On Community Impact

On Community Impact :

• How do you envision CommunityCloth impacting local communities?

What long-term changes are you hoping to inspire within the communities involved?

What role do you see participants playing in educating their communities after the training?

CommunityCloth aims to create a network of educators to implement programmes fostering sustainable urban practices. This network will serve as a crucial resource for disseminating knowledge and supporting the establishment of communal farms, thereby promoting economic growth and job creation within urban communities.

By providing educators and communities with practical educational tools and knowledge, CommunityCloth will lay the foundation for more sustainable, diverse and inclusive urban farming projects, creating new opportunities to bridge the urban-rural divide in textile production and promote local small-scale textile manufacturing.

We think these projects' impact is something very “long-term”. Of course, we will see the results almost immediately. Still, we should think of CommunityCloth as a seed that will grow into something exponential, where each new trainer is a “nod” in a growing network of roots of knowledge. 

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• Why did you specifically select a gendered target group, i.e., what is the purpose behind selecting to target female participants? Is it to strengthen/empower females towards entrepreneurship or independent community learning?

The answer to this question is not as straightforward as one might think. 

The project idea started with the notion that we would like to empower women to control the fibre production process fully. Most of Saber Fazer’s customers are women; we can say they are the “end users” of the fibre production process and are very present in the last stages of the value chain, especially in small-scale manufacturing (combing, carding, spinning, felting). But if we go back in the value chain, the fieldwork is still dominated by men. You don’t see many women shearing sheep, right?

The project rationale is to bridge the urban-rural divide in fibre production and foster agroecological practices in an urban context, where most farms and allotments are not gender diverse. We also think that the economic potential allowed by the diversification of cultures, intercropping mixing plants for fibre or dyes and food can be very interesting for job creation and social integration of minorities, youngsters and the target groups we selected in the proposal stage. 

Of course, we are limited to two areas; this is a small-scale project focused on testing a community learning methodology that Saber Fazer already explored locally and will work as a pilot for other, bigger-scale projects, where we will explore these topics and broaden the intervention to different stages of the fibre production value chain.

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