Who we are

Cascina Don Guanella di Valmendra is a social agriculture project founded within the wider Opera Don Guanella to create a new educational environment especially meant for the community minors.

The Casa Don Guanella community works in very critical situations, such as minors removed from their own families, with identity isses, with migrants looking for new perspectives on life, with kids risking social exclusion. All of them com from traumatic situations in which they experimented failure. This is precisely why social inclusion and and self assessment are the founding pillars of the active pedagogy brought forward by the community operators.

In 2013, Casa Don Guanella acquired, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and to the Provincia d Lecco Onlus non-profit Foundation, a 15 hectares cultivable land in the Valmarea valley, which included a 900mq farmstead and the authorisation to renovate the building and to use both the land and the surrounding woods.

Activities

Production, manufacturing and commercialisation of agricultural products such as vegetables, small fruits, wine and semifinished agricultural goods (honey, eggs, cheese), as well as running a small restaurant and B&B in accordance to the agritourism model.

Recently, the stable and its milking room, a small cheese factory ad a henhouse for self-consumption poultry farming have been renovated.

The farm also plans to set up common spaces (meeting/dining room, common kitchen, cellar, manufacturing workshop), private ones (small apartments to hosts external guests, a B&B service) and new spacesto host some of the residents when they come of age, at the end of the community path.