Fixar

In 2024, Sende fully designed and piloted the Fixar project, supported by Xunta de Galicia. It is an ongoing project where we’ve so far worked with hundreds of people from Galicia who are considering moving or are already living in the countryside. Among them there were creatives and innovators, entrepreneurs, educators and community builders.

Using our coliving space as a platform, we’ve been bringing them to Sende for a two-week-long mentorship program to help them develop or strengthen their small businesses. A few times a year, we organize networking events called Xuntanzas where all Fixar participants meet to talk about their experiences and ideas, while spending time together, eating good food and often dancing to nice music.

For Fixar, we also developed a graphic map, presenting all the people we gathered within this project.

CRAB

CRAB is a project through which we connect rural and peripheral spaces across Europe. Together with partners from Spain, Portugal and Italy, we’ve been building the future rural creative hubs community. 

Think maker labs in barns, coliving in cottages, pop-up galleries in forgotten towns - we put them on the map, quite literally.

Here you can explore the map we designed, see these spaces and understand, in a visual way, what each hub does and how it works.

POCKETS.GAL art residency

Within the Culture Moves Europe mobility scheme, Sende designed and hosted a month-long art residency in Senderiz, a small Galician village of twenty inhabitants. The residency focused on mapping the natural heritage that surrounds our village and reimagining how people relate to it.

Five artists working in different fields came together to explore the landscape, observe the details often overlooked and translate them into creative forms. 

The result was pockets.gal, a digital, interactive map that gathers fragments of this place: textures, stories and memories connected to the land - memories of migration, silence, resilience.

Erasmus+

Within Erasmus+, we’ve been active both as coordinators and partners in dozens of KA1 and KA2 projects.

Both in Spain and Portugal, we organized youth exchanges and trainings in fields such as rural development, innovation, youth engagement, social entrepreneurship, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. 

Here are just a few topics we tackled through these projects:

+ map a local problem and build a solution to prevent it from happening (+ conflict transformation in case it still does happen)

Our village in Galicia burns (almost) every year. But it’s not an isolated case - summer fires are happening all over Europe. Although there are modern solutions that extinguish fires, there are still no solutions that prevent one. Through projects such as Lume and Into the wild, we worked around the wildfires topic. 

During Lume, we worked on small-scale prototypes for preventing human-caused forest fires - solutions that could be easily repeated elsewhere. We used lights, sensors, and Makey Makey to build interactive games about forest fires, combined with projections, talks and discussions. We spoke with neighbors about their experiences and ideas for prevention, met with firefighters, and learned more about wood, forests, and the ecosystems that surround us.

But what happens when the fire has already started? It often brings conflict - between communities, nature, policies, neighbors, politicians, firefighters, private companies, and activists.

With Into the wild, we brought together young people from four countries, but also local authorities, firefighters and forestry companies. Together we explored how conflicts arise in the context of natural disasters and what can be done to transform them. We developed ideas and practical solutions, while also looking at how local policies could be improved.

+ teach young people how to build tiny sustainable businesses with social impact

We believe that learning how to build something small, but with purpose, can completely change a person’s path. Through our Season and Growth projects, we worked with young people across Europe, helping them turn ideas into simple, sustainable businesses with social impact.

Both trainings took place at Sende in Spain. In Season, participants learned the ins and outs of creating tiny businesses (online and offline) from people who have been doing it for over 15 years. Businesses that support both them and some greater cause.

Growth was about how to build creative and coliving spaces in rural areas. A year later, we are witnessing something really cool - one in five participants has opened their own space.

Within Season, we also developed the Training for Trainers Toolkit - an open-source guide for educators and local change-makers who want to pass on this knowledge and teach others how to start a small social business.

+ work with young people on conflict transformation and peace-building

Sende grew out of a belief that change begins with dialogue, and this belief has guided our work in peace-building and conflict transformation. Over the years, we’ve led workshops and trainings on these themes in many different settings - from small rural communities to international projects. One of our co-founders is also among the founders of the Youth Peace Ambassadors Network, and this experience continues to shape how we design our programs today.

In 2022, through the YOU-GO project, we brought together young people from the former Yugoslav countries for the first time to openly face the conflict that has shaped their region for decades. It wasn’t easy - the process was challenging, emotional, and often painful. But over the course of seven days in our bird-forest campsite in Portugal, something began to shift. Participants started to see the past through new eyes and to imagine what peace might look like in their own communities. And we believe that’s the most valuable thing we could do in this training.

The Break

In 2023, Sende hosted two cohorts of female entrepreneurs from all over Europe, within the Break mentorship program. As mentors, we worked with women through online sessions, and, more importantly, during their three-week stay at our coliving space in Galicia. During this time, they developed their business ideas, took part in one-on-one mentoring sessions, and learned from each other through peer activities. 

The goal was to help them strengthen their projects, gain new perspectives, and connect with other women building their own businesses.

Creative FLIP: Ambassadors of Good Practice

In 2025, Sende was selected as one of the Ambassadors of Good Practice within the Creative FLIP policy project. As part of this program, we hosted a five-day residency designed to explore how local communities in non-urban and peripheral areas can be revitalized through arts and culture.

Our guests from the Cultural Center Schule (Czech Republic) joined us in Senderiz, where we opened the doors to our everyday processes - how we host, write and manage projects, bring together people with vastly different backgrounds and languages, how we design for participation, and how we keep things running with a small team and often modest resources. 

By taking part in these processes, but also through walks, shared meals and informal talks, we once again saw the value, power and importance of non-formal learning methods.

What we did: Hosting · Mentoring

Rural developmentCulture

ArtCreative spaces

ECHN workshop

In 2026, Sende will host the ECHN workshop Low Tech Communication from the Village, selected by the European Creative Hubs Network. The workshop is built around a simple idea: small creative spaces in remote areas can only survive if they know how to communicate well - ideally without spending their lives online. 

At Sende, our space gets fully booked for years, and we send no more than two emails annually. This is all thanks to communication. In this workshop, we will share how other hubs can apply the same systems in their own spaces.