ASAVM - Associazione sentieri Alta Val Malone

“Sentieri Alta Val Malone - Trails of the Upper Malone Valley" ODV is a non profit organization that works to maintain and recover mountain trails in the rural areas of Valli di Lanzo and Canavese in North Western Italy. Our vision is to contribute to a sustainable future for people who live in remote mountain areas, by reconnecting the territory both physically and socially -by adopting a participatory approach in building a common strategy for sustainable local development in our valley.

This volunteer organization was established in 2015 with the aim of preserving the landscape heritage of the Upper Malone Valley area. Among the founding members are representatives of all the associations in the valley and also volunteers from the neighboring municipalities, in order to ensure a cohesive and shared development of the activity in the area concerned. In its first eight years of activity, the association has reached the remarkable number of 700 members. Among them are 60 volunteers active in trail maintenance, who in the period 2015-2019 provided more than 15000 hours of volunteer work dedicated to the restoration and re-opening of trails. During the last three years (2020 – 2022) we reached 5000+ hours of volunteer work per year, also thanks to two social inclusion projects regarding vulnerable people that are receiving the nationa inclusion income. In 2019, Legambiente\’s caravan of the Alps report awarded a green flag to our association as an example of innovative practices and experiences of environmental and cultural quality of mountain territories. The motivation for the prestigious award reads: Val Malone, a local development project that, step by step, builds \”paths to go far.\” Initially we did not perceive the need to digitalise because manual work had taken all our time and resources, but now instead the time has come to evolve the association to take a step forward and improve ourselves more and more. Now the need has come to develop this field and update our association, which is now well established at the local level, to a community-based enterprise that can promote economic development and cooperation among the local actors. Our idea is to make our trails with all the work done over the years known to as many people as possible through the use of digitalisation. We would like to put our trails on the platforms so that this little-known part of Piedmont will be known.