While Politicians Wait, We Regenerate: Lush Spring Prize 2025

As policies stall and environmental protections are rolled back, grassroots changemakers are restoring ecosystems, rebuilding resilience, and proving that regeneration is not just possible — it's already happening. 

The Lush Spring Prize 2025 seeks to profile this work and has awarded around £250,000 to 19 groups, celebrating regenerative organisations and practitioners from around the world.

The 2025 Lush Spring Prize recipients were announced as part of a celebratory event held in Dorset (UK) where the Lush Cosmetics company is headquartered. The event was attended by prize recipients, Spring Prize judges, Lush staff, press, funders and other regenerative practitioners.

Each Spring Prize year sees different themes emerge that are shaped by the organisations that receive a prize. In 2025, these include the importance of weaving ancestral wisdom with scientific approaches; working at multiple scales and legally recognising the rights of nature, and learning from those on the frontlines that are facilitating regenerative work in conflict zones or regions experiencing natural disasters.

In partnership with The Savitri Trust, Be The Earth Foundation is proud to sponsor the Indigenous Knowledge & Wisdom Award — celebrating and supporting the powerful work of three remarkable organisations keeping ancestral knowledge alive.

Discover their stories and impact!

Assentamento Terra Vista — Bahia, Brazil

 

The struggle for access to land is a constant in Brazilian history, from the first indigenous revolts to the emergence of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). From the 1980s onwards, the struggle for agrarian reform gained momentum with the MST leading land occupations and defending social justice. With over a million members, the MST is the largest social movement in Latin America and plays a key political role in Brazil.

The Terra Vista settlement, in the municipality of Arataca, Bahia, was a historic achievement for the MST. The movement occupied and secured the land for social purposes in 1994, after five evictions and facing opposition from the region’s colonizers and landowners. In 2000, Terra Vista began an agro-ecological transition, reforesting the land, abandoning chemical inputs and adopting regenerative practices, such as the cacao-cabruca agroforestry.

The resulting recovery of 92% of the Aliança River’s riparian forest and 80% of the springs has strengthened the local ecology, as well as eradicating hunger in the settlement.

Despite these important achievements, the settlement faces challenges in expanding and deepening the use of agroecology due to a lack of resources, technical assistance and adequate education.

According to indigenous and quilombola principles, the regeneration of a territory is considered inseparable from the regeneration of the communities that live in it. Agroforestry challenges the logic of industrial agriculture and preservationist environmental conservation, integrating ecological regeneration, human participation and sustainable food production.

Organización Ecologica Sol y Verde — Petén, Guatemala

Organización Ecológica Sol y Verde is a grassroots, regenerative and educational non-profit working in a rural and Indigenous context on the edge of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala.

Sol y Verde’s mission is to protect and restore threatened ecosystems, by supporting climate justice, community resilience and the preservation and celebration of the Indigenous culture it is part of.

Its work focuses on land-use solutions and stewardship to secure food sovereignty for vulnerable rural communities, particularly women, youth, and Indigenous groups impacted by displacement and climate change.

Its work has focused on the following areas:

• Nature restoration and agroecology – Regenerating endangered ecosystems by reforesting the jungle landscape, propagating and cultivating endangered plant species, and supporting local families to transition to regenerative agricultural practices, particularly through soil restoration and agroforestry.

• Placemaking through bioconstruction – Improving infrastructure with the local community in ways that are accessible, sustainable, and equipped to face ecological and economic challenges through natural materials that are sourced regeneratively and from agricultural land. This means that Sol y Verde almost exclusively uses local and bio-based materials, often considered as waste.

• Community support and wellbeing – Sol y Verde believes community participation is the key to securing long-term change.

It provides safe and supportive spaces for women and children to learn new regenerative skills and exchange knowledge about land stewardship and ancestral medicine through practical and creative education.

This helps create financial independence, develop strong local social ties and reinforces a sense of belonging.

The Cultural Conservancy (TCC) — San Francisco, US

The Cultural Conservancy (TCC) is a Native-led non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1985, its mission is to protect and revitalise Indigenous cultures through the direct application of traditional knowledge and practices on ancestral lands.

It works with Native/Indigenous peoples locally and globally on community-based projects that are shaped by community requests and guided by the Native Advisory Council of Traditional Knowledge Holders, land-care practitioners, and community leaders.

From language revitalisation and traditional carving projects to Indigenous agricultural sciences and traditional land tending, critical to its work is the acknowledgement of the sacred relationship Native peoples have to their lands and waters and the importance of this relationship to their physical, mental, and community health.

TCC is deeply rooted in Turtle Island (North America), with strong connections to Hawai’i, Central and South America, and Moana (the greater Pacific). It also increased its work with California Indian communities, including recognised tribes/sovereign nations, unrecognised tribes, Native organisations, and urban, intertribal Indian communities. It commits to Indigenous youth and elders and promotes intergenerational sharing and knowledge exchange.

Through its flagship Native Foodways Programme and its land project Heron Shadow, it:

• Works to provide safe culturally-rooted spaces.

• Provides access to resources for growing healthy, culturally appropriate foods including through planting, harvesting, processing, distributing, cooking and seed keeping.

• Facilitates community-led transformation for those struggling with food access, land displacement, and physical, spiritual, and cultural health issues.