The Social Farming (SF) movement has developed substantially over the last decades in Europe, which means recognising its potential for providing eco-approaches (organic farming) that engage vulnerable individuals (social integration). The concept of SF is not yet present in vocational education and it is not recognised at a government level in many EU countries, however the number of SFs is continuously increasing. SFs and other social institutions will highly benefit from the Revitalist social farming training, especially because it includes an economic viability module and an innovative method called Practical Skills Therapeutic Education (PSTE).Revitalist has taken further the concept of Social Farming by elaborating a new curriculum based on a therapeutic method of education (PSTE), by creating and collecting a pool of background materials and by establishing a network of professionals, and this way responding to several EU regional and local policy needs. The target groups of the new curriculum are social farm employees, social and agricultural professionals.The core method PSTE has been tested and validated by one of our project partners (Ruskin Mill Trust) in the UK for over 20 years, providing social direction for young people with learning difficulties. Their results have been proven, recorded by the physical and mental development of their clients. Furthermore, PSTE also opened a window towards the social inclusion of the clients.We believe that Social Farming represents new potential enterprises for the agricultural sector: any land based initiative that wishes to work organically can attract other sources of income by engaging disadvantaged end-users.To bring it all to life, the project involved 7 organisations that contributed and benefited from this project:Hungarian Quality Compost Association (HU) is a professional organization with extensive experience in education, training development, agricultural practices and project management. Revitalist helped increasing their network connections at a national and international levels.Diverzitás Foundation (HU) has a well-established work practice developed with end-users, stable network connection with the stakeholders. The creation of new Revitalist training program, consisting of developing local social farming initiatives, brought extensive new knowledge into the organization.Ruskin Mill (UK), creator of the PSTE method, designed and delivered training program adapted to different multinational demands within the Revitalist project framework. They also tested the potential of PSTE when working with different types of clients.The Municipality of Tiszasas (HU) and WWOOF (HU) are both situated in socially deprived areas of Hungary and have been over the years building the necessary infrastructures to address the end-users needs. Alongside Diversity Foundation, these three organisations guarantee direct access to the target group; their knowledge is essential to keep the Revitalist training program alive and more importantly, work towards the creation of new SFs to significantly improve the life quality of those in need.University of South Bohemia (CZ) is developing training programs in SF, and they contributed to the project with their economic viability knowledge, which is essential to make SFs viable and sustainable in the long run.Agricoltura Capodarco (IT) is one of the oldest examples of SF in Europe, integrating socially disadvantaged people in the community, in an ethical and ecological way. Their participation in the process was therefore essential, as the partner with the greatest knowledge and practical experience in this topic.The main activity of the project is the elaboration of Social farm mentor training curriculum with methodologies, containing 5 modules: 1. PSTE theory and Genius Loci, 2. PSTE practice, the crafts 3. Characteristics of end-users, 4. Economic viability 5. Adaptation to local circumstances. For the understanding of the PSTE method and the operation of SFs, 3 short-term joint staff trainings have been carried out in the project. To support the Social farm mentor training, educational materials and an Open Education Resource was created on the SF topic, as well as an active, supporting online mentor-network interface.We tested all theory and practice described above in two different pilot-trainings where we used the participants’ feedback to improve the outputs.The Social farm mentor training uses a practice-oriented approach that involves learning handcraft activities that promote cognitive development and a sense of personal achievement, focusing always on the specific needs of each learner. We aspire for forgotten craft activities to be sustainably reinstated in the various locations in order to boost local economies, while guaranteeing the passing on of this cultural heritage to future generations.

The ECO-MOTIVE project was aimed at providing training tools for disadvantaged and unemployed adults to provide sustainable development solutions to entrenched rural poverty. The roots of poverty and social disadvantage are complex, and there is no wholesale solution within the scope of any single project, but we believe that one starting point for building opportunities for disadvantaged, low-skilled rural people is to explore individual human development (both life and employment skills) in connection with agriculture-based training opportunities. The ecological approach offers multiple benefits, including a recognition of the central importance of the social context of agriculture and its resource-efficient nature that complies with the long-term strategic goal of the sustainable natural resource management. A number of local government initiatives have started up over