We are pleased to announce the Second Edition
of the SHE-EDE Program,
Portugal – Italy | 2024 – 2025


ECOLOGICAL DIMENSION

Spring 2024
April 28 – May 6

Covão do Feto,
Alcanena, Portugal


WORLDVIEW
DIMENSION

Summer 2024
20 – 29 July

Narni,
Umbria, Italy


SOCIAL
DIMENSION

Fall 2024
11 – 19 October

Covão do Feto,
Alcanena, Portugal


ECONOMIC
DIMENSION

Winter 2024
1 – 9 December

Narni,
Umbria, Italy

After the success of the program in the EcOstello Magliano Sabina in the spring 2023, a 4 week journey to empower women, raise awareness and create resilient communities inside the Ecovillage Design Education Model of Gaia Education.

We are offering a new format of she-ede.
Women led with mother values, open to everyone held through the years 2024 and 2025 in a cyclic program of eight days sessions each held in two startup communities in Portugal and in Italy.


We teach the knowledge and skills needed to design truly regenerative communities, which thrive within planetary boundaries.

SHE-EDE will be facilitated by certified and experienced facilitatresses, bringing together experience in ecovillage design, matriarchal societies, feminine wisdom, activism, community building and healing circles, we created a new format of EDE – responding to the worldwide need of mutual maternal values support and empowerment.

The latest available Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 data show that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

UN WOMEN

Covão do Feto
Alcanena, Portugal

Covão do Feto is a small village at the foot of the Serra D’Aire and Candeeiros mountain range, one of the main Portuguese mountain ranges linking the sea to the interior of the country. The land on which the She-EDE project will happen is constituted by two plots of fertile soil just outside the village forming a small forest with trees and native vegetation. The house has been built by the hands of the land’s guardian and her friends using, whenever possible, local resources.

With the intention to build a community linked to the village community, this house was built in auto-construction. It has a living room, kitchen and bathroom on the lower floor and two bedrooms on the upper floor, which together houses 8 people. Participants will camp on site, supported by a dry toilet and an outdoor shower. The house provides support for cooking, but meals will be taken outside, where there is a large table, benches and a cupboard to store some food, and an area for sorting rubbish and washing up.

The project is all about community building and a new way of regenerative living.

Narni
Umbria, Italy

On the hillsides of Narni, surrounded by woods and olive trees this old farmhouse is the home of MatriCulture, project led by the association BestUp to create a school for Matriarchal studies and  women’s empowerment. The main house hosts 15 people. The house has 3 fully equipped bathrooms, and a big common area for study, a library, a big kitchen for cooking together, an area for eating inside that welcomes 15 people and many outside areas to eat and work. There is also a big common studio area that is also a yoga room where to work together. Lots of land surrounds the house to create safe spaces and enable participants to install their tents. Compost toilets and outside showers are being built for the sake of happy campers. There is also an outside wood oven. The project is under construction and will be finished in July 2024 for the opening of the first SHE-EDE.  We are a startup project so everyone is needed to make it happen and make it better every year.

Led by a group of passionate women, they are solidly working to create this space for sharing wisdoms.

I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

From A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf

Women empowerment in a world in climate emergency

Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.


In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.

There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available.

Joanna Macy