Navdanya International

English subtitles available

When the Officine Municipali in Bracciano opened as a free coworking space, the idea was simple: somewhere to study and work. A few months on, the space is becoming something more. Students and young people come every day, stay for hours, return, and increasingly take part in the life of Terrae Vivae around them. With Navdanya International as managing partner and the Municipality of Bracciano as a committed ally, the Officine are becoming the Terrae Vivae Hub, a civic home where ecological learning, everyday life and democratic participation meet.

Around Lake Bracciano, as in so many territories, the difficulty has rarely been a lack of solutions. There are farmers practising agroecology, teachers opening their classrooms to the land, young people ready to act, and institutions willing to listen. What is often missing is a place where these relationships can meet and keep meeting. Industrial food systems thrive on fragmentation: they separate people from nature, farmers from citizens, schools from the land, youth from the decisions that shape their territory. A shared civic space is one of the most concrete ways to mend those separations. The Hub is not an addition to Terrae Vivae. It is the connective tissue that allows everything else to hold together and endure.

A turning point came on 23 May with Youth & Territory: Pathways in Agroecology and Citizenship. Students, teachers, local farmers, residents and representatives of local institutions gathered at the Officine to talk about the future of Lake Bracciano through agroecology and active citizenship. The students brought a whole year of ecological exploration with them, and they did not present it as schoolwork. They carried their knowledge, questions and proposals into a public space and shared them as members of their community. This is the passage Terrae Vivae works for: from learning to read the relationships that sustain life, to taking part in caring for them. Youth & Territory closed a school year, and it opened a lasting relationship between young people and the Officine.

A community space comes alive when people stop visiting it and start inhabiting it. The first monitoring data suggest this is already happening. Between 4 June and 31 July 2026, over 35 opening days, the coworking space recorded 209 visits by 99 different people, around six people a day and roughly 880 hours spent together in the space. The average visit lasted 4 hours and 13 minutes, and almost 40% of visits lasted five hours or more. People are not passing through; they are choosing to spend their days here. A core community is also taking shape: 38 people returned at least once, 23 came three times or more, and nine came at least five times. What these numbers describe is not attendance but rootedness.

The most striking finding is how naturally young people have made the space their own, a place to be together outdoors while staying connected to their work and to one another. They already know what they need from a shared space. The next step is to give that knowledge room to shape the Hub itself. One day each week will be opened to activities that young people propose, organise and run: workshops, meetings, music, art, training, or new ways of spending time together that grow from their own interests. This is not a programme designed for young people. It is a programme they co-create, and with it comes a share in the responsibility for the space.

Alongside daily life at the Officine, public events are drawing a widening circle. The latest evening of Le stagioni di Officine (The Seasons of Officine) brought together more than 70 people: young people, residents, local producers, restaurant owners and local organisations. Producers shared what short supply chains and a circular local economy can mean in practice, and a screening of The Seeds of Vandana Shiva connected concerns close to home with struggles for seed and food sovereignty worldwide. Events like these are not a calendar of activities. They are how relationships are woven, how knowledge circulates, and how a building becomes a known place to meet and act.

Terrae Vivae is not a local project. It grows from Navdanya’s decades of work in India, where community seed banks, women’s collectives and Earth University have shown how living knowledge can regenerate land and community, and it translates that method into the soil of Lake Bracciano. Learning travels in both directions. What young people, farmers and institutions are discovering here returns to a wider international community of practice, just as experience from India enriches the work in Italy. It is an international process, grounded in one territory.

October brings this connection into sharp focus. The 54th plenary session of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) meets at FAO headquarters in Rome from 19 to 23 October 2026. The following day, 24 October, Bracciano will host Agroecology and Regenerative Communities, welcoming delegates from the CFS, the Sustainable Development Forum, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE), the Italian Buddhist Union and other environmental organisations. The aim is to bring the international debate into a real territory, and to carry the experience of that territory back into the global conversation. A territory brings to such a conversation something no position paper can: named farmers, working relationships, and young people speaking from their own experience.

Terrae Vivae begins from the understanding that communities are living ecosystems, shaped by local and global forces alike, and able to regenerate through participation, knowledge, relationships and shared responsibility. The Officine Municipali give that understanding a physical home, where daily work, ecological education, civic life and international dialogue come together. Transition is not delivered to a community; it is grown by one. It is still early, but the direction is clear: from coworking space to meeting place, from meeting place to community, and from community to a space that plans and acts for its territory while remaining in conversation with the world.

