WE BELIEVE PLACES MATTER

We are a regenerative think tank and innovation studio. We partner with visionary organizations and communities to unlock territorial potential, proving that development honoring culture and fostering wellbeing isn't just possible—it's more resilient.

Our Story

In 2010, while working on the UNESCO restoration of the Vittorio Garatti School of Art in Havana, Paola confronted a fundamental question that would reshape her entire career: who has the right to shape the future of a territory?

As an architect and urbanist, she had been trained to design spaces. But Havana taught her something that universities rarely address: spatial inequality is not accidental. The abandonment of rural territories, the decay of historic centers, and the displacement of communities are not natural processes. They are the result of economic models that concentrate resources in metropolitan areas while extracting value from everywhere else.

The question evolved: what if we could prove that another model of territorial development is not only possible, but more resilient? What if places currently dismissed as "remote" could become laboratories for the economic and social innovations Europe desperately needs?

This is why Inesto was founded in 2020, after more than 15 years of field research across Mediterranean territories. It was established not as another architecture studio designing buildings, but as a think tank and innovation studio focused on territorial justice—proving that regenerative development that honors local culture and empowers marginalized communities creates more economic value than extractive models ever could.

WORKING WITH

Our Mission

Our Mission is to co-design and implement regenerative projects that create measurable economic, social, and cultural value. We act as a bridge between strategic vision and on-the-ground implementation, ensuring that local communities are the true architects of their own renewal.

Our Vision

A Mediterranean network of thriving territories where heritage fuels innovation, rural areas are recognized as essential to European resilience, women lead transformation, community wellbeing measures success, and regenerative business models are standard.

Communities prospering through unique identities rather than despite them. Spatial justice as practical framework, not aspiration. Mediterranean as laboratory Europe studies for its regenerative future.

MANIFESTO

Time is our most powerful tool for transformation. We use experiences as catalysts to experiment with new paradigms for community development and territorial regeneration. Deadlines don't constrain us—they motivate us to face uncertainty, push creative boundaries, and rediscover what's possible when we reimagine how territories can thrive.

Our concept of experiences allows us to create perfect-fit solutions for partners while managing continuous flows of people and energies across Mediterranean communities. We don't aim to leave permanent marks that disrupt local ecosystems. Instead, we create new pathways—economic opportunities, social connections, cultural exchanges—that communities can follow long after specific projects end. Every residency, workshop, and collaborative intervention opens possibilities rather than imposing predetermined outcomes.

We believe the most transformative territorial regeneration happens at intersections—where diverse perspectives, expertise, and lived experiences converge. Each project we undertake is a composition created from all stakeholders' inputs, from municipal leaders to local artisans, from corporate partners to community elders, from young entrepreneurs to traditional knowledge holders.

Collaboration isn't just our methodology—it's our theory of change. By working together through challenges rather than imposing external solutions, we build the trust and confidence that allows communities to lead their own transformation. The tensions that emerge when different worldviews meet aren't obstacles to manage but opportunities to discover approaches no single stakeholder could have imagined alone

We can work and live anywhere in the globalized economy. We choose to go rural because we recognize that territories currently dismissed as marginal hold keys to Europe's regenerative future. These are places where ancient resilience strategies—diversified local economies, kinship networks, cultural continuity—offer blueprints for the climate-uncertain, demographically-challenged world we're all entering.

Our conscious choice to focus on forgotten and underrated areas isn't charity or nostalgia. It's strategic. We create sustainable flows of energies, people, and income for communities that extractive development models abandoned. We prove that rural and peripheral territories aren't problems requiring urban solutions—they're laboratories where innovation happens when we honor what already exists rather than replacing it with imported templates.

Every territorial regeneration project begins with immersion and deep listening—not just to stated needs but to stories, dreams, intuitions, and unspoken goals that reveal what communities truly value. We listen to what's said in formal stakeholder meetings and what's shared over coffee in village squares. We listen to municipal development plans and to what elderly residents remember about how things used to work. We listen with both analytical rigor and intuitive openness.

This deep listening allows us to co-create tailored solutions that blend existing territorial context, our methodological expertise, and the collective vision of impact we want to generate together. We don't arrive with predetermined answers. We arrive with questions that help communities articulate futures they want to build.

Creativity is our driving force for territorial regeneration because the most innovative solutions emerge when we approach complex challenges with artistic and poetic vision alongside analytical frameworks. We promote integration of different disciplines—architecture and economics, anthropology and technology, traditional crafts and contemporary design—because we believe every territorial intervention can be approached as creative practice.

