How critical is the EU funding?

To offer insight into the vision and work behind CommunityCloth, we’re introducing a Q&A series featuring Miguel Barbot and Alice Bernardo of Barbot Bernardo, the project's lead coordinators. Throughout the series, they will share their perspectives on sustainable textiles, natural dyeing practices, and community-driven learning, while reflecting on the project’s objectives, challenges, and wider significance.
Published:
March 27, 2025

How essential is EU funding to the development, reach, and long-term impact of the CommunityCloth project, particularly in enabling innovation, community empowerment, and wider access to training?

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At Barbot Bernardo, we firmly believe that European Funding is the perfect way to finance experiences that lead to a visible improvement in craft education: it allows us to, in a straightforward way, implement and test the ideas that arise during our everyday activities as vocational education and training providers. 

Funding is also a magnificent tool to finance critical knowledge production with the potential to have a significant impact, but hard to finance “in the market”. 

A good example is our GatewayCrafts project: the Flax and Linen production e-learning course, with hundreds of international users by the end of the project, is very expensive to produce and difficult to monetize without funding, but its environmental impact is incredible. Suppose just a few dozen learners start producing linen. In that case, we have the beginning of local fibre production value chains, precisely what is needed to transition textiles. 

Having this funding for CommunityCloth is an excellent opportunity to test more structured methodologies, blending straightforward training and the trainers’ moments with digital communication tools. Also, it will allow us to invest in research and go through all the collected data, with the sole motive of adding a comprehensive learning programme evaluation methodology. This data will be crucial to understand the project’s impact and potential and better prepare future programmes. The evaluation results will be made available for everyone interested in replicating the project community learning methodology.

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