How to Build a Regenerative Business That Actually Meets Human Needs
What if the business you're building is solving a problem nobody actually has?
It's an uncomfortable question. But according to Erin Axelrod, Partner at LIFT Economy, roughly 90% of the current global economy isn't dealing with fundamental human needs. It's serving manufactured demand, propped up by systems designed to keep us buying things we don't need with money we don't have.
On a recent episode of The Purpose Profit Shift podcast, Erin sat down with host Rachel Bernier-Green to unpack what it actually takes to build a regenerative business from the ground up, and why the frameworks most founders use are fundamentally broken.
Start with What Your Community Actually Needs
LIFT Economy's first principle for a "next economy enterprise" is deceptively simple: meet basic human needs. Not market gaps you found in a pitch deck. Not trends from a VC newsletter. Actual, pattern-level needs in the community you serve.
Erin encourages startup founders to survey the people around them and ask: What collective need keeps coming up that's genuinely unmet in the market? Design for that.
This reframe matters because it changes who you're accountable to. Instead of optimizing for investor returns, you're optimizing for community resilience. And that, paradoxically, is what creates lasting demand.
The Vertically Integrated Cooperative Model
One of the most compelling examples from the episode is Erin's work with Winona LaDuke on an Indigenous-owned hemp textile cooperative in northern Minnesota.
The vision is a fully vertically integrated supply chain: community-owned farms growing hemp in polyculture with sheep, processing equipment for decortication, a spinning mill, and a cut-and-sew factory. Indigenous communities would own value creation at every stage instead of selling raw goods at low margins.
Here's the framework embedded in this model:
Step 1: Identify a regenerative crop or resource that addresses environmental harm. In Winona's case, hemp regenerates soil that was degraded by toxic potato farming.
Step 2: Design ownership structures that keep value in the community. Cooperative ownership at every stage of the supply chain prevents extraction.
Step 3: Create a proof-of-concept product. Winona and Erin produced a tool bag through Patagonia's supply chain. It sold out, validating market demand.
Step 4: Hold the long-term vision while executing near-term milestones. This vision may take a decade. The Patagonia partnership was the critical-path next step.
Stop Chasing the Wrong Capital
One of the sharpest insights from the conversation: mission-driven founders waste enormous amounts of time pitching to capital sources that will never fund them.
Venture capital mandates that require 10-20x returns are structurally incompatible with regenerative enterprises. Erin has watched initiatives effectively die because founders spent years chasing money that was never going to materialize.
Her alternative approach involves three layers. First, non-dilutive capital through trust-based philanthropy for early-stage R&D, so founders don't have to give away ownership before they've validated their model. Second, qualifying investors the way you'd qualify customers, matching your offering to capital whose mandates actually align with your mission. Third, community-based funding models like crowdfunding and program-related investments from aligned foundations.
LIFT Economy offers a self-study course on raising mission-aligned capital for $400, with a no-one-turned-away policy for those who can't pay.
The $44 Trillion Elephant in the Room
Perhaps the most striking revelation from the episode: $44 trillion in US retirement savings is concentrated in three asset management firms, and those funds are invested in extractive mining, surveillance technologies, and carceral systems.
The Next Egg initiative, a collaboration between LIFT Economy, the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and local investing thought leader Michael Schumann, has been working since 2019 to help individuals redirect their retirement funds into local, values-aligned investments. The legal mechanisms to do this already exist. The hard part is navigating the financial intermediaries who discourage it.
Building the Economy That Replaces This One
Erin's parting insight ties everything together: reducing housing costs, currently one of the top three expenses for the average American, would unlock civic participation and entrepreneurship at a scale we can barely imagine.
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, which received its first investment from LIFT Economy's Force for Good Fund, has liberated 7 properties from gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area. The model is explicitly community-driven, focused on keeping Indigenous and Black residents in neighborhoods that market forces are trying to push them out of.
This is what a regenerative business looks like at the systems level: not just healing soil or redirecting capital, but dismantling the structural barriers that prevent communities from meeting their own needs.