COFO founder · Palermo, Italy
Marco Traina
I’m an entrepreneur, Innovation Manager and community builder focused on exploring new models of sustainable living, travelling and local development. I’m the founder of BeetCommunity, a pioneering coliving and community project born in Palermo in 2018. Through Beet, I’ve been exploring how coliving can go beyond accommodation and become a way to connect international remote workers and digital nomads with local communities, creating meaningful relationships, shared experiences and a stronger sense of belonging. I’m also the founder of Italia Nomad Fest, an international gathering exploring the relationship between digital nomadism, local communities and the future of work and travel, and co-founder of COFO – Coliving Founders, a global network of independent coliving founders created around a simple idea: we can grow better together. Alongside these projects, I’m CEO and Project Manager of Beet Srl Benefit, an innovation company working with entrepreneurs, companies and public administrations on project development, digital solutions, communication and strategic consulting. At the centre of my work is the concept of the temporary citizen. I believe we can move beyond tourism based mainly on consumption and create models where people temporarily living in a place become part of its community: sharing knowledge and resources, building relationships and contributing positively to the territory that hosts them. Through COFO and my other projects, I want to explore how coliving, entrepreneurship, innovation and global communities can become tools for local development, connecting people, founders, businesses, institutions and places, and transforming places to stay into places to belong.
Why I chose COFO
I decided to be part of COFO because it grew out of something I experienced firsthand as a coliving founder: the sense of loneliness that often comes with building and running a coliving. I wanted to connect with other coliving founders around the world, people doing the same work, facing similar challenges, learning from similar experiences and sharing a common vision of what coliving can become. In our coliving spaces, we talk about community every day. We create it, nurture it and encourage our guests to be part of it. But I believe that, as founders, we should ask ourselves the same question: how can we truly build and inspire a sense of community within our spaces if we don’t experience what it means to belong to one ourselves? I didn’t simply want to find a community. I wanted to create the kind of space I wish I had found when I started my own journey: a place where coliving founders can connect, exchange knowledge, support one another, collaborate and grow together. For me, COFO is about practising the same values we bring into our colivings, turning loneliness into connection, shared experience into collective knowledge, and collaboration into new opportunities. Because before building communities for others, I believe we should know what it feels like to truly be part of one.
What coliving means to me
“turning a place to stay into a place to belong, where home is created through human connections and global communities become part of the local communities that welcome them.”