Photo credits: Maela Bonafede

Project “Coworking Space Bracciano” – CUP F11I24000190009 – co-funded by the European Union under the Lazio ESF Regional Programme 2021–2027, Priority 1 Employment, Specific Objective ESO4.2, Key Action (AC) 19, “Officine Municipali” Call for Proposals, DD G05680/2023. Beneficiary: Municipality of Bracciano. Managing partner: Navdanya International ETS.
CUP: F11I24000190009 – Sigem Code: 23019DC000000106

From 19 to 23 October, FAO headquarters in Rome will host the 54th session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the leading multilateral forums on food security and nutrition. The CFS brings together governments, UN agencies, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, researchers and the private sector to tackle the root causes of hunger and malnutrition, advance the right to food, and build sustainable, resilient food systems. High on this year’s agenda are food system resilience and critical and emerging issues for food security.

The meeting opens just over two months after the release of a FAO–UNOSAT report that shows starkly what it means, in wartime, to lose not only access to food but the very ability to produce it. In the Gaza Strip, just 3% of cropland is both accessible and undamaged.

As of 24 June 2026, 4,091 hectares were accessible, 27% of the total agricultural area. Yet only 448 hectares were intact and could be farmed without first being restored, while the remaining 3,643 accessible hectares had been damaged. Since October 2025, the area of accessible, undamaged farmland has shrunk by a further 25.5%. In Rafah, 97.2% of agricultural land and 98.4% of greenhouses are out of reach. Across Gaza, just 224 hectares of greenhouses, 16.6% of the total, remain both accessible and intact.

According to FAO, the main reason less land has been available in recent months is not further physical damage but loss of access to the fields. Land can still be fit for farming and yet produce nothing, because farmers simply cannot reach it. Even where access is still possible, production is held back by shortages of seeds, fertilisers, irrigation equipment, fuel and other essential inputs. Livestock farmers are struggling to find animal feed and veterinary medicines.

Before October 2023, agriculture accounted for around 10% of Gaza’s economy and supported the livelihoods of more than 560,000 people through farming, livestock and fishing. The hostilities have struck not only crops and infrastructure but an entire food ecosystem: soil, water, seeds, farming knowledge, labour, local trade and the ability of people to keep producing their own food over time. This is where the question of seeds becomes crucial. A seed is not just another input to be imported. It is the first link in a community’s food autonomy, because it holds the possibility of saving, reproducing and adapting crops. The freedom to save and exchange seeds and the protection of biodiversity are fundamental to food sovereignty. When land, water, seeds and local productive capacity are lost, dependence on outside sources grows instead. FAO itself lists among its priorities safe access to land, the entry of agricultural inputs, and investment to rehabilitate fields and rebuild local agriculture.

As the CFS meets in Rome, Gaza raises a question that reaches far beyond the Strip: can we talk about food security in terms of food availability alone, without also considering whether communities are able to produce it? For Navdanya, this is exactly where food sovereignty begins: with the freedom to safeguard seeds, regenerate the land and keep the power to feed themselves in the hands of communities.

Ruchi Shroff 

Navdanya International

Thumbnail: “Palestinians commemorate Land Day in the ‘buffer zone’ of the eastern Gaza Strip” by Joe Catron, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr. No changes made.

Saturday, October 24, 2026, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM
Chiostro degli Agostiniani
Via Umberto I, 5, Bracciano (RM)

A day of exchange between those who farm, teach, study and administer this area, together with guests who carry out similar work in other Italian regions and in other countries.

An event dedicated to ecological education and the role of youth, to biodiversity as the foundation of territorial resilience, and to the question that runs through all our work: how do we build community-led processes capable of bringing together farmers, schools, institutions, and citizens.

In recent years, Navdanya International has advanced this path at the local, national, and international levels through initiatives such as Terrae Vivae, Officine Municipali, the educational project Ecological ReGeneration: Citizenship and Participation, co-financed by the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security within the framework of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development, and the FSL (School-Work Training) educational pathways supported by Ecologia – Italian Buddhist Union: concrete opportunities for knowledge, exchange, and participation that connect learning to experience and awareness to the possibility of action.

In the cloister, exhibition of school projects and artistic works born from ecoliteracy pathways, local producers’ market, and seed exchange. In the afternoon, a plenary session and a convivial moment featuring local products are scheduled.

For further information: info@navdanyainternational.org