Rooted in Nature: Lessons for Building Resilient Ecosystems
I found the secret to building thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in a rural Spanish town in the heart of the Ribera del Duero region, where I attended the DEEP Ecosystems Conference focused on nature-based solutions for entrepreneurial ecosystem building.
Deep Ecosystems Conference 2025 in Aranda de Duero, Spain. Photo courtesy of Mari Hicks (center in red).
I traveled to Aranda de Duero, Spain, to attend the DEEP Ecosystems Conference and learn more about supporting social enterprise and nature-based ecosystems and to see how Europe approaches ecosystem building. I had been following DEEP Ecosystems since connecting with the co-founder and CEO Thomas Kösters on LinkedIn and learning about their DEEPSEA ecosystem accelerator — a global cohort-based program that implements 10–12 innovation projects to accelerate the growth startups ecosystems.
I’m passionate about social enterprise because I know the best solutions for a sustainable future for the well-being of my family, friends, and Wyandotte Nation community will come from within our communities and be rooted in community-led efforts.
A chance to visit the Ribera del Duero region, one of the best wine-producing regions of the world, and do a wine tasting as part of the conference didn’t hurt either!
The conference had three primary goals.
Raise awareness on the need to leverage nature-based solutions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural ecosystems.
Accelerate the transition to a nature and people-positive economy to build resilience and equity.
Engage both the private and public sectors in scaling up finance for nature.
Since entrepreneurial ecosystem builders often look to natural ecosystems to guide our work, it was only fitting that I attend this ecosystem building conference on nature based solutions.
What stood out to me most was that European and U.S. ecosystem builders share the same values of generosity of spirit and care for people and place. The people drawn to ecosystem building in Europe sit at the intersection of sectors, countries and cultures, and share a passion to enthusiastically pursue solutions that work for people AND the planet.
Deep Ecosystems Conference 2025 in Aranda de Duero, Spain. (Photo courtesy of Mari Hicks.)
Here are 3 Key Takeaways from my time in Aranda:
We're all looking to interconnectedness to strengthen our ecosystems.
Local knowledge and decision-making can get us there.
Smaller, targeted solutions work better than scaling up.
At a time when U.S. ecosystem building is in a period of transition, these 3 key principles (interconnectedness, local and Indigenous knowledge, and human-sized solutions) should be our north star.
Interconnectedness is the key to survival and sustainability for all ecosystems.
Our conference hosts, NBSCLIMATE, are a social enterprise improving nature-based solutions through design, evaluation, funding, and scaling. Jesus, Cristina, and the rest of the team and family welcomed all of us to the Aranda ecosystem and made us feel at home.
At the opening of the conference, the Aranda de Duero city council shared how the closure of the rail line connecting their city to Madrid and surrounding communities left residents feeling disconnected. The remaining bus lines are less efficient, can hold fewer passengers, and take between two to four hours to reach Madrid instead of the previous 40 minute train ride. We also learned that Aranda, like many rural areas, depends on a healthy natural environment for their farming economy. Given Aranda’s interconnectedness with nature, both climate change and environmental preservation play important roles in their community’s health.
The first panel highlighted Vitoria-Gasteiz, a Spanish city that has connected its city parks and urban green spaces with eco-recreational corridors called the Green Belt since 1993. The goal is for every part of the city to have access to nature, not just wealthy areas. Interconnecting every part of the city with nature helps combat urban heat and ensures equitable access to green space. Vitoria-Gastiez’s example offers a replicable model for cities seeking to become more livable while boosting biodiversity.
As I reflected on the conference, I felt connected to something larger than myself and our US ecosystem building community. Indigenous people like to say “We are all related,” and my experiences at this conference made my belief in those words more concrete.
Ecosystem canvas activity from Deep Ecosystems Conference 2025 in Aranda de Duero, Spain. (Photo courtesy of Mari Hicks.)
Local knowledge is key to effective decision-making for ecosystems.
