, native-led education, and reform of federal Indian policy.

Dr Parker's sustained efforts, dating back to his first push for a "Native American Day" in 1915, planted the seeds for the eventual month-long observance, fighting to secure a national platform that honored Native history, rights, and enduring contributions. His legacy is a powerful example of how knowledge preservation can be an act of restoration and justice.

​​The Anishinaabe, meaning “original people,” are also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa. In Minnesota, one of their most significant homelands is the White Earth Reservation, established in 1867. White Earth has become a center of resilience and cultural continuity where traditions, language, and land-based practices are actively preserved. Today, one of the most urgent and vibrant efforts from the White Earth Anishinaabe is centered on preserving manoomin (wild rice), a sacred food and treaty staple. The White Earth Nation’s Wild Rice Program works each year to protect natural wild rice beds by managing water levels on lakes such as Lower Rice Lake, seeding lakes that have seen decline, monitoring rice density, coordinating harvesting permits, and finishing rice with traditional practices. This work reflects both cultural survival and climate adaptation, as manoomin faces new pressures from warming temperatures, invasive species, and industrial water use.

​Honoring Diversity in South AfricaOn September 24, South Africa celebrates Heritage Day, a holiday that embodies the richness of diversity. Originally known as Shaka Day, honoring the great Zulu leader, it was reimagined after apartheid as a national celebration of heritage in all its forms.

Today, South Africans mark the day through music, traditional dress, storytelling, and perhaps most famously, the braai - a barbecue that brings people together across cultural lines. Braai is more than food, it is a symbol of connection, of shared spaces where differences do not divide but enrich.
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Heritage Day is a global lesson in inclusivity. It shows us that embracing cultural differences strengthens bonds and creates more resilient communities. In a world where identity can be weaponized to exclude, South Africa offers a powerful counter-narrative: inclusivity is not sameness, but the celebration of many voices woven together.

This August, let’s honor them not only in words but in action:

• Support women-owned and women-led organizations in your community
• Share resources like Jenine Benyus’ talks or Carol Sandford’s lectures
• Learn more about Pangea World Theater and Living Earth Center
• Reflect on the women who have shaped your own path and thank them

Because when we honor women’s leadership, we honor the regenerative future already unfolding around us.

Daniel Quinn, author of books including Ishmael, challenges us to see the dominant culture as just one story among many and one that is often misaligned with the flourishing of life. Cultural erasure is not a neutral act; it is a form of harm. It violates the principle of do no harm, a core ethic of regenerative practice. To strip away a people’s relationship to place, or to design without recognizing those who came before, is to sever the deep roots that nourish healing.

In contrast, culturally rooted regenerative projects point the way forward.. The Owe’neh Bupingeh Preservation Project in New Mexico restored historic adobe homes and ceremonial spaces to maintain the living culture of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo. This and many more are not just “green” projects they are cultural acts of repair.

In a regenerative framework, architecture and design are not merely functional they are expressive, connective, and reciprocal. Culture informs not just what we build, but how we build, for whom, and with what intention. When we ignore culture, we design in a vacuum. When we embrace it, we open up the possibility for buildings and places to become living embodiments of care, resilience, and renewal.

Regeneration, then, is not only technical. It is cultural. And sensitivity to culture is not a constraint it is the doorway to design that is alive, grounded, and truly transformative.

Call to Action
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This week, take 15 minutes to reflect on the culture(s) that shape your life your family’s stories, your neighborhood’s rhythms, your community’s rituals. What values are embedded in them? How do they show up in the spaces you live and work in? What wisdom do they hold for how we design regeneratively?


​Better yet, talk to someone in your community an elder, a neighbor, a culture bearer and ask: What do you think this place remembers? Then listen with your whole self. Regeneration begins with relationships.