Why Damanhur: Learning to Build Community by Living Inside One

You can learn a great deal about community from a book. You can learn more from a good course. But there's a kind of knowledge that only arrives when you live inside the thing you're studying — when the subject of the lesson is also the ground under your feet and the people you share breakfast with. That's the wager behind holding our Training of Trainers in Damanhur.

This September, the week takes place not in a training centre but inside one of Europe's most remarkable intentional communities. We think the place is half the teacher. Here's why.

A Community That Has Been Practising for Decades

Damanhur sits in the alpine foothills of Piedmont, between Turin and Aosta. Around 600 people live there. Over the years it has built its own constitution, its own schools, its own art and music, even its own currency, and it runs a university that draws scholars and educators from across the world. People describe it, only half-jokingly, as a small country with a big imagination. What it really is, is a decades-long experiment in how human beings might organise life together differently.

For a course about facilitating groups and building community, that's an extraordinary classroom. So much of what a Training of Trainers teaches — how trust forms in a group, how decisions get made, how conflict moves through a community and either heals or hardens — is hard to convey on a slide. It's far easier to absorb when a living example of it surrounds you all week.

What Residential Really Means Here

This is residential in the full sense. You arrive on the Monday afternoon and settle into the place. From Tuesday to Friday the days are full — facilitator skills, leadership presence, learning cycles, working with the Sustainable Development Goals, and a great deal of hands-on facilitation practice. Saturday morning is for your own facilitation, with real feedback, followed by a closing ceremony and a final lunch together before you leave. Evenings are gently self-organised: a film, a presentation, time with the others.

Meals and accommodation are part of it. You're not commuting in and out of a venue; you're living the week. That continuity — eating, resting, and learning in the same place, with the same people — is exactly what lets the deeper learning settle.

Participants tell us the same thing each year: that living for a week inside a little community was as much the teacher as any session.

The Trainer Who Holds the Week

Guiding all of it is Macaco Tamerice, who has lived in Damanhur since 1993 — more than thirty years inside the questions this course asks. A sociologist and life coach focused on community-building, leadership, and conflict resolution, she has served as President of GEN Europe and of Damanhur's education NGO, and she has been a certified GEESE educator with Gaia Education since 2011. She is also a professional jazz singer, which may hint at how at ease she is improvising in front of a room. The group is kept small and hands-on, so you learn alongside her rather than watching from the back.

The Plain Details

Here are the facts without softening, because if this is for you, the timing matters.

• The week runs Monday 7 to Saturday 12 September 2026, in Damanhur, Italy.
• It's fully residential, with meals and accommodation included.
• The fee is £834. Travel to Italy is your own to arrange — Damanhur is roughly an hour from Turin and within reach of Milan's airports.
• You leave with the teaching manuals, a Certificate of Completion, a discount on our online programmes, and a place on the pathway toward Gaia Education's Certificated Trainers' Roster.
• It's a small, residential group, so places are limited.

If something in you has been leaning toward learning to hold a room and build community — and toward doing it somewhere that has been building community for forty years — this may be the current worth trusting. We'd be glad to have you with us.

Join the Damanhur training