people – IEPS

Meeting with international partners of the SOFARM project in Krakow

The next meeting of the international partners of the project "SOFARM - Supporting Social and Inclusive Farms" took place on 5. and 6 September in Krakow, Poland. At this meeting, we jointly finalized the Summary Report, which maps the situation of social farms in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Poland and Germany, and now the report only needs to be translated into local languages. Furthermore, under the guidance of our Slovak partner Druživa, we went through the collected case studies, which will serve as an example of good practice for other social farms that are, for example, still in their beginnings and want to be inspired abroad. As part of this, we have agreed on the necessary adjustments and should complete the entire catalogue during October. We will publish everything on our project website https://sofarmerasmus.eu/. During the afternoon programme we also had a workshop led by the host organisation ARID from Krakow on the training modules, where we refined how this output will look like. These modules will educate farmers on marketing tools to increase sustainability and financial stability of farms. The next day we visited the Brothers of Mercy Foundation in Konary near Krakow, which serves as a social farm. It's a place full of flowers, meadows and orchards, and the way it looks is also due to the work of people

Kick-off meeting of the SoFarm – Supporting Social and Inclusive Agriculture project

On 15th and 16th November 2022, the Erasmus+ project "So Farm - Support of Social and Inclusive Farming" held its kick off meeting at the Impact Hub in Prague. The aim of the project, which is financially supported by the Erasmus+ programme, is to gain and exchange experience in the development of social farms and, last but not least, to increase awareness of social farm entrepreneurship as such. The meeting was attended by all foreign project partners from Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Italy. For the Czech Republic, IEPS is involved in the project as an experienced creator of educational outputs and organisation named SoFarm that supports local social farmers. At the kick-off meeting, the individual partners presented their organisation and planned the different phases of the project together. In particular, we discussed the design of the first deliverable, the Condition paper, which will aim to map the situation of social farms in each country through workshops and interviews with experts, including identifying the challenges faced by each country. This initial survey of social farms should be the starting point for further outputs, which will be case studies, educational materials and short videos. During the second day of the meeting, there was space for a visit to a social farm, namely the Community Garden Pastviny z.s., which employs socially disadvantaged people. The foreign partners