Sharing time and space with diverse perspectives allows us to explore collaboration possibilities that rigid professional boundaries would prevent. When urban planners work alongside rural artisans, when corporate strategists share meals with community organizers, when researchers collaborate with local youth—we create conditions where more interesting visions emerge. Creativity isn't decoration we add after the serious work is done. It's how we see connections others miss and imagine futures others can't yet envision.

We create spaces where people can bring their worlds and mix them with others in ways that generate mutual transformation. Living and working together with professionals from different backgrounds, geographies, and life stages offers new perspectives and enrichment that brief consultancy visits never achieve. Our co-living and co-working initiatives aren't just accommodation—they're methodology.

We facilitate deep connections with locals to create temporary cultural hubs where people learn to coexist across difference and generate new ideas for more just, sustainable, beautiful worlds. Digital nomads learn from traditional craftspeople. Corporate executives understand community organizing. Young entrepreneurs grasp why heritage preservation matters economically. These exchanges happen when we slow down enough to actually live in territories we're trying to help regenerate.

We believe transformative territorial change occurs through deeply personal participation where everyone's expertise matters. Everyone is invited to contribute—not as passive recipients of services but as active co-creators bringing valuable competencies. We make regeneration real through actions that engage hearts as well as minds, recognizing that lasting change requires emotional investment alongside strategic planning.

We believe in collective capacity and how everyone can participate in creating more value than any expert-driven model could generate alone. Every experience we facilitate is a journey where participants share competencies as service for collective good while rediscovering inner talents they didn't know they possessed. The woman who thinks she's "just a housewife" becomes recognized as a cultural heritage expert. The young person dismissed as unemployed becomes a social entrepreneur. Sharing competencies transforms how communities see themselves.

Trust is the foundation of everything we do in territorial regeneration. We maintain clarity about our goals, methods, and how we work to create benefits and impact for all stakeholders—not just those who can pay. We understand that building trusting relationships requires time, transparency, and demonstrated commitment to community wellbeing over extractive profit.

This warmth we cultivate through trustworthy relationships is profoundly transformative. Communities that have been promised development and abandoned by countless consultants need to see that we're different before they'll genuinely engage. Trust isn't built through presentations—it's built through showing up consistently, honoring commitments, centering community voices in decision-making, and proving that our success depends on their flourishing

It's simple, yet radical in professional contexts that often reward aggressive competition over collaborative care: be kind, always, with everyone, and even with yourself. Kindness isn't weakness or lack of rigor—it's the ethical foundation for regenerative practice that creates more value than it extracts.

Kindness means respecting local knowledge as much as academic expertise. Kindness means designing solutions that work for communities rather than imposing what works for our methodologies. Kindness means recognizing when we're wrong and changing course. Kindness means treating ourselves with the same compassion we extend to others, because sustainable territorial transformation requires sustainable practitioners.

This is our secret ingredient for territorial regeneration that conventional development models miss entirely. We aim to create measurable impact, ensure financial sustainability, generate positive changes that compound over time—and share genuine love for the work we do and the communities we serve. We're open to receiving as much as giving, understanding that regeneration is mutual transformation rather than one-way service delivery.

We make our table longer rather than guarding scarce seats. We build bridges without limitations between urban and rural, between tradition and innovation, between global networks and local rootedness. We create a better world to live in not through sacrifice but through collective happiness that proves another way of working and living is possible. When municipal leaders, community members, corporate partners, and our team all experience joy in collaboration—that's when we know we've created conditions for lasting transformation.

OUR TEAM

Inesto's team combines expertise in architecture, urban planning, social innovation, and community development. Led by award-winning urbanist Paola Balduzzi, we partner with Politecnico Milano, UNSW Sydney, and leading European institutions to advance territorial regeneration science. 


Our network spans 20+ expert collaborators, 5 university partners, and 12+ municipal governments across the Mediterranean, creating Europe and MENA's most dynamic regenerative development ecosystem.

FOUNDER - CEO AND ASSOCIATION FOUNDER

Paola Balduzzi

She is a cultural designer who works in the urban regeneration field and social innovation. She imagine new participatory scenarios and facilitate the co-designing of projects by involving the communities.

She founded Inesto to restore energies in rural areas and to find a work-life balance. Transversal thinking allows her to see new scenarios that she  design with creativity, ethics and sustainability.

She facilitate generating a positive impact by creating beauty and working with kindness. 

She has been traveling following location independent lifestyle and  digital nomadism since 2016,mostly living in rural areas and getting involved into community projects.

