Resilience Movement

La Lucciola – a next generation project

This adventure started in March 2022. Throughout the past years, 16 adults and 24 kids, teens and students between the ages of 9 and 29 have come to discover what this experience of re-energizing and intuitive living can mean to them. All with a desire to come back someday…

We welcome you to discover what La Lucciola means, how you might relate to this place and how (y)our experiences impact you!

Images and sound by Daniel Lambo & Norma Prendergast

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Building Culture

Each of these pictures is a chapter in our way of living and “building culture” at La Lucciola.

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The mission of La Lucciola is to offer support to kids, teens and caregivers, to find their own authentic way to end disconnection and suffering and to build connection, creativity and wisdom. We contribute to a more compassionate and courageous culture, individually and collectively. As human beings, we have to learn to understand, feel and practice how we can live together more peacefully, embracing our life force energy and our inner and interpersonal diversity and strength.

The challenge we want to deal with, is how to respond to the fact that kid’s and teens anxiety, stress-related disorders (as ADHD, autism-spectrum, learning difficulties, auto-immune diseases, mental breakdowns, burnouts and suicide) have been rising and still are. Investing in the next generation’s wisdom and the capacity to deal with life’s challenges is necessary and urgent. We notice that

• there is a lot of resistance to compassionate education and investing in future generations in a profound connective way.
• there is an enormous need for understanding and learning how to deal with pain, grief, anger, fear, anxiety, and other kinds of suffering.
• there is also a growing number of professionals and parents that seek for change and feel alone in their struggle to build up a new mindset or culture.
• there are lots of educating caregivers and teachers with a more connective and compassionate approach, based on their values and ‘new’ insights from neuroscience (although those insights are very old and present in ancient cultures). This ‘new’ approach is colliding with the foundations of our educational patterns and systems, and those who are growing up in a compassionate environment and who have access to alternative educational activities, have a hard time connecting to the ‘normal’ facilities and structures in our society.

Do you know a child or teenager in your own family or social network who seems to be losing self-confidence, to be suffering? Or have you experienced it yourself? 

Do you recognize the feeling of longing to be understood and not to be judged? The desire of an environment that allows you to be your whole self? And to reconnect to the life force energy that drives your motivation and confidence? 

Do you wish the next generation to act with more wisdom and more resilience then we have been capable of ourselves?

As a participant and/or investor, you will be part of our Resilience Movement-network and gatherings, experiencing the qualities of connection that we build with all participants in this project. We invest in developing and embodying our skills, to create stronger and deeper human connection, and to reinforce our capacity to handle tension and conflict.

Our solution to the challenges mentioned above, is that we actively and experientially engage in a permanent and lifelong learning process, where we come to understand and practice what it means to live in connection with ourselves and one another. With this project we want to respond to the lack of activities and places that

• are accessible AND radical enough to foster real change 
• offer teenagers and caregivers a get-away from daily life and make space for discovering and building new habits
• invite everyone to engage in individual and collective learning, based on a compassionate, embodied and conflict-resolution-oriented approach. 
• contribute to community-building and to a culture of deeper human connections, capable of facing tensions.

In this project we offer guidance through a process of preparations, a retreat and follow up-sessions, which helps kids, teenagers and parents or other child-care-givers to get in touch with their intrinsic motivation, self-confidence and mutual support. Together we find a way to develop and integrate our capacity of being aware and to recognize and handle situations where emotions, convictions or other unconscious elements are blocking our individual or collective growth and creativity.

Our coachings and retreats are based on the idea that deeper insights arise in a compassionate environment, in contact with nature, having the possibility to be alone and together, where we can physically build something and contribute to a resourceful place for ourselves and for others. During the retreats we will be embodying and practicing in a spontaneous and organic way, the qualities we want to develop to be able to support and channel the intensities of daily life that await us when we come back home.

• Our coachings and wild-camping-retreats offer a parallel and complementary way of learning in the present moment, while the classical educational systems are struggling to find their way.
• Our guidance and allyship embodies generosity and compassion, love and courage, finding balance, learning to build collective and reinvent living together. 
• Our methods -based on Worldwork/Deep Democracy and Embodiment- and in addition the methods each participant brings and develops, enable us to experience and learn tools and skills, to deal with ourselves and others, to cope with differences instead of fearing them, in a way that reveals our hidden wisdom and strength.

Through the processes mentioned above, we will be connecting to our intrinsic motivation and self-knowledge, developing insight in our own talents and potential. Coming back several times is possible and very welcome.

We wish that all kids, teenagers and their caregivers get the opportunity to encounter their inner force and potential in a safer environment, so they can grow to develop their own concrete actions in a changing and conflictual world. 

Participants can be teenagers, caregivers and kids who are losing their confidence in or their connection with the regular (educational) systems, or who want to engage in building a different culture for themselves and for others.

Our participants want to develop their courage to deal with conflict and stress, and connect with themselves and/or other people, feeling supported and not being alone in the quest of building their life and future.

Ylva Berg and Marijke Smeets are coordinating this project, exploring what shared leadership means when we engage with family, colleagues, friends and other participants in this adventure. Compassionate and sensitive, they are able to establish clear boundaries and deep human connection, to reveal creativity and potential, even in chaotic and conflictual situations. Some of their most important qualities are reliability, congruent values and actions,  an experiential approach, a constructive collaborative attitude and a large social and professional network.

More info on the personal pages of Ylva en Marijke, or on their professional website https://www.firoafacilitation.com

All official arrangements that are required to manage and build this project will be handled through firoa facilitation srl.

Participants and private investors in this project are our first partners. They are the co-creators of La Lucciola. Public funds can be addressed for specific activities, but we wish not to depend on subsidies in a structural way. The piece of land has been bought in March 2022 thanks to private investments, and all investments remain welcome to develop the land and the house. Through the income of contributions, material donations and manual work, we can gradually continue to build and finance the project.

Investing in this project is possible in many ways

• Giving us feedback and inspiring ideas
• Spreading our message in your own network
• Offer your time and talents, working on renovation and maintenance, agriculture and cultivating, (co-)guiding retreats
• Make financial contributions
• Invest material contributions (building materials for the renovation project, furniture to equip the ‘rooms’, …)

Different kinds of activities are organized to generate diversity in income, input and participants: 

• retreats for teens and caregivers are possible during school holidays, based on free contributions to guarantee accessibility.
• retreats for adults in Deep Democracy and other culture-building practices, based on ‘normal’ contributions with the possibility to add donations.
• gatherings where all co-creators can meet and connect, contributing each in their own way.

In the first years we focused on our existing network of friends and family. We are reaching out to a growing network of partner organizations such as (mental) health care associations, schools, youth support associations, parents associations and social movements.

In this pdf you find the planning and retreat-weeks organized in 2022 – 2023 – 2024. In 2025 we will be there in summer and in December for harvesting olives. Specific request are also very welcome.

Welcome to contact us through this form to plan your first meeting with us!

Curious how La Lucciola started? Find out more on this page

Would you love to contribute to the development of La Lucciola? Check the contribution page!