about ria
ria is an educational institution committed to reimagining the role of capital in service of life.
It was founded from a simple, lived insight: that even in the world of impact and purpose-driven business and investing, something essential was missing. The systems that spoke the language of change were often still rooted in fragmentation and control. ria emerged from a longing for a different way, one that would honour complexity, nurture potential, and regenerate the relationships that sustain us.
ria’s foundations are rooted in lived experience, shaped by those who have walked the tension between purpose-driven finance and systemic transformation.
ria exists for those ready to move beyond extractive paradigms and into a new practice of investing: one grounded in relationship, context, and life.
We offer programmes, gatherings, and collaborative learning spaces for investors, founders, and field-builders that cultivate the personal and systemic capabilities needed to align capital with living systems.
Our work brings together:
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living systems thinking
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developmental learning design
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embodied and intuitive ways of knowing
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relational and place-based engagement
the principles that guide us
ria’s approach is grounded in seven learning principles that shape every aspect of our design and practice:
Regeneration: Seeing life as a dynamic, evolving process and investing in ways that nurture vitality, resilience, and evolutionary potential in living systems.
Relationship: Understanding that everything exists in relationship and placing connection, reciprocity, and wholeness at the center of investment practice.
Place: Honoring the uniqueness of context - ecological, cultural, and historical - as essential to meaningful regeneration.
Participation: Moving beyond extraction and control to co-creation, engaging fully and consciously in shaping living systems, acting where our choices can catalyse transformation.
Potential: Recognizing and activating the inherent potential in people, places, and enterprises, not only for present outcomes, but for their unique role in the ongoing evolution of life.
Practice: Embracing regenerative investing as a developmental path, one that involves discerning where and how to intervene for the greatest systemic effect, guided by reflection, experimentation, and continual learning.
Wholeness: Holding the parts within the whole, integrating inner and outer, self and system, logic and intuition, in service of life’s greater coherence.
These principles are inspired by the regenerative lineage we walk with, especially the foundational work of Carol Sanford, whose Seven First Principles of Regeneration continue to shape our understanding of systems, essence, and change. While our articulation is adapted for a learning context, it honours and extends that original ground.
Further to Carol Sanford, we honour the work of Regenesis Institute, Fritjof Capra, John Fullerton, Daniel Christian Wahl and many others whose ideas and practices continue to shape this path.