Meet the Regenerators of the 2023 Lush Spring Prize

Now you’ve rewilded your cosmetic routine with Lush products, what’s next? Rewilding your homes and communities? Rewilding the world?

Imagine your town thriving, abundant and green. What could it look like? Food forests grow where concrete once covered the ground; birdsong replaces the rumble of car engines; people live in harmony with the place that they’re part of, making it lush.

Leaving the world lusher than we found it is actually one of Lush’s core company aims. To do this we create ethical vegetarian and vegan products with carefully sourced ingredients, and we also donate funds to fantastic organisations around the world through several Giving streams.

One of these is the Lush Spring Prize, a prize program that runs every two years, celebrating those who are regenerating the ecological and social systems around them. It’s one of two biennial prizes, the other being the Lush Prize focussed on fighting animal testing, which runs on opposite years to the Lush Spring Prize. Both prize programs are coordinated in partnership with Ethical Consumer.

In 2023, seventeen outstanding organisations have been awarded a Lush Spring Prize. Their work spans the globe, and shows us the uniqueness of regeneration when it’s contextualised with different people, places, and cultures. From refugee-led regenerative food growing with Rwamwanja Rural Foundation in Uganda; to Permaculture food forestry with marginalised farmers with Beejvan in India; to Mycorama in Greece, who are teaching mushroom growing as a way of bringing nutritious, meat-free food to communities in their area. Now in its fifth cycle, the Lush Spring Prize has distributed over £1,000,000 to 69 regenerative organisations around the world.

“Regeneration is possibly the biggest technology that planet earth has given us in these 3.8 billion years.” Tomas de Lara from Cities CAN B is one of the judges on the Lush Spring Prize decision making panel this year. The panel welcomes voices from different regenerative movements such as Permaculture, Agroecology, or Biomimicry as well as a Lush staff member and customer judge. Tomas explains, “through the understanding and deep listening of nature, we humans can evolve into a better civilisation that is integrated with the flows of life.”

Often, regeneration is about listening and learning from how healthy ecosystems work. How can we learn from nature and apply it to our own lives and communities?Silvana Nihua, president of prize recipient organisation Organización Waorani de Pastaza (OWAP) in Ecuador, tells us that these regenerative ideologies are an intrinsic part of many indigenous cultures. Protecting indigenous rights and culture is an unquestionable step that policymakers need to take in order to create a thriving, lush world. Silvana says, “the rescue of our ancestral knowledge and practices is crucial for the protection of our territories. It’s the same ancestral wisdom, transmitted from generation to generation for thousands of years, that teaches how to coexist with nature.”

Are you ready to take the step and join the regeneration revolution? Start by getting inspired by the 2023 Lush Spring Prize recipients and their work. Is there anything that you could learn from them and adapt to your area?

Take part and find out more on www.springprize.org.

By James Atherton, Spring Prize Coordinating Team