• The G100 is a co-creation group made up of 50 women and 50 men promoted by El Hueco (Soria), which promotes social innovation to remedy demographic imbalances in rural areas.
• The group has just presented a series of newly created projects to be developed in the towns included in the "Network of Welcoming Towns."

"Rethinking rurality." This is the formula with which some rural groups approach the task of promoting rural development. This is the case of G100 , a co-creation group made up of 50 women and 50 men, promoted by El Hueco , a Soria-based group that promotes social innovation as a tool to correct demographic imbalances in rural Spain.

Examples include computer training for young people who don't want to leave their villages, recruiting digital nomads for rural areas, creating "rural studies" scholarships for university students, and programs to attract migrant populations, specifically Sahrawis. These are some of the pilot projects to combat depopulation that the G100 has devised. More specifically, the projects will be developed within the "Network of Welcoming Villages . "

The projects have been in the making for several months, until their recent presentation on April 20 in Madrid. The initiatives presented are classified into five groups: Heritage, Culture, and Tourism; Teleworking and New Settlers; Sustainability, Energy, and Climate Change; Digital Economy; and Sahrawis.

Projects

A) Heritage, Culture, and Tourism – “ Enjoy Rural Working ” : The goal is to create active tourism experiences that make towns more attractive to digital nomads and remote workers. The project will first be implemented in Aledo (Murcia).

B) Teleworking – “Get your training in your town”: Creation of computer skills training scholarships for young people who want to stay in their towns and work remotely from them. The training courses respond to the job profiles needed by the companies participating in the project.

C) Sustainability - “Learning Community”: Its objective is to design and implement a practice-oriented Learning Community (LC) to promote the creation of Rural Energy Communities (RECs). The pilot project would be developed in Sarnago (Soria), Santa Ana la Real (Huelva), and Allo (Navarra).

D) Digital Economy – “Researching in Rurality”: an initiative to create a pool of research topics for theses, dissertations, or other academic activities related to the research and development needs of the localities in the Network of Welcoming Villages. The research topics would be offered to universities for all students. The project will be implemented first in Paredes de Nava (Palencia), Allo (Navarra), and Benarrabá (Málaga).

AND) Sahrawis:

• “Children of the Clouds”: Design and implementation of a project to attract young Sahrawi people to the network's villages for six-month stays, enabling them to develop pastoralism as a professional activity while learning innovative practices in the sector.
• “Paredes Saharauis” : A project to attract young Sahrawi people to the network's villages for six-month stays, enabling them to pursue housing renovation and construction as a professional activity. It will be implemented in Paredes de Nava, Palencia.
• "Bootcamp 53": a project that aims to equip young Sahrawis between the ages of 18 and 35, living in refugee camps in Algeria, with computer programming skills so they can enter the international IT labor market. The pilot project will be carried out in the Sahrawi camps.