by: Comunità rigenerative | data 25/10/2023
***Breaking News***
THANK YOU to each and every one of you, we have reached the first goal!
We are thrilled, amazed by this great response of solidarity and community that has embraced us! We dare what we did not imagine achievable, for you have shown us that TOGETHER IT IS POSSIBLE!
We do not stop here!
We are bidding for another 20,000€ which will enable us to acquire immediately - with a single deed, thus making savings on the notary - the first house to be renovated in Laparé, with more land to farm!
In this way, we will advance our dream of starting to rebuild the abandoned hamlet!
Help us achieve this second goal!
***
We are a community, an ecovillage under construction in the Anzasca Valley in the province of Verbania that has been bringing regeneration to three hamlets in the municipality of Calasca Castiglione for more than two years. Our dream is to create self-sufficient communities, places to live in harmony with the ecology of relationships and the planet. We aim for self-sufficiency in food, energy and everything else we need. Recovering terraced land, homes, and vitality from abandonment and subsequent degradation. Together.
In these two years we have recovered land overrun by brambles, regenerated the soil with ecological approaches to agriculture, hosted over 200 people who have come to get to know us and experience living and working together with us. We have offered some 15 courses in Nonviolent Communication and dry stone wall restoration.
We love what we do. We are happy up here - for us this is 'real life'! Building with our hands. Farming, baking, giving blossoming life back to rubble of walls and collapsed houses. Reinventing communication, discovering human bonds beyond good and evil, outside the habitual moralistic schemes. And then create an educating community that accompanies the enthusiasm and freedom of the children and of us all, in a balance that wants to take care of the needs of each and nurture a deep connection in empathy.
We build our dialogical systems together, those agreements that allow us to distribute resources and power, to make decisions collectively, to navigate through tensions and conflicts in order to regenerate community. All this by creating a new economy, in financial co-responsibility. Living as if the world we want were already here.
We love a simple life. We love to welcome with us anyone who seeks meaning and sharing. We want to do this with anyone who fully resonates with our project, regardless of whether they have a few pennies in their pocket, or millions in the bank. We are building oases of life immersed in nature, even in the hard work of ancient crafts, and moving ever closer to a radically zero-impact life.
When we think of the crises that are already underway, the destruction of ecosystems and the profound alteration of natural balances underway, and the wars with which humanity still responds to crises, we feel strong emotions of fear and sadness.
We want to protect life, and help create harmony and solidarity, together with you and all those who wish to participate in the vision
We are Isabel, Lucia, Lorenzo, Marco, Rolf, Sabrina, Sylvia, as well as the youthful Luis and Jonas... Choose your favourite reward now and find out more about us and our passions.
We are in an emergency! In Drocala, the house we have rented so far, with its land, is now for sale! And to be able to continue using it we need to buy it now!
We only have part of the money needed and only a few weeks to find what we lack, to buy the basic house for our project together with the land attached to it. That is why every contribution is indispensable!
The house and land we cultivate will be the property of all and sundry, they will be bought by our Social Promotion Association, of which anyone who fully adheres to our principles and values, our Vision and Mission, and all that is set forth in our Articles of Association, available upon request, may ask us to become a Member. All our houses and land are in fact bought or rented collectively, for the common good, in equality and shared risk and prosperity. Because in community we are stronger, and we discover a dimension of security and solidary reciprocity that allows us to go much further.
In this very house we have the common kitchen/dining room, the main place for gathering and sharing.
Thanks to this house, you too can come and experience this way of life.
We all get together in the morning, to greet each other and connect humanly. Then we work in the fields sowing, harvesting or tending the gardens, the trees, the wood for cooking and heating. You can enjoy the fresh mountain air, sunshine and breathtaking scenery. When it is lunchtime, the trumpet sounds, and we all head to this house that welcomes us to eat and tell us about the day as we savour the delicious things we have cultivated and transformed with our own hands.
Upstairs there is a large room that we plan to make into a training and sleeping room to accommodate you. This house is essential because, being the largest of those already inhabitable in the village, it is the only one that has the capacity to offer these communal spaces. For now, in the absence of other possibilities, two permanent residents live upstairs.
In order to continue creating community, we need your help. If together we can achieve our goal, we will be able to continue to breathe life into these abandoned mountains that are just waiting to be repopulated. We will be able to accommodate people interested in the project, which will allow us to grow more and more.
Do you also want to see our Alps revitalised?
We are in the Anzasca Valley, one of the beautiful Ossola Valleys. The one that climbs the famous east face of Monte Rosa, the only 'Himalayan' face in Europe, today increasingly bare of snow and with glaciers reduced to the bare minimum.
We are present in three neighbouring villages, in the municipality of Calasca Castiglione, in the province of Verbania, Castiglione Ossola, at 514 m above sea level, Porcareccia, at just a little under 600 m, and Drocala, at 940 m, the place towards which our project has been heading since the beginning.
Just below Drocala, there are two completely abandoned hamlets with houses completely in need of renovation, in the midst of reforestation that has also been very dense for many decades.
There are 240 km of abandoned terraces, many hamlets connected by a dense network of well-maintained paths, a network known for some years now as 'La Via del Pane' (The Bread Route), in reference to the many hamlet ovens for the collective baking of the rye bread that used to be grown on these terraces, ...and which we have resumed to grow, to harvest and bake our first rye in the summer of our second year.
The entire valley is south-facing, entirely terraced, and until a few decades ago, completely cultivated: rye, millet, corn, vegetables, fruit, vines, chestnuts, fibre hemp, and so on. Mills used to grind rye flour, chestnuts, and lever presses were used to produce walnut oil. Women walked to Novara (or hid on trains) with panniers full of fruit to barter for rice.
There is immense potential here to recover and regenerate abandoned terraced land, to develop self-sufficiency, food and otherwise, ... an urgent need in the face of climate and ecological, and social, and geopolitical emergencies.
Our long-term goal is to reclaim and repopulate Laparé. an entire abandoned hamlet just below Drocala (a ten-minute walk from the house). In this hamlet we want to create our central and completely autonomous core. An example and a model for responding to global crises and the challenges and questions they raise. The house that we will buy in Drocala together with you will give us a base from which to start one step at a time and restore houses and land.
Regenerative Communities is an Association of Social Promotion, a Third Sector Organisation regularly registered with 'RUNTS' - the Single National Register of Third Sector Organisations. All your donations can therefore be deducted from your personal and corporate income taxes. If you want to do this, at the end of the campaign, if we have been successful, you can ask us for a receipt by writing to presidente@comunitarigenerative.it
(20€ unlimited)
You will receive by email a drawing made by Jonas, which you can take with you wherever you like as a desktop or wallpaper on your mobile phone.
(25€ - 10)
To you who have decided to support us, Jonas gives you one of his drawings as a present! Come and pick it up whenever you want, or if you can't, receive it directly at home.
(30€ - 20)
You will have the opportunity to come for lunch with us, get to know the whole community and receive directly from Lucia a set with a bag of nettle herbal tea, hand/body soap and a sugar-free plum jam of your choice.
(40€ - 15)
You will have the opportunity to come for lunch with us, get to know the whole community and receive directly from Sabrina a set with a sachet of holy basil (tulsi) herbal tea, a solid shampoo and a sugar-free plum jam of your choice.
(50€ - 5)
You will have the opportunity to come to lunch with us, meet the whole community and receive directly from Lorenzo 25 gr of dried porcini mushrooms from the Valley!
(50€ - 12)
Thank you! Luis builds you a wooden hammer personalised with your name! Come and collect it!
(70€ - 12)
Sylvia invites you to spend a morning together. On a wonderful walk you can learn to recognise wild herbs, plus you will have the chance to have lunch together with all the residents. In February you will receive an e-mail with three proposed dates from which you can choose. Hurry up and choose this reward, there will be a maximum of 4 people on each date, and the first to donate will be the first to choose the day!
(100€ - 6)
Rolf will plant a tree in your name and you will receive a certificate. The first 6 in autumn/winter 2023/24 and another 12 in autumn/winter 2024/25. You will thus contribute to planting the first trees in our orchard and our 'food forest'.
(100€ - 50)
A one-hour session - with either Marco or Isabel at your choice - online, or in-presence (to be agreed with respect to time and place, ideal for those who live in the province of Verbania, Novara, Varese, Milan) - to accompany you in any challenge you encounter in your personal, relational or professional life. We create together, for you and with you, a safe, confidential and fully empathic space for listening. You can use this space 'simply' to satisfy a need for listening, and/or to receive guidance, accompaniment, suggestions which we build together, beyond good and bad, in a welcoming field free of dogma and judgement. By appointment from 17 December. (with Isabel in Spanish and Italian, with Marco also in English and French)
(100€ - 20)
You will have the opportunity to spend a whole day in the community, to see for yourself the house we will buy, the land and the crops. You will have the chance to taste our food and experience life in the mountains, in connection with nature and in companionship.
(250€ - 10)
Come to us for a weekend, from Friday for dinner until Sunday for lunch, this spring or summer. Double room in Castiglione. Meals included. You will be able to taste our seasonal produce and, if you wish, get to know the vegetable gardens where we grow and the other villages where we are.
(300€ - 30)
For the first time ever, we are opening up the possibility of coming to us to spend a wonderful regenerating week in a tent on the land we will be purchasing thanks to your contribution. Full board with our delicious food, in total autonomy or sharing lunches in the community.
(500€ - 5)
For the first time ever, we are opening up the possibility of coming to us to spend a wonderful, rejuvenating week in a tent on the land we will be purchasing thanks to your contribution. Full board with our delicious food, in total autonomy or sharing lunches in the community.
(900€ - 5)
For the first time ever, we are opening up the possibility of coming to us to spend a wonderful, rejuvenating week in a tent on the land we will be purchasing thanks to your contribution. Full board with our delicious food, in total autonomy or sharing lunches in the community.
Da due anni costruiamo Comunità rigenerative in Valle Anzasca, una valle dell’Ossola. Ricreiamo comunità, recuperiamo antichi saperi, ricostruiamo muri a secco crollati, riportiamo più vita in queste montagne abbandonate. Troviamo gioia e libertà nell’autonomia. Puntiamo all’autosufficienza alimentare, energetica e via via per ogni altro bisogno. Viviamo puntando a un’ecologia radicale e costruendo un’ecologia delle relazioni. Un modo profondo e resiliente di stare insieme, nel dialogo e nel potere condiviso. Vogliamo ricostruire borghi abbandonati e creare un’oasi di resistenza di fronte alle gravi crisi climatica, ecologica, sociale. Essere insieme. Questo progetto può essere anche vostro. Perché l’essere umano è comunitario. Nel condividere rischio e prosperità possiamo davvero affrontare insieme qualsiasi sfida. Cerchiamo aiuto monetario ma non solo. In cambio, proponiamo varie cose tra cui potete scegliere e anche la certezza di un luogo in cui sarete sempre benvenuti, benvenute. Potreste diventarne comproprietari oppure far parte di quest’avventura in vari modi, da vicino o da lontano. Qui vogliamo coltivare insieme, crescere insieme. C’è terreno da coltivare e montagne da camminare o respirare. E una grande visione a lungo termine!
