May 11, 2020

ICT women on Rural Areas – the first transnational meeting of the Erasmus+ project
14th and 15th of November took place the kick off meeting as a part of the WORA – ICT for Women in Rural Areas partnership project financed by the Erasmus + programme. Representatives of four organizations: AgriNatura Foundation  from Poland, Kisleptek from Hungary, AMA Centar from Serbia and EcoRuralis (www.ecoruralis.ro) from Romania, met in Poland, in Zareby Koscielne, at the headquarters of our Foundation.
It was an opportunity to meet representatives of the partners, exchange the experiences, determine the distribution of roles and responsibilities in the further activities of the project. The first session was Lego Serious Play a gamification play with the LEGO blocks. This game is like an ice breaker for the participants, helps to listen each other and the negotiate and finally can establish closer relationships between the players.

The watchword was: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and also how the women in the countryside use the Internet for example, to support the sale of their home made products and how to contact their customers. The experiences were shared among others by:
Anna Po¶nik – farmer running RWS Wojciechówka – CSA Wojciechowka (interview to watch on our Youtube );
Joanna Orlicz, from Malkinia Gorna commune, who runs the “Orliczowka” agritourism farm and sells her own home made products to the Grochowska Cooperative in Warsaw;
Danuta Jab³onka-Grabowska from Brok commune, also the owner of the ‘Dajana’ agritourism farm.

The meeting was also attended by Urszula Wolosiewicz, the mayor of the commune Zareby Koscielne, who talked about the projects activating rural women and how it encouraged her to successfully engage in local politics issues and about the obstacles that the women living in the villages can meet to use a computer and the Internet.

On the following day, the partners visited “Zio³owy Zak±tek”(www.ziolowyzakatek.pl), located next to the Dary Natury company, which is one of the best examples of an ecological enterprise, developing from a small, local scale into an international, prosperous company.