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EU FUNDS & PROJECTS MANAGER

Vinicius Ramos

I’m a project writer, coordinator and non-formal facilitator, specialized in experiential learning methods for international groups, mainly about the personal growth and empowerment of young people. I took part in many mobilities projects including a 4 months Leonardo project in Ireland and more than 15 Erasmus + training courses focused on the topic of personal development, coaching methods and facilitation tools for youth workers.

My passion for conflict resolution makes me experiment non formal activities -that I implement in international projects- about personal and interpersonal expression through art and movement as a way of self-develop. In these activities we dig deeper in sounds and our connection with them, the way they make us express freely and without conditionings.

You’ll find me either developing new projects or taking care of sending participants to new mobilities experiences abroad. When I’m not in the office, it means that I’m somewhere around coordinating/facilitating a new project!

My mission is to create life-long and authentic connections with a person and itself, with another human being, with the community, with nature and with the world.

Retreat project manager

Virginia Bailon

ASSOCIATION COFOUNDER, MBA AND VICEPRESIDENT

Stefano Mangiarotti

Sales Manager with excellent technical skills and extensive experience in world markets. Strategist determined and creative thinker with focus on results. 

Dedication to customers and a habit of building long-term profitable relationships. Experience in managing diverse teams. Positive, optimistic, and always up for the next adventure.

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COFOUNDER AND ASSOCIATION SECRETARY

Elisa Maria Lori

Project manager and climber, she is always sunny and with a smile ready to manage excel sheets, a new village or the next experience.

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ART PROJECT MANAGER

Gaia Camponi Benaglia

She is an Artist with a long experience in various pictorial techniques.

She designs and manages exhibition spaces for art exhibitions in the accurate, careful, and diligent execution of its tasks to obtain an extraordinary results without ever renouncing operational speed.

Her Careful dedication to the therapeutic approach of art as a means of meditative and harmonizing states for adults and children is at the heart of her work.

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RETREATS COORDINATOR

Alessandra Spano

Professional Chef of international experience, Mindful Educator. In my profession, I pursue the objective of promoting social, mental and physical health through Mindfulness.

Over the years I have undertaken many challenges and pursued different avenues of employment. I am a university graduate of Engineering and Architecture, and I have life experiences -from traveling and working

in many different countries over the years. My main purpose in life is to achieve self-sufficiency, live in a community of people that share values, and have a lifestyle that follows the rhythm of nature.

This idea brought me to different places in the world and to go through different experiences that helped me develop an awareness of others and the environment.

For over 10 years I have been matching imaginative and healthy recipes with the promotion of a mindful way of eating. 

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COFOUNDER ASSOCIATION

Sara Gandini

COFOUNDER ASSOCIATION AND FESTIVAL MANAGER

Leonardo Sias

COFOUNDER ASSOCIATION

Giuseppe A D'Angelo

Community Development Coordinator & Rural Regeneration

Ivan Ballesteros

With over 15 years of experience in European grant writing and project management, Ivan is a key member of the Inesto team. He has a proven track record of successfully securing funding from prestigious EU programs such as Horizon 2020, Erasmus+, and LIFE.

Ivan's in-depth knowledge of the various EU funding streams, from conceptualization to reporting, allows Inesto to pursue the most competitive opportunities. He has worked across sectors including sustainability, education, and rural development. His strong command of English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese further expands Inesto's reach into new markets and partnerships.

As Proposal Development Manager, Ivan works closely with Inesto's leadership to identify strategic funding alignments. He then guides project teams through the application process, ensuring proposals are finely tuned to meet each program's evaluation criteria. Having led numerous funded initiatives himself, Ivan brings invaluable expertise in transforming ideas into well-structured, impactful proposals that catch the attention of reviewers.

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PHOTOGRAFER AND PROJECT MANAGER

Stefano Laddomada

Graduated in Media Spaces at the University of Applied Sciences of Berlin, my background is in Photography and New Media. 

I expand my visual research every single day while I try to have a better understanding of the digital world.

Social media and clothes enthusiast.

I'm managing projects development in Sardegna, Sicilia and Galizia

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CSR and Corporate manager

Rebecca Zaccarini

ADVISORS

Meet all the people  and institutions who support us in building Inesto

Co-Director Creative Industries Lab POLIMI

Arianna Vignati



She’s been mentor for several start-up companies and she was also evaluator expert in the panel of InvestOrizon project (a project dedicated to the scouting of promises innovative start-up companies). She works with PoliHub, the Incubator of Politecnico di Milano and with business angels and investors for the scouting of innovative startups in the field of creative industries.

Discover more about here 

Business development Polihub

Sergio Pirotta

Business development leader, Mentor and Advisor helping Companies and Startup to reach their goals at POLIHUB.

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Project Manager and Consultant Tallinn Business Incubators

Nele Plutus

Nele has done business development and sales work for several start-ups, she enjoys generating new ideas, solving marketing and sales challenges, and conducting research projects.

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Business designer and cultural destination designer

Valentina D'Agata

She is a  business designer with more than 35 years of experience in business organization and management and professional careers.

She supports companies in imagining and designing the structure behind their business and helps the people improve the models, she aims to achieve a sustainable personal ecology.

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A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

Dear Future Partner,


When I was restoring Vittorio Garatti's School of Art in Havana, I learned something fundamental: buildings don't transform communities. Communities transform buildings. The architecture is just the container for human possibility.


I founded Inesto because I saw too many beautiful masterplans gathering dust while communities continued to empty. Too many consultants deliver reports without staying to see if anything has changed. Too many "sustainable" projects that sustained nothing but themselves.


As an architect and urbanist, I know spatial design is never neutral. Every territorial intervention either reinforces existing inequalities or challenges them. Every regeneration strategy either empowers local communities or displaces them. Every development model either creates conditions for human flourishing or optimizes for capital extraction.


Inesto exists because I believe—and we have proven—that territorial development centering community wellbeing, honoring cultural continuity, and empowering women's leadership is more profitable, more resilient, and more replicable than any extractive alternative.


We do things differently because we've lived the alternative. We've watched villages lose their last young families. We've seen heritage buildings collapse not from age, but from abandonment. We've witnessed the gap between what organizations say about impact and what communities actually experience.


That's why Inesto operates from within communities, not above them. Why do we measure cultural vitality with the same rigor as others measure profit? Why we're building AI technology to prove that community wellbeing is quantifiable, fundable, and essential to any serious sustainability strategy.


This isn't just business for me. Every project carries the weight of real families deciding whether to stay or leave, real traditions surviving or disappearing, real communities thriving or fading. When a mayor tells me "our children now see a future here," that's the metric that matters most.


If you're reading this, you probably share this urgency. You know that regeneration can't wait for perfect conditions. You understand that true leadership means creating more value than you extract. You're ready to prove that good business and community wellbeing aren't just compatible—they're inseparable.


Let's build that proof together.


Paola Balduzzi
Founder & CEO, Inesto
Architect, Researcher & Cultural Designer

PARTNERSHIP

WORK WITH US

We believe places matter. And we believe the people who shape them matter even more.


Inesto is a remote-first organization built on a culture of trust, intellectual curiosity, and a shared passion for creating meaningful change. We are a collective of architects, researchers, and strategists working on some of the most interesting regenerative challenges in the Mediterranean.


We are looking for kind, talented, and purpose-driven individuals to grow with us. While English is our working language, Italian is warmly welcomed, and any other language is a plus. If you are ready to do the best work of your life on projects that truly matter, we invite you to explore our open positions.


This is a key strategic role for a natural relationship-builder who can connect Inesto's unique value to the needs of visionary corporate and institutional partners.

  • What you'll do: You will identify and cultivate strategic partnerships, develop compelling proposals for our high-impact consulting and experiences, and drive the commercial growth that fuels our mission.

Who you are: You are a strategic thinker with a proven track record in B2B/B2G sales or partnerships, passionate about sustainability and social impact. You are an excellent communicator, comfortable engaging with C-level executives and public sector leaders.

This role is the engine of our non-profit impact. You will be responsible for securing the resources that allow our community projects and research initiatives to flourish.

  • What you'll do: You will identify and pursue grant opportunities (EU, national, private foundations), write compelling funding proposals, and manage relationships with funders. You will be our storyteller for the world of philanthropy.

Who you are: You have experience in fundraising or grant writing, with a deep understanding of the impact funding landscape. You are a meticulous writer and a creative strategist.

This role is for an organized and empathetic leader who can bring our complex territorial regeneration projects to life, from concept to completion.

  • What you'll do: You will manage project timelines, budgets, and deliverables, coordinating a diverse team of experts, local stakeholders, and international partners. You will be the main point of contact for our clients, ensuring excellence at every stage.

  • Who you are: You have a strong background in project management, ideally within architecture, urban planning, or social innovation. You thrive in complex environments and are skilled at facilitating collaboration.

Don't See Your Role?


We are always open to connecting with exceptional talent. If you believe your skills in communications, operations, community facilitation, or another field could contribute to our mission, please send a spontaneous application. Tell us what you are passionate about and how you envision your role at Inesto.


Send your CV to info@inesto.it

LET'S BUILD THE FUTURE, TOGETHER

Our story continues with every community we partner with. If your organization is ready to move beyond conventional development and create lasting, regenerative value, we invite you to start a conversation with us.

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