The House / In a Nutshell
Sprouting people and initiatives.
A Casa da Velha / The Grandmother’s House
A tribute to the elder woman archetype and its ancient wisdom in stewarding human life on Earth.
Many SDG initiatives fail because they are built to work in isolation and rely on continuous injections of external funding. We are building a self-sustaining ecosystem from day one.A Casa da Velha is a cooperative incubator of cooperatives, a learning centre and a working demonstration of economically sustainable collaboration, taking shape in rural Portugal.
More than an incubator that produces cooperatives, The House is designed to be an economic organism whose own livelihood model creates the conditions to incubate other forms of collective livelihood.
Why this work matters
Rural–urban rebalance
Cities are crowded and expensive while rural areas are underused, as technology reshapes where and how we work.
Ecological limits
Our economies are still largely organised as if ecological systems are external and effectively infinite.
Collective needs
Care, education, belonging and other needs are increasingly carried by individuals rather than shared communally.
We have unprecedented access to information, but far fewer places to turn it into lived practice.
A Casa da Velha brings people together to develop new forms of kinship and livelihood: practical know-how for living together in socially cohesive, ecologically grounded and economically viable ways.