The Be part of CSA! project wishes to facilitate the spread of CSA initiatives by providing knowledge, skills and competences to local communities in Hungary, Czech Republic and Romania, and disseminates its outcomes to the European level.
The partners of this ERASMUS+ project are TVE-Hu, CRIES-Ro, PRO-BIO LIGA-Cz and URGENCI.
Together, they plan to develop an innovative European informal and non-formal training program of 4 modules. The topics of the modules were developed by research and common needs analysis: partners collected feedbacks on workshops and forums from more than 300 stakeholders and also carried out researches. In Hungary, TVE delivered a qualitative research among CSA members and farmers in 2012. In Czech Republic, PRO-BIO LIGA carried out an internal audit last year with the Czech CSA network and organised consultations. In Romania, a national meeting was organised by CRIES in 2014.
The common conclusion of these researches was, that for the spread and development of CSAs, their members need specific entrepreneurial and management knowledge, business planning and community building skills, access to management tools. At the 2nd European CSA Meeting (2014) organized by URGENCI, stakeholders agreed that there is a growing interest towards CSA and CSA should be supported by education programs. The thematic modules will educate practical skills responding to these needs – e.g. conflict and problem management, basic business planning and marketing, use of risk analyses.
The project has three major pillars.
I) To design a European core training program on CSA by:
- elaborating a modular training,
- elaborating supporting educational materials and
- running, evaluating and improving the core program.
II) To assure the dissemination and the accessibility of the training program to various communities by:
- building expert capacity for staff and multipliers (volunteers of the partner organisations who will disseminate the project results in their local networks) and
- make the training program accessible on the European level.
III) For the long term sustainability of the training program, partners will build new alliances on local and international level.
A first kick-off meeting was recently held in Budapest on Novembre 26-28, hosted by the coordinator TVE.
More coming soon…