Over dinner, I had a chance to chat with Khaoula Behi, CEO of Maarifa for Transition, about her work in Tunisia with Future Islands. Her work focuses on collaborating with local populations who have been in an area for generations, developing sustainable and eco-friendly solutions for their local economy. Local knowledge is so crucial to Maarifa for Transition’s efforts that they pay 10-30% of their profits directly to the local people whose knowledge was used.
“Big cities make decisions for rural areas.”
– Claudia Zappatini of Fundacion Conama.
While attending a panel, I heard Claudia Zappatini of Fundacion Conama, an organization that promotes sustainable development in Spain’s cities and towns, give another meaningful example of why local knowledge matters. Claudia emphasized how decision-making is centralized in bigger cities, and emphasized the importance of including local communities in conversations about rural development. Fundacion Conama addresses this by holding two different conferences – one focused on the national landscape and one focused on local ecosystems. Often conversations about rural and local development hinge on how to make rural areas more attractive, but Claudia encouraged us to ask: is it really the local areas that need to change, or is it the centralized decision-making in cities?
Observing these organizations' deep commitment to local communities made me reflect on how displacement has disconnected much of my Wyandotte community from our traditional lands and place-based knowledge systems. We were displaced first from our homelands in Ontario, and then from Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas. Many of the decisions that led to our displacement didn’t happen at the local level; instead it happened in cities and countries hundreds or thousands of miles away. And yet, even across great distances, we’ve continued to build and sustain community. Today, the Wyandottes have a thriving virtual language and cultural community inclusive of those living in our reservation community in Oklahoma with Wyandottes living from California to Texas to Chicago to Washington, DC.
Human-sized solutions are key to prioritizing sustainability over scale.
A term I kept hearing throughout the conference was “human-sized solutions” for climate and justice issues that work at both the individual and systemic levels. On Day 2, a panelist shared how their community initially opposed a biogas plant put forward by the local economic development office. However, farmers embraced the technology when it was implemented on a smaller scale on individual farms. Each farmer contributed farm waste and, in return, received energy they could then use or sell back to the grid. They were included in the prosperity that came from converting the biogas. Solutions have to be useful and usable by the local community.
Basilio Rodríguez from Rewilding Spain urged us to consider the size of solutions in a different way. Instead of focusing on projects that last only a few months or years, he urged us to think of climate and justice solutions as initiatives running for decades. Human-sized also means making change in a human lifetime for the benefit of generations in the future.
We had the chance to visit the El Majuelo del Abuelo winery (and taste the wine!) located below the co-working space hosting the conference. The winery is family-owned and is making small but sustainable changes to the way they grow and select grapes, care for the soil, and prepare the wine for sale in Aranda and beyond. They prioritize heirloom grape varieties to promote biodiversity and to better protect their product from pests and disease. Human-sized can also mean choosing sustainability over scale.
Again, I thought of my Indigenous entrepreneur community and what human-sized means for us. Indigenous entrepreneurs, like me, do not pursue a “unicorn” billion dollar business, but we choose our own destiny to care for ourselves, our families and communities, AND the next seven generations.
I truly enjoyed my time in Aranda. Between the beautiful location, good wine, and the valuable relationships I formed, DEEP Ecosystems is a conference I will make time for in the future. Learn more at
Plaza Mayor, Aranda de Duero, Spain. (Photo courtesy of Mari Hicks.)
Mari Hicks is the President and Founder of Scattering Seedlings LLC, which helps community-based organizations create strategic long term visions and plan the projects to make them happen with grassroots consensus-building, project management expertise, and future-forward systems thinking. She can be reached at Mari.ScatteringSeedlings@gmail.com .
This post is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 and may be shared or republished with attribution. Photos courtesy Mari Hicks.
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This post is part of the Ecosystem Building Leadership Network's guest contributor series, featuring voices and perspectives from across the entrepreneurial ecosystem building field. We welcome contributions from practitioners, supporters, and advocates who want to share insights, experiences, and ideas that advance our work. If you’re interested in contributing a post, please get in touch with us at hello@ebln.us.
