Kufunda Learning Village: Building Community with Movement Medicine in an African Sanctuary, with Maaianne Knuth
Since founding the Kufunda Learning Village [https://www.kufunda.org/] in Zimbabwe in 2002, Maaianne Knuth has undertaken a profound journey into the heart of collective healing.
Born of Danish and Zimbabwean parents, Maaianne wanted to create a sanctuary that would support Zimbabweans — especially women and youth — to reclaim the depth of their brilliance, wisdom and sense of belonging.
Nestling amid granite boulders and msasa woodlands on the site of her parents' farm, Kufunda has since emerged as a beacon of biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf-inspired progressive education, and transformative programmes to nurture leadership, healing, and resilience.
In this episode, Maaianne speaks about the hard-won lessons she has learned in following her call to support rural Zimbabweans to undertake a "journey of remembering who we are and what we have."
"Within a few years, we realized we have to live it. We have to be in the remembering. We have to be in the waking up to what it is to create healthy community," Maaiaane says. "And I think the work of the community is: How can we support each one to become more fully who they are?"
Maaiaane shares about the moments of crisis Kufunda has faced as echoes of Zimbabwe's collective trauma patterns erupted among participants. She also describes how meditation and the School of Movement Medicine [https://schoolofmovementmedicine.com/] dance practices she studied with Ya'Acov and Susannah Darling Khan helped shift old stories and open intuitive channels.
"It is actually a portal to keep connected to the future arising through us in each moment," Maaianne says. "So the past isn't holding onto us and our unconscious, but it becomes material out of which the new can be born."
Maaianne also describes profoundly moving scenes of how Movement Medicine helped rural Zimbabwean women reconnect with an archetypal sense of queenly power and splendour — and how this process helped her dissolve limiting scripts subtly internalised in her own system.
This episode offers a potent distillation of the embodied wisdom Maaianne has earned through decades of community-building experience. It also provides inspiring insights into the many forms in which collective healing can mend frayed connections and build a more luminous world.
"It's really to be hosting each other into a shared remembering of our dignity, of our grace, of our gifts." Maaianne says. "We have to be willing to embrace someone — ourselves included — in our wounding as well as in our light."
Coming up at the Pocket Project:
Register for Phase 1 of the Resilience Program [https://pocketproject.org/resilience-program/]: Become part of a global network committed to nurturing resilience, coherence, and healing across societal spaces in this practice-based training.
Further Resources:
Kufunda Learning Village [https://www.kufunda.org/]
LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/kufunda-village]
Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/kufunda.org]
Instagram [http://www.instagram.com/kufundalearningvillage/]
About Maaianne Knuth:
Maaianne is the co-founder of Kufunda Learning Village, a learning center and eco-village in Zimbabwe dedicated to cultivating locally rooted pathways to community self-reliance. At Kufunda, communities engage their own imagination, collaboration, and cultural wisdom to meet challenges in education, health, and land stewardship.
Together with villagers from across Zimbabwe, Kufunda has: Founded a Waldorf-inspired school serving over 140 children from surrounding communities, where learning with head, heart, and hands is foundational; deepened into biodynamic farming, working alongside local farmers to restore relationships with the soil; hosted transformative programs for women, men, and youth — nurturing leadership, healing, and community resilience.
At the heart of it all is a living commitment to learning our way into the futures we long for. Maaianne is also a teacher of Movement Medicine, a conscious dance practice that supports people in becoming more whole — in service of a more just and beautiful world.
Maaianne has facilitated multi-stakeholder processes and participatory leadership programmes across Africa and internationally, drawing on the Art of Hosting, embodied practice, and over two decades of learning at the intersection of community healing, cultural reclamation, and collective becoming. She holds a master's degree from Copenhagen Business School and earlier co-founded Pioneers of Change, a global learning community for young changemakers. She lives between Zimbabwe and Cape Town.
