Announcing the Training of Trainers in Damanhur: Learn to Teach Sustainability Where It's Lived

There is a particular kind of person the world needs more of right now. Not only people who understand sustainability, but people who can teach it — who can stand in front of a group, hold the room, and help others find their own way toward change. That skill has a name. It's facilitation, and it can be learned. This September, we're offering a week to learn it, in one of the most remarkable places in Europe.

We're glad to announce Training of Trainers — Damanhur 2026, a residential Gaia Education course running Monday 7 to Saturday 12 September, held inside the Damanhur community in the hills of Piedmont, Italy. Its promise is simple: learn to teach, facilitate, and train with purpose.

What a Training of Trainers Is

The Training of Trainers, or ToT, is Gaia Education's course for educators and facilitators who want to move people, not just inform them. It's built around three pillars:

• Facilitating participatory learning journeys — designing and holding experiences where people learn by taking part, and building genuine learning communities rather than delivering content.
• Deepening the edge work — learning to stay with a group at the edge of what it knows, the uncomfortable place where real creativity and change actually happen.
• Translating the Sustainable Development Goals into local action — decoding global agreements into something a real community can do, in its own context.

Underneath all three runs Gaia Education's way of seeing sustainability whole, across four dimensions: social, ecological, economic, and worldview.

Learn to teach, facilitate, and train with purpose.

Why Damanhur

This edition is held inside Damanhur itself — a federation of around 600 people with its own constitution, schools, art, currency, and university. You don't only study how community works; you live inside one that has been practising it for decades. For a course about facilitating groups and building community, there are few better classrooms.

Who Guides the Week

The week is led by Macaco Tamerice, a resident of Damanhur since 1993. She's a sociologist and life coach focused on community-building, leadership, and conflict resolution, a former President of GEN Europe and of Damanhur's education NGO, and a certified GEESE educator with Gaia Education since 2011. Decades of lived practice, in the very place you'll be learning.

The Practical Details

The course is fully residential and runs six days, Monday to Saturday. The fee is £834, which includes meals and accommodation, full tutorial support, a set of digital teaching manuals you keep, a Certificate of Completion, a discount on Gaia Education's online programmes, and a place on the pathway toward our Certificated Trainers' Roster. Travel to Italy is the one thing you arrange yourself.

It's open to educators, facilitators, community leaders, and anyone drawn to teaching participatory methods — no long list of prerequisites, just some experience with groups and a willingness to learn by doing.

An Invitation

If you've ever wanted to be the person who can hold a room and help a group move, this is a week built for exactly that. Places are limited, because it's residential. You can read the full description and dates below.

See the full training and dates