What the project produced
Every output is open and free. The portal keeps the map and the resource library alive after the funding period; the handbook and the documents below can be downloaded and reused as they are.
The e-Handbook · English · Español · Italiano
A handbook to get the most out of your eco-community: case studies, methods and material for educators, youth workers and community leaders, drawn from the five partner communities and the initiatives mapped around them.
English edition, 57 pages.
The project's home for eco-projects across Europe: a community-managed map of initiatives, a calendar of gatherings, open calls, funding opportunities and a growing resource library. Members add their own initiative to the map.
Open the portalThe research behind the project turned into something usable: a mapped, searchable database of eco-communities and regenerative initiatives, maintained by the people who run them rather than by the project team.
Explore the mapYouth exchanges, volunteering places and community gatherings posted by the network itself — the channel through which young people actually reach the communities on the map.
See what is openTwelve public sessions with practitioners from across the network, free to attend and recorded. The full programme is listed further down this page.
A curated list of grants for climate initiatives and youth organisations, kept on the portal so that small community projects do not have to hunt for them alone.
Browse the listDocuments to download
Youth exchange · Hopeland, Greece · May 2026
Thirty-three young people from the five countries stayed at the Hopeland eco-centre for ten days, worked on the land, visited eco-communities in the region and talked about what community actually asks of people. Hopeland filmed it.
Method
Three principles carried the work in every country, and they are the ones the handbook and the trainings keep returning to.
Work package 3
Five actions in each partner country, designed and run by youth workers with the people who live around them. They are the part of the project that never travelled: no flights, no conference rooms, just the ecosystem and the community closest to hand.
Listening, being and crafting with the Marais — a three-part journey in an unprotected urban wetland on the canal's edge in Brussels: an opening workshop in June, a month of self-paced practice in August carried by a pocket guidebook, and a closing reading in September. 54 people took part, and the process produced a collective booklet made from what they brought back.
Five activities culminating in a public festival, which carried the project's themes well beyond the group of registered participants. The full report is published here.
Five local activities completed in May 2026 around the Hopeland educational eco-centre, connecting the community's practice with young people and organisations in the region.
Five actions run with local youth and community groups, using the project's non-formal education toolkit.
Five actions hosted from the coordinator's intentional community in the Hérault, where the project's horizontal governance practice was developed.
Work package 4
One evening at a time, practitioners from the network opened their work to anyone who registered: farmers, cooks, facilitators, governance nerds, youth activists. Free, online, and recorded.
How the project moved
Each activity fed the next: research made the portal, the portal made the handbook possible, the handbook was tested in training, and the trained youth workers ran the local actions.
Partners surveyed the initiatives around them and built the database that became the portal's map.
Youth workers from the five partners met at Catfarm to work with non-formal education and Education for Sustainable Development methods.
The second phase turned methods into plans: participants built together, worked on the land and left with a local action to run at home.
Young people from the five countries stayed at the Hopeland eco-centre, visiting eco-communities in the region and testing the handbook's material in the field.
Back home, each partner ran five actions with their own community — the project's widest reach and its least visible one.
The network opened its practice to anyone who wanted to listen, and the recordings stay available to those who registered.
From the field
Moments of the project, documented by the partners who ran them.
Training course · Catfarm, France · April 2025
Training course · Spain · June 2025
Partner meeting
More is on the way: the film from the youth exchange in Greece, and photo sets from the local actions in Greece, Italy and Spain.
Who made it
The consortium worked horizontally: decisions were taken in circles rather than by the coordinator alone, which is also one of the practices the project teaches.
PartnerBack to the RootsSpain
