Erasmus+ KA220-YOU · 2023-2-FR02-KA220-YOU-000179634 · 2024 — 2026

Eco-communities,
made findable.

Five organisations in five countries spent thirty months closing the distance between young people and the communities already living regeneratively in Europe. Everything the project produced is collected here.

5Countries
25Local actions
12Public seminars
5Handbook languages
250+Young people & community members

What the project produced

Results you can use today

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.

Cover of the handbook Eco-communities as Key Actors in Education for Sustainable Development

The e-Handbook · English · Español · Italiano · Français · Ελληνικά

Eco-communities as Key Actors in Education for Sustainable Development

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.

Open Communities — the portal

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 portal

The map of eco-communities

The 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 map

Open calls and events

Youth 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 open

Seminar series

Twelve public sessions with practitioners from across the network, free to attend and recorded. The full programme is listed further down this page.

Funding opportunities

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 list

Documents to download

Youth exchange · Hopeland, Greece · May 2026

Building Bridges

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.

The opening of the film. The complete version runs 3 minutes 42 seconds, on Hopeland's channel. Watch it on YouTube

Method

What the project teaches

Three principles carried the work in every country, and they are the ones the handbook and the trainings keep returning to.

Engage local communities: build partnerships, involve everyone, encourage community ownership
ECOSystems principle panel
ECOSystems principle panel

Work package 3

Twenty-five local learning actions

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.

Belgium

Gaia Education

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.

54 took partRead the booklet

Italy

New Wellness Education

Five activities in Bergolo, in the Alta Langa, built around environment, community and territorial regeneration, each one closing into a public ECOFestival that carried the themes well past the people who had registered for the workshops.

48 registered · 100–200 per festival

Greece

Hopeland

Five local activities around the Hopeland educational eco-centre in Corfu, connecting the community's practice with young people and organisations in the region. The largest brought roughly twenty young participants together with more than twenty-five families; a session at the Corfu Forest Theatre in the Xelonari Valley gathered fourteen.

70+ at the largest gathering

Spain

Back to the Roots

Five actions run with local youth and community groups in Catalonia, using the methods the project collected — the toolkit tested in the training course and carried home.

Five actions completed

France

Catfarm

Five actions hosted from the coordinator's intentional community in the Hérault, where the project's horizontal governance practice was developed and where the first training course was run.

Five actions completed

The record

What the actions looked like

The activity reports stay in the project file — they carry the participants' own details. These are the photographs the facilitators took, which is the part of the record that can be shown.

Participants standing among vegetable beds in the Alta Langa
Italy · Bergolo
A facilitator addressing a group on a track between fields
Italy · Bergolo
A group gathered in a mown field below wooded hills
Italy · Bergolo
Two people crouching among pepper plants while others watch
Italy · Bergolo
A long shared table at dusk during the ECOFestival
Italy · ECOFestival
A participant walking through tall vegetation at the Marais
Belgium · the Marais
Cloth and wool laid out in a spiral on a hall floor
Belgium · the Marais
Reeds standing in still water at the Marais de Biestebroeck
Belgium · the Marais
Participants mapping the swamp together
Belgium · swampmapping
The brick building above the wetland
Belgium · Biestebroeck

Work package 4

The seminar series

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.

Announcement: Sharing Tools for Youth Eco-Activism, 8 July 2026
Announcement: Imagine the Utopia, 22 July 2026
Announcement: Horizontal Governance, 26 August 2026
Announcement: Regeneration with Alba Saez, 16 September 2026
0122 Apr 26Reimagining Agriculture: Regenerative Pasts, Presents and FuturesDara Casey
026 May 26Pronoic Cuisine and Zero Waste CookingCristhian Scorrano
0320 May 26A Taste of Deep EcologyThao Kin
0410 Jun 26The Art of Self-Responsibility in CommunityNicolas Filippini
0524 Jun 26Trauma-Informed CommunicationMacaco Tamerice
068 Jul 26Sharing Tools for Youth Eco-ActivismYan & Richard Hennery
0722 Jul 26Imagine the Utopia: Gamification Tools in Non-Formal EducationSaúl Nebot
086 Aug 26Nature-Based Solutions and Youth MobilityDamiano Angelini & Tommaso Tonet
0926 Aug 26Horizontal Governance: Holacracy at CatfarmGabriel da Rocha
109 Sep 26The Principles and Realities of Eco-Community LivingGiorgos Nicolaou
1116 Sep 26Food SovereigntyAlba Saez
129 Oct 26From Ecological Breakdown to Regeneration and FlourishingPeter Gringinger

How the project moved

Thirty months, in order

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.

2024 · Research

Mapping the eco-communities

Partners surveyed the initiatives around them and built the database that became the portal's map.

April 2025

Training course in France

Youth workers from the five partners met at Catfarm to work with non-formal education and Education for Sustainable Development methods.

June 2025

Training course in Spain

The second phase turned methods into plans: participants built together, worked on the land and left with a local action to run at home.

May 2026

Youth exchange in Greece

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.

2026 · Local

Twenty-five local learning actions

Back home, each partner ran five actions with their own community — the project's widest reach and its least visible one.

Apr — Oct 2026

Twelve public seminars

The network opened its practice to anyone who wanted to listen, and the recordings stay available.

30 September 2026 · the project closes

Who made it

Five organisations, five countries

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.

Catfarm CoordinatorCatfarmPoussan, France catfarm.net
Gaia Education PartnerGaia Education EuropeBrussels, Belgium gaiaeducation.org
Hopeland PartnerHopelandGreece hopeland.gr
New Wellness Education PartnerNew Wellness EducationItaly newellnesseducation.com
Back to the Roots PartnerBack to the RootsSpain backtotheroots.cat