On Project Goals and Sustainability

• How does CommunityCloth support sustainable practices in wool processing and natural dyeing?

What are some specific challenges you anticipate in promoting sustainable practices, and how do you plan to address them?

What was the overall motivation and background for this project? What prompted the community learning approach through your experience of practicing natural dyeing & wool processing?

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CommunityCloth is about learning, innovation, community and… textile production. In 2023, we designed this project having as a starting point previous projects where we explored the topic of community learning in a very rural area in North-Eastern Portugal.

The project will promote new models for urban farm-to-cloth training programmes, creating alternative learning curricula and awareness for healthy agroecological ecosystems.

Agroecology is still a rural topic, despite experiences with food production in urban contexts.  With increasingly crowded cities, it is important to test new urban farming models providing more than food and allowing more effective management of resources. These new farming models will also reinforce connections between rural and urban ecosystems and provide knowledge that will help transition processes in rural areas.

An agroecological ecosystem integrates ecological principles with agricultural practices creating a environment mimicking natural ecosystems. It prioritises biodiversity by utilising diversified crop rotations and intercropping, agroforestry and animal production to enhance soil fertility, manage pests, and promote natural pollination. It also focus on soil health through cover cropping and organic matter management, ensuring long-term productivity and resilience. 

Fibre production is still underexplored in cities but can have a fundamental role in diversifying soil usage and creating jobs associated with urban farming. In addition, the capacitation for new models for sustainable textile production, including alternative dyes (one of the textile industry main environmental problems) is also of extreme importance to fight climate change.

The proposed Community Learning model is a cost-effective way of disseminating transition practices, fostering new communal farms and productive gardens, providing low-cost training and creating new sustainable businesses and jobs.

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For many years we were teaching and educating the public in general, but, slowly, our focus changed to teachers and educators, as a way of scaling and accelerating transfer and retention of precious knowledge in the communities.

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In our 2022/2023 project Cultura para Todos (Culture for All) in Vinhais, a small municipality in the north-eastern corner of Portugal, we researched and documented the local wool tradition and teached a group of school teachers, educators, social workers and community leaders on areas such as wool processing and weaving.

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Later on the project, we followed-up this group in the training activities they organised in their schools, social organisations and communities.

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At the same time, after organising different events for the public in general, Saber Fazer started capacity building programmes in Parque Biológico de Gaia and the Serralves Museum Park, training their education services staff in areas such as linen production, natural dyeing, sheep shearing and wool processing.

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After these experiences, we were interested in exploring this topic in an European level, introducing research and evaluation methodologies to test the impact of our community learning model.

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By then we were managing GatewayCrafts, an Erasmus+ project where we explored social media learning as a way of expanding and accelerating technical knowledge transfer using social media as “gateway” to new sustainable jobs and activities and decided to submit the CommunityCloth proposal to the same programme.

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CommunityCloth will implement and evaluate community learning methodologies by training new trainers (we call them educators) that will later in the project teach what they have learnt in their communities (schools, social organisations, NGOs, etc). To support this, we will also provide learning materials, structured activities books and a peer-to-peer communication system so they can contact our staff and other project participants.

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The project activities includes the development of learning materials (new technical books in English will be available soon!), the creation of a communication system between our educators based on an app; capacity building (it means training programmes) for the new educators and following training programmes in their communities; and evaluation of the community learning process.

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