Episode 6: Beyond Global Finance – Investing in Bioregions and Place-Based Resilience with Michiel Lenstra

Michiel Lenstra has been working in impact investing since 2010 at The Wire Group, where he leads the infrastructure team supporting clients and investors in regenerative finance. His path started far from finance — as a teenage punk drawn to questions of injustice — before studies in development studies at Manchester sharpened his critical view of the global financial system. He later built commercial grounding through an MBA and years in M&A and restructuring at KPMG, before moving fully into impact investing in 2014.

At The Wire Group, Michiel has helped build one of Europe’s first impact fund of funds, with an early and, at the time, unconventional focus on regenerative agriculture. That work revealed a deeper truth: individual companies, however impactful, cannot solve problems that exist at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss, and community breakdown. This realization pushed Michiel and his team toward place-based and bioregional investing — financing not single ventures, but entire landscapes.

Michiel recently helped launch the Resilience Partnership, an alliance between The Wire Group, the Bioregional Weaving Lab, and Commonland, bringing together impact investing, landscape restoration, and grassroots entrepreneurship to build financing infrastructure for bioregions across Europe.