Fashion, Crafts and Design
for Women Empowerment
Four European organisations from Italy, Portugal and Romania join forces for a period of 15 months to share current best practices, collaborating to develop, test and establish an innovative training programme specific for women coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
A Fashion Social Business
Flo Concept develops the programme in Italy. The aim with its course is to engage women from disadvantaged backgrounds and introduce them to the world of fashion, to its rules and many unique aspects. The main objective is to give these women the courage, the self-awareness and confidence, the basic skills and notions that will allow them to create a possible future for themselves in the world of fashion. The women involved will come from various disadvantaged backgrounds such as: women with physical and mental disability, women with a past of drugs addictions, women with economical and social difficulties, women struggling to come out of sex trafficking and immigrants.
Fazer Bem
In Portugal FORWARD is conceived and developed by DFFWAC, the Design Foundation for Women and Crafts, and the workshop receives the name Fazer Bem, the portuguese expression for “doing well” or “doing good”. It is based on the role of contemporary design, the visual arts and creativity as contributors to the maintenance and innovation of craftsmanship, underlining its impact in the creation of social and economic sustainability.
Being site-specific, it is aimed at a group of women in precarious situations from different backgrounds, seeking to simultaneously promote adult education, highlight the cultural heritage of craft practices and the importance of contemporary design and culture.
Women entrepreneurship – development through CRAFTS
TON Foundation, in Romania, levels national and local training and has identified a need for personal and professional development of women through entrepreneurship. Our women’s groups work in rural or small urban areas where jobs are not available – and because of this – women are becoming excluded from the socio-economic life of their communities. In the context that in rural and small urban areas there are different local resources, where women have the desire and the power to develop their own small businesses, we consider this FORWARD Training Course is a basis in empowering women to develop personally and professionally. The development of women entrepreneurship by increasing skills and competences through crafts will contribute not least to the community development of Romanian localities, which is a main activity of TON Foundation.
Transversal Actions
Fism Formazione is responsible for coordinating the phase “Training of Trainers” with the purpose of coordinate partners to produce a guidelines draft of the project and, as well, the monitoring and evaluation phase of the project, assuring relevance and quality on each activity as well as the effectiveness and learning outcome of the training specific for women from disadvantaged backgrounds.
