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 thus had the opportunity to learn about the current situation and story of a particular farm, which was a valuable insight for them that we will build on in future project meetings.
