Four European organisations join forces for a period of 15 months to share current best practices, collaborating to develop, test and establish an innovative training course specific for women coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

FORWARD: Fashion, Crafts and Design for Women Empowerment aims to promote the social inclusion of women who are in a less privileged status, coming from disadvantaged health, social or economic situations, such as immigrants, women with physical or mental disabilities, and women living in precarious contexts.

Each partner defines and develops their own training course, providing specific groups of women with new competences and seeking to to develop their self-confidence and entrepreneur skills . Each training follows a personalised path that takes in consideration the beneficiaries past and present, giving them the opportunity to explore the sectors of fashion, design and crafts and develop field-related skills. The courses are designed to present these women with learning opportunities of great quality by creating a flexible learning path that is focused on each participant’s inclination, personal ambitions and necessities. Forward is developed by the four organisations, which collaborate to achieve the same objectives with their training courses.

The participant organisations are: FLO Coop. Soc, a social business from Florence, Italy, TON from Iasi, Romania, a Foundation focused on female entrepreneurship in arts and crafts; the Design Foundation For Women and Crafts from Lisbon, Portugal that aims to protect and promote artisanal practices among female clusters; and Fism Formazione also from Florence, Italy, an accredited Tuscany training agency, and provider of training frameworks, evaluation and monitoring services.

FORWARD foresees the following main activities: a 3-day transnational train-the-trainer training; an activity to define common guidelines for an innovative pathway in the fashion, design and crafts sector (Project Result 3); a pilot training course dedicated to the direct beneficiaries of the project which was carried out in the three partners; the modelling of a training course in the field of fashion, design and handicrafts (Project Result 5).

Forward – Fashion, Crafts and Design for Women Empowerment is an Erasmus + project focused on creating small-scale partnerships in adult education. The project refers to the horizontal priority of Erasmus +: inclusion and diversity.