You can make a Madrid or San Francisco salary working from the Spanish mountains by running your tiny business online.

You can also start a coliving space in a village setting and host people from around the globe who will work on their projects while listening to singing birds and other nature sounds in the background.

Sende is launching a free program, called ‘Download Sende’, that teaches coliving professionals how to open such a coliving space in remote places, whether you live in the Brazilian jungle, European mountains, Greek islands, or African desert.

One rural coliving space can make an impact big enough to bring back a forgotten or underdeveloped village to life. Here are the numbers to prove this:

Let’s take a hypothetical example where you are about to open a coliving space in an Italian village with only 30 inhabitants.

For this, you will need to organise (simple) accommodation, a big kitchen, and shared spaces to host 25 digital nomads every month who will work online from your place.

To adapt the physical infrastructure of the space , you will probably need to invest between €25,000 to €150,000 or more. Families of at least 5 local construction workers will benefit from these renovations. Bravo, you just helped 5 of the local families living in this village. Even if you start with a few euros, properly running a coliving space can bring you money for future investments and hence more local economic impact.

In a village of this size, there is probably only one shop and one bakery. 25 digital nomads can eat around €4,000 to €6,000 of food produce in one month. If 70% of ingredients are purchased in this shop, local owners can meet their ends just by answering the needs of this coliving space. The local bakery probably can now serve more villages AND your coliving space. Now you helped store owners and their families to maintain and grow their small business.

There is most likely at least one bar/restaurant nearby where people from other villages stop by. This place can double, often triple their regular income with a coliving space nearby, especially if they serve food. This space will probably need to collaborate with locals to run efficiently. Many young people escaped from rural areas because there are no job opportunities. Hiring locals to run the restaurant or to help maintain the site can keep these people in the village and prevent ‘brain drain’ and economic decline.

This micro economic impact only works if your coliving space matches their values with the needs of the local community. If you buy first from the locals (even though everything will cost a bit more) instead of going to big supermarket chains, this new space can make a real micro impact, and you will integrate within the village ... a win-win for everyone!

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In Sende, we moved a step forward and created our grow.rs program which teaches coliving newbies and locals the whole process of launching a small business from scratch based on the learnings from digital nomads who stayed at our place.

When carefully executed, this tiny business can bring 1-3 monthly salaries for its founders. We use this program to help young people launch coliving projects and to bring people back to our local village permanently.

(Social) entrepreneurship is a straightforward solution. If one has an income, this person can choose a place to live.

But coliving spaces can do even more.

One digital nomad who chooses to work from the village is not a typical “white sox with sandals and a camera” tourist. These are the ones brave enough to pack their life and work in a backpack and travel the world. But there are also different types of digital nomads. There are those who only care about making money from their dropshipping business, and there are other ones with other values who care about different causes (and not just their income).

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This second group will more likely be a more longer term and committed resident. They are the type of guest that is a curious world traveler who cares about people, nature, and cultural differences. Your small rural coliving space will not be perfect, but they know that, and still, they will come. These nomads feel good to support your village project, and they feel even better if they can directly contribute to the cause.

We have discovered a simple way of organising these kinds of contributions from nomads in your space. We use one online board where we have listed the needs of the village and the needs of our space. Any nomad can take a “need” to work on. One of these boards is called “Difficult Problems,” where thinkers can sit and find outside of the box solutions.

Julien from Canada, Johannes from Germany, and Ovi from the US figured it out how to cross high-speed internet over the valley with deep forest terrain. Often these solutions are solved when different profiles match.

When you scale this, you can see that your whole village becomes smart or technological (if there is a need), or friendlier just because you crowdsourced their problems with people who can solve them. And they want to work on them because digital nomads who care like challenges.

One small coliving space is not just for digital nomads. It’s the place where you can also organise concerts, events, intensive training programs, hackathons, or any other event that seems like a fit for the whole concept.

A single event can generate decent economic and community impact in a week for all locals.

But you will now say: ‘Hey, but this impact is good for this village, but we’re only talking about around 30 people’. Yes, but there are thousands of villages (only in Europe) with less than 30 inhabitants seeking the same kind of economic and cultural renewal. That’s why we are starting our ‘Download Sende’ programme where people from all over the world will be able to read about how to start their own small coliving space that can completely transform the lives of their residents and of the local villagers.

This program will be our contribution to scaling this model around the planet. Instead of scaling our business, we decided to scale our impact. We are even building our second Sende location in Portugal by using the ‘Download Sende’ blueprint and principles.

A coliving space is not just a big house with enough beds and a big garden. That is just a property. What makes coliving work is the people and everything that happens inside that house, and you can make miracles with this one-of-a-kind opportunity.

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