New European Bauhaus meets Community Economies
https://nebcommunityeconomies.net/
New European Bauhaus meets Community Economies is a two-year Erasmus+ project that engages with diverse bottom-up community initiatives recognized by New European Bauhaus Price through the lens of a theoretical framework rooted in community economies. Two of the 2022 prize finalists, Forno Vagabondo and Krater joined in taking the initiative of connecting and empowering the diverse communities’ efforts in grounding the ecological transition. By identification and sharing of a diverse range of successful economic strategies and tactics we aim at providing a detailed study of the ways in which these economic strategies were launched and how they contribute to make the projects and organizations sustainable over time.
Although NEB and other sister initiatives contribute actively and substantially to the EU’s ecological transition and their success and impact are recognised, they often struggle with precarious or low funding situations. Based on the experience of our collective practices we will map and analyze the behind-the-scenes of such projects, with a special focus on what kind of economic reasoning and acting makes such projects viable and potentially resilient in the long-term.
To shed a light on these often invisible struggles we are drawing on community economies approach, i.e. an approach championed by economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham that places the well-being of people and nature at its core. The project unfolds around three interrelated activities: network creation, online seminars, and a spring school. Seminar tools will be developed to map the specific aspects of our economic relations that we want to address and analyze. The seminars are followed by a live gathering in Rovereto to create a shared corpus of knowledge, supported by a network of diverse communities, to be further used by citizen-led initiatives and public administrators across Europe.
WEBINAR SERIES
During the webinars we will use a community economic lens to map our existing place-specific practices and share our economic strategies. Following feminist geographers Gibson-Graham and Miller, we aim to reframe and reconceptualize the essential relation between economy and ecology. We understand economy as an ecology of interdependent relations between human and more-than-human beings. We are focusing on projects that have been developed and implemented by other finalists of the NEB Prize while also opening the network to other projects in order to unite our efforts. Together, through mapping diverse experiences, we hope to reveal how to support these types of initiatives beyond funding and precarious conditions. We want to contribute to organizational capacity building amongst the NEB community to favor new community economic collaborations at a local and transnational level.
During the six learning sessions we will map our practices, together with invited participants. The webinars will take place once per month between April and June and later on between September and November 2024.
To apply contact us at info@trajna.com
Date: 19. April / 10.00 - 12.00
We map the monetary and non-monetary inputs that allowed our organizations to emerge and those that allow it to continue over time.
How do you keep going in spite of everything?
12.03.2024 / 10:00-12:00
In this webinar, we reflect on what makes our initiatives precarious and what helps them thrive. Given the destabilizing work conditions many face, we aim to engage in transformative thinking and action. We map out factors that contribute to both the precariousness and empowerment of our initiatives.
What kinds of surplus are we producing with our initiatives?
Date: 21. June / 10.00 - 12.00
We map what we are producing that sustains well-being for our own lives, our partners and our communities.
Video recordings of the webinars will be available on our YouTube channel.
SPRING SCHOOL
A 4-day community economies spring school will take place in Rovereto in 2025. In line with the objective of network consolidation it will offer space for the fine-tuning of the transferability of the mapped practices. More info in autumn!
Follow us on social media for updates: La Foresta, Krater Collective.
About our project partner:
La Foresta - community academy is a small-scale cultural center growing in a regenerated space at the train station of Rovereto (TN). La Foresta brings together cultural associations, informal groups and active citizens. Together we work on questions of community cohesion, the agro-ecological transition, mental health as a commons, social innovation for community entrepreneurship that tackles social welfare and environmental resilience. The horizontal governance and community-led financing of La Foresta is based on community economies principles. One of our core projects, Forno Vagabondo - fermenting desirable futures, was a 2022 NEB finalist. It consists of a traveling bread oven engaging local communities through baking into issues of food sovereignty.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.