On Challenges and Innovations

• What challenges do you foresee in the implementation of community-based learning?

The biggest challenge is selecting the right participants and future trainers/facilitators. 

We usually get many applications for these projects, most from talented and well-intentioned people. We must review all the applications, do background research on their organizations, and filter those that can effectively learn, teach, and activate a community of learners.

Then, the application of learning and organisation of community activities is also challenging. We must ensure that the project is a win-win for facilitators and learners and that the knowledge effectively stays in the community. 

Another challenge is the project legacy: how can the results and findings be helpful in the future for us and other VET organizations working with sustainability? This is something we are always very concerned about.

• Are there any innovative approaches or methods CommunityCloth is introducing to address these challenges?

Firstly, the community learning methodology is not usual in the craft sector, where most training is done one-to-one or one-to-many. Here we have a situation where the new trainers will be “guardians” of knowledge in their communities and train in combined logics of one-to-one and one-to-few. To support the implementation in the communities, we will co-design a set of learning activities to deliver to the new trainers/facilitators.

Secondly, we are creating a community of practice where our trainers and experts will follow up with the new facilitators in the pilot programme in the communities. Everyone involved in the project will be in touch: we will meet each other in the Porto’s programme, and the online platform prepared by our partners, Smuss Studio, will allow for permanent contact between participants, trainers and experts. We expect to have a strong, interconnected group that will support future initiatives. 

Regarding the project legacy, we usually collect data throughout the project duration, which allows us to prepare more informed proposals for future financing of our projects. To make knowledge more easily accessible, we usually develop learning content, such as technical workbooks, that are free and widely disseminated through the project website and the Saber Fazer platform.

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• Why is this project implemented between Cyprus and Portugal? What are the cross-border connections?

Barbot Bernardo and Saber Fazer first met on a different project. We clearly share a similar vision and ethos regarding art and culture and European funding. 

For this project, we pretended to explore local and international experiences to offer a more accurate European perspective regarding the state of the art in urban agroecology and natural fibres and dyes production, community intervention, education and technology usage in both countries. It will be fun to understand how this will actually happen. We also decided to include a Romanian participant, who has great potential and can contribute to the project findings regarding this broader European perspective. 

The results of this cooperation will also inform better ways of establishing diverse learning networks for farm-to-cloth and community development activities, something we intend to explore in future, bigger-scale projects.

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