For the fourth time, the partners of the project “SOFARM – Supporting Social and Inclusive Farms” met for an international meeting at the end of January, this time at the University of Kassel in Witzenhausen, located in central Germany in Hesse.
During the meeting we discussed all project deliverables with the project partners. In particular, we focused on the finalisation of the case studies, which are based on interviews with farmers and coordinated by the Slovak organisation Druživa. This was followed by a detailed discussion led by the Polish organisation ARID on the content of the training modules, which will focus on marketing and development of social farms. This was followed up with the planning of short training videos aimed at overcoming barriers and stereotypes for social enterprises. Finally, we discussed the dissemination of these outputs and the further development of the project website. At the end of the first day, we had an evaluation of the project’s progress so far, where we shared our impressions and satisfaction with the progress.
On the second day of the meeting we went to the social farm Gut Sambach in Mühlhausen. The interest of the Gut Sambach farm is to achieve the fullest possible integration of the disadvantaged into the outside world, and the aim is to make the environment sustainable and sensitive to the special needs of each person with a disability. The farm operates two homes for the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped. It also operates a bakery and café on the farm as a day centre. They also process meat and dairy products from farmed cows and pigs, and have a large spread of vegetables grown. Here we learnt a lot of useful information about how the farm works and integrates the disadvantaged into its daily running.
We are looking forward to the next and last project meeting, which will take place in September in Bovino, Italy.
