O Community
Reconnecting people with nature through community and wisdom traditions.
The circle
The Circle as a symbol.
Inspired by Sápmi and the wider Nordic wisdom traditions, we hold the circle as a protector: of life, of death, of the cycles that carry one into the other. It is also the shape people take when they come together again as a village.
To draw a circle is to decide what is worth protecting.
What we do
O Community supports reconnection hubs. Farms and retreat centres that specialise in reconnecting people with nature through community and traditional practice, across ecology, culture and spirituality.
We represent several such hubs, and we work to grow both their number and their craft: better hubs, and better facilitators.
O Community is built to be excellent at facilitation. Holding groups, running programmes, supporting leadership teams and individuals. Rather than at administration, funding and partnership-building alone. The practice comes first; the structure serves it.
Where O Community comes from
O Community comes from a recognition: that it is time to reconnect with the circle, and sit around the fire together.
We believe that it is of vital importance to form a circle around what is worth protecting and supporting. Physical places that facilitate reconnection — with nature, with each other, and with ourselves.
Society has drifted. And a growing number of people are arriving at the same realiztion: that we need to reconnect with wisdom traditions, with the village, with land stewardship, and with the parts of our traditions, culture and history that are worth carrying forward. At the centre of all of it stands reconnection.
What we see
Society needs reconnection and there great facilitators and places offering it.
But the great facilitators, farms and retreat centres offering real reconnection — are spending too much time hustling with everything that surrounds it. Administration. Capability building. Running programmes with public stakeholders. Applying for grants.
The result is that many of the people doing this work wear out, and can thus offer less or poorer quality facilitation.
Reconnection hubs need to be run by people who are full of energy and empowered — free to focus on the facilitation itself. That is what we exist to support.
What we want these places to be
Sanctuaries for reconnection through community. Places that bring together the best of wisdom tradition, cultural heritage, ecological stewardship and the parts of our history worth bridging into modern ways.
We support the people who specialize in that bridging — carrying ancient wisdom traditions into modern methodology and technology.
Why we exist
To build resilience from the ground up.
Involving people and community in building knowledge around local resilience, localisation and holistic systems — integrating humans with nature, and learning to thrive without depending so heavily on global extractive systems.
To build peace from the inside out.
Gathering people around the fire. Cultivating a peaceful state of being, internally and with others, through community methodologies, through participation in stewardship, and through the practice of wisdom traditions.
In this approach the world can see peace.
To be a bridge.
Connecting wisdom practitioners, elders and indigenous wisdom keepers with society at large, and creating programmes that support the young and the old.
To be a sandbox.
A workshop, a communal place for human expression — and, in essence, for reconnecting.
Rekindling the village fire
For most of our history, humanity has functioned in villages — smaller integrated neighbourhoods and tribes, where you see the effect of your actions, where you matter to your neighbour, where people show up for each other and share both the burden and the joy.
It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to raise food, build resilience, to protect wisdom traditions, and to work out together what is worth protecting — integrating elders and the young, and people who are not necessarily like you, through communal practice and through simple work done side by side.
We believe the medicine of experiencing coherent community is essential for humanity to move forward. Nature-based community is how people reconnect: with themselves, with each other, and with nature. And from there it becomes natural to turn toward wisdom traditions — the timeless knowledge.
We want to be a place that makes space for those people, and a place that experiments with village-like structures, permanent and impermanent — working alongside local people and authorities to pave the way for a more connected way of living.
Timeline
Our history
2024
O invitation. We sent out an invitation to co-create this movement.
2025
Forty two people joined a five-month process, online and offline, to co-create the founding principles of O Community, and experiment with how . It became the playbook, completed in May 2025. Read here.
June 2025
Tharald Nustad, owner of Østre Dal Gård and grandson of its founder Olav Selvaag, invited us to experiment with the vision of community at the farm.
That became a longer stay. We cleared three generations of the place having been a family holiday retreat and began turning it back into a working farm: chickens, land under cultivation, a greenhouse running, a playground for the children, and the slow work of renovating and safeguarding the old houses.
2026
Preparing the farm for retreats and hospitality. Applying for programmes in collaboration with government and local authorities to involve youth and elders in the work, and programmes bringing experienced craftsmen, indigenous wisdom keepers together with young aspiring artists, builders and facilitators. The first programmes are about to launch, and the first retreat is booked for 2027, subject to permissions.
August 2026
We open the sauna and wellbeing station to local people: nervous system regulation, community, and a first taste of what this place is. The campfire is built. Volunteers are helping it come to life.
O Community has existed for six years, previously under the name Bloom, and went through a rebirth with a new name spring 2026 to carry the O vision forward.
Bloom already carried the vision of reconnecting people with nature, but through a different vehicle: co-owned equipment and impermanent hubs. The NGO owned facilitation gear — tents, saunas, sound systems, massage tables, creative tools — shared between facilitators running experiences, conferences, festivals and retreats focusing on reconnection.
That gear has since been donated to Third Place, to continue benefitting the community and enable the NGO to fully focus on supporting permanent places in the vision we hold today: reconnecting people with nature through community and wisdom traditions, working through physical reconnection hubs — farms and permanent places that cultivate long-term resilience from the ground up, and peace from the inside out.
You can read the original playbook, completed in May 2025This link is not active yet.The story of the farm
Many of the old houses here originally stood in Setesdal, raised between the 1300s and the 1800s. In the 1960s they were moved to this site to be restored and protected, because their previous owners could no longer care for them. The man who brought them here was Olav Selvaag, and he assembled the place much like a museum. It is very well cared for and carries tons of inspiration about historical craftsmanship, resilience, culture and everyday practices.
It became a holiday place for his family, and later passed to his daughter Cecilie and her husband Peik Nustad. Cecilie was a significant philanthropist and the founder of Karibu; during the anti-apartheid struggle, the farm housed people connected to that work. Amongst other things Østre Dal gård has served as a sanctuary for Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of the anti apartheid movement, which is one of the rare historical examples we have from winning a battle of oppression. He gathered leaders in this farm to lay strategy for that battle, and relax to gain strength in his important work.
In 2009, Tharald Nustad took over. He spent the years since building impact investing companies and working with systems change, without much time to give this place — until 2025, when our organisation came in as stewards with an invitation to foster systems change from the ground up.
What we aim for here
- To establish homes as a klyngetun — a cluster farmstead — where we can practise and demonstrate living in community
- To rebuild the old barn, a thousand square metres, into a cultural gathering place with workshops, innovation tools, machines and a music studio — fostering wellbeing and mental health through programmes, among them support for Sámi artists making work
- To regenerate the land, and in time, when the timing is right, perhaps to build an ecological village here
Our home: Østre Dal Gård
Our main base is Østre Dal Gård in Nittedal, where we are building a community reconnection hub and destination.
Here we live the vision rather than describe it: going deep in our own specialisation, offering reconnection to those who come, and demonstrating for society what a connected life can actually look like.