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 with disabilities who, together with therapists, take care of not only the greenery but also the animals as part of vocational rehabilitation. There are stables for horses, organic food and bee products, which you can buy in the local shop to support the rehabilitation of people with disabilities.
The meeting was attended by a representative of our partner organisation IEPS, and was partly held online. We are happy that the project continues to progress according to plan and we look forward to presenting the first finished results.
