“Village Hosts” are collaboration experts who co-create new projects in rural areas - mixing creativity and local knowledge
Photo by Aija Freimane, May 2023, Naples, Italy.
We are always looking for examples of cosmolocalism - where localities, drawing down from global practices and partners, find ways to empower themselves. Here’s a great example: the Open School for “Village Hosts” (OSVH). Our compadre John Thackara, advisor to the project, explains here:
Village Hosts are collaboration experts who co-create new services and enterprises in rural areas that have a positive ecological and social impact. They seek out and connect assets that may already exist in a community – people, places, buildings, and skills – but are unknown, or neglected.
Their work leads to make it possible for diverse partners and stakeholders to work together – often for the first time. There are dozens of rural networks, platforms, labs and hubs in Europe, but the majority of these are time-limited and feature university reasarchers.
OSVH is a community of practice for people who are from, and will stay in, their locality. The OSVH Manifesto has just been launched - and their handbook will be ready in January 2024.
And here, from that manifesto:
Many remote rural regions have endured decades-long crises, marked by declining economic prospects, emigration, insufficient services, deteriorating infrastructure, and a sense of being left behind. In Italy alone, 5,000 small villages (those with 5,000 or fewer inhabitants) have been declining; in Spain, 3,500; in Serbia, 4,700 – to name just three countries as examples.
In these areas, right across Europe- where services, infrastructures and opportunities are lacking - people continue to move to urban areas. When they do so, local ecological knowledge is often lost, and fewer people are left to care for the land and its biodiversity. Simultaneously, a growing number of urban residents contemplated leaving cities, seeking refuge, or even moving to rural areas.
Dissatisfaction with increasingly gentrified urban centres and mainstream activities started this trend even before the COVID-19 crisis, which increased it further. But new projects, new livelihoods, new connections are sprouting up among Europe’s multitude of small villages.
Amid these disparate challenges, a convergence emerged through a rising phenomenon: social innovation hosting initiatives known as Village Hosts. Many of them began to develop new activities, such as positive-impact tourism, nature reconnection, ecological restoration, adventure sports, farm-shares, learning journeys, wellness retreats, heritage trails, and more.
These initiatives, characterised by informal grassroots designs, connect and experiment with novel economic and social models, bridging urban and rural areas: Village Hosts are individuals who transitioned from urban to rural settings or migrated from rural to urban and now return. Village Hosts embody a blend of those two worlds, nature and creativity, rural culture and history and innovative thinking.
They have a blog which captures examples of “village hosting” in action. For example: