‍How did Pandorahub get started? What is its vision and how have you upheld that vision and your values to this day?

It initially started by following my own ‘call to rurality’, as a mainly urban social entrepreneur and human centric design consultant for big corporations, tech companies and international NGOs, and the urge to live and work more often closer to nature. Four months after starting the project (in June 2015) and while pitching the first pilot experience to the local villagers of Riva Roja d’Ebre, I realised that my passion for old stone buildings and rural life might have started early on. When I was six years old, my father often brought me to visit his abandoned village home in the old Mequinenza in Aragon, Spain. His family, together with all the other village inhabitants, were forced to fully abandon the old Mequinenza village to avoid the risk of flood after the construction of a dam in the riverside in the 60s. It all ended up being a miscalculation. The village actually never flooded and was kept fully visible and abandoned for over thirty years. I still recall my father’s passion for the rural life when he brought me there, together with this sadness of having had to abandon the village and move to the city of Barcelona(where none of his family ever actually fit culturally).

As I once shared this vision on a TEDx Talk, I guess this is in a way what Pandorahub mission is pursuing till now. A return to the village lifestyle, reversing rural depopulation, mixing the modernity and rurality, building bridges between villages and cities, leveraging the opportunities of remote work, rural coliving and coworking, collaborative housing and impact-driven entrepreneurship. With all of our different activities and workstreams, what Pandorahub is envisioning is the ignition of a network of vibrant rural hubs where locals and newcomers colive, collaborate and complement each other, virtuously mix cultures, ages and skills. In all that we do, there is an underlying claim based on the idea that by redistributing people, wealth, knowledge and resources amongst different territories worldwide (rural, urban, peri-urban) in a more balanced way (vs urban densification), the overall quality of life standards will improve, both in cities and rural areas. I’m surprised how all these ideas are still present and keep our initial Manifesto alive!

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Can you explain what you mean by rural reactivation?

I find the best way to describe how we understand rural reactivation is talking about our ‘Ruralisation Model’ (English version coming soon). It is based on three main pillars:

Positive Ruralisation: we empower the positive transformation of rural regions we operate in by deliberately attracting and consolidating diverse, multicultural impact-driven local and newcomer entrepreneurs and professionals, and we actively involve local communities and local partners in our projects.

Connected Ruralisation: we clearly bet for remote work, digital nomadism, open, decentralised and P2P technologies and communities, conscious, impact- driven startup and tech-based cultures as a rural reactivation opportunity.

Collective Ruralisation: in all our activities and programs, community living in the form of coliving or simply resource sharing practices are a must, and above all, we mainly focus on regenerative and collective economic reactivation models based on local endogenous resources and capabilities, empowering collaboration and cross-pollination between local and newcomer professionals, projects and initiatives.

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What is the impact you try to have in the areas in which you set up your coliving spaces?

First of all, we literally LOVE the mixture of cultures and backgrounds that consciously emerge between locals and newcomers. So one way we create impact is enabling valuable connections between the rural and the global/urban world. This can be done from designing spaces and activities that invite knowledge- sharing in rural coliving and coworking experiences, to more sophisticated acceleration programs with the coliving component embedded within them that also enable actionable collaborations and tangible projects. For instance, the local and fully analogical (non tech-based) artisan collective La Iera in Olot (Garrotxa, Spain), who turns empty grocery stores into craft-shops and workshop spaces for temporary artist residencies, joined forces with the P2P social network Retroshare (one of the participants of our accelerator programme) to scale their collective to other rural regions with the same empty-grocery phenomena. So once you not just fall in love with the place and the people, but more deeply connect and start exciting ‘equal-to-equal ventures’ with local change-makers, your reasons to move to the village (at least for a while) or come back more recurrently, grow much stronger. This is a way that we finally can leverage productive and high-value rural repopulation.

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What are some of the initiatives you have organised that are impact-driven and have contributed to this rural reactivation?

We can sum up our rural reactivation initiatives in four types:

Firstly, we do specialised rural reactivation training and consulting projects addressed to companies, regional entities or public-private agents committed to rural development. This is the example of the Rural Shakers initiative we are co-creating with a worldwide group of rural coliving and coworking spaces (such as Coconat in Germany and Angkor Hub in Cambodia) and incubators who share our impact-driven values and mission (reversing rural depopulation by attracting and consolidating impact- driven talent and entrepreneurship to rural areas). The Rural Shakers initiative is aimed at reclaiming the Rural Shakers role and importance in the rural reactivation challenge, Pandorahub is on a mission to turn our more informal ‘gLocal Rural Shakers’ network into a tightened community able to provide support, specialised training, and global visibility to Rural Shakers success stories, fostering transregional strategic alliances and allowing knowledge exchange amongst the community.

Another important reactivation focus are the impact- driven entrepreneurship and professional programs in rural areas addressed to individual professionals, entrepreneurs and/or teams, both locals (rural) and global (urban). Rural coliving is an important component of these programs in creating bounding and stronger connections between participants. This is the case of Civichub, a civic innovation and decentralised technologies acceleration program held yearly in Garrotxa region (Catalonia, Spain). The last Civichub edition involved a 15-day rural coliving time frame spread across 4 months, and gathered 39 participants of 20+ teams, local & global impact startups, NGOs and governments. Within the program, 5 companies were incorporated, 5 new cross-pollination projects emerged between locals & newcomers, 2 participants were hired by participating projects, 3 participants moved to Garrotxa, 15.000€ of business deals were closed and several participants earned over 700K€ of equity-free awards.

Another rural reactivation focus are the recurring and rural coliving and coworking experiences in entrepreneurial and conscious rural communities and villages that we organise and co-design together with local ambassadors or rural shakers. During these coliving experiences, remote workers, entrepreneurs, nomads, and global/urban professionals and teams gather in a rural location where they share life and work for a while mixing and connecting more informally with interesting local people. After 5 years, we have explored many ways of leveraging remote work and rural coliving as a rural reactivation opportunity counting over 15,000km traveled, 150+ days of rural coliving in 30+ rural towns in Spain involving 30+ entrepreneurs, nomads and professionals of 15+ nationalities.

Finally, we are in close collaboration with expert housing lawyers, doctors and PhD students of Unesco Housing Chair of RV University together with whom we organise talks and support rural governments to explore and innovate with more flexible, fair and legal ways to access underused rural homes such as coliving, cohousing or co-ownership. This is driven by the will to minimise the possibilities of causing rural gentrification as a potential side effect of reactivating rural areas.

Such is the case of our support reviewing a housing plan for unlocking and renovating abandoned homes, and a subsequent awareness video campaign we created for the Mieres village municipality. This eventually helped make the previous housing plan more flexible so that the first 3 families finally enrolled in the plan after 4 years of it being published, making it possible to renovate and inhabit 3 empty homes. Our support also contributed to a territorial attractiveness and a long waiting list of people looking for a house in the village.

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Who are some of the individuals / organisations you have worked with to deliver rural impact (e.g. municipalities, NGOs, mayors, foundations, Enspiral, Ouishare)?

Apart from the projects we already mentioned, we have also designed the local involvement and local-newcomer rituals for global nomad network rural retreats like the Network Convergence Retreat held in Mieres in the summer of 2018, together with Enspiral and Ouishare, that gathered 40+ members of distributed networks from more than 20 nationalities. As an example of local impact in this specific collaboration, we created a ritual where both locals and newcomers were invited to bring an emotional or tangible gift and share it in a circle. This idea of the gift-exchange ritual was based on a huge exchange fair where one is not allowed to buy anything using money (just by mere barter) that is held in Mieres village gathering of over 3,000 people. We designed a smaller version of this event to emotionally connect locals and newcomer participants of the Network Convergence Retreat. And pure serendipity turned the whole thing into a highly emotional 3 hour ritual, since the first few gifts exchanged in the circle totally matched by chance, leading to some hyper sensitive and personal situations between locals and newcomers. Some of us could not help but to start crying, it was very special!

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How best do you work with some of these actors (e.g. local communities / ‘rural shakers’)?

Our approach is to start any collaboration with locals before proposing any activation activity or program. Meaning, first of all, identifying local partners who have deep knowledge and understanding of the local reality and ecosystem. And if there are Rural Shakers that are new to the area (like newly created rural coliving, coworking spaces or incubators), we help them to start conversations, create bridges, foster relationships while ideally actively involve local governments, NGOs, activists, and local change-makers (local heroes) in whatever activities these Rural Shakers are planning to do.

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How are you measuring your impact and your success of your business / communities?

Some of the main rural reactivation KPIs that we measure include the following:

• Number and quality of valuable interactions between locals and newcomers: this can be measure in the form of knowledge exchange hours and in number and preexistence in time of cross- pollination projects emerged between locals and newcomers,
• Number and level of impact-driven companies incorporated,
• Number and quality of jobs created, and
• Number, profile and type of stay (permanent or
  discontinuous) of new inhabitants moving to the region.

These KPIs are based on social, economic and environmental factors that are aligned with global sustainability goals such as the UN SDGs. We are aware, however, that the depopulation of rural regions will make it nearly impossible to achieve the stated goals by 2030.
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Despite this, we believe Pandorahub contributes to a more sustainable and fair world in a variety of the following ways:

• Redistributing people, knowledge, resources and wealth beyond cities to rural territories helps reduce poverty (UN SDG Goal 1),
• Inspiring people to live and work closer to nature in rural areas increases opportunities for good health and wellbeing (UN SDG Goal 3),
• Leveraging the opportunities of remote work in rural areas makes it possible, for both men and women, to work from home while being with their kids, enhancing gender equality in the upbringing of families (UN SDG Goal 5),
• Empowering entrepreneurship and job opportunities contributes to creating decent work, economic growth and regeneration, especially in rural areas (UN SDG Goal 8),
• Creating mainly off grid, sustainable and eco- friendly rural homes and locations provides a hand-ons playground for practicing what it means to live more sustainably in community (UN SDG Goal 11), and
• Our main demographic consists of impact-driven entrepreneurs, professionals and organisations who are aware of and practice responsible consumption and production models (UN SDG Goal 12).

In summary and based both on my own experience at Pandorahub and the rural coliving and coworking spaces we collaborate with, I would highlight for current and future rural coliving operators, that the sooner you realise the potential of becoming a positive catalyser for the region you are in, and the sooner you actively start involving the local community, the faster you can grow, the more resilient you become, and lastly, the easier you acquire, retain and create stickiness with colivers/coworkers. If you want to know more about why to embed the impact focus in your rural coliving space and how it can make the business even more profitable, you can view this presentation of a recent talk I did about it for the Coliving Hub Conference which includes some or our initiatives and other existing projects and case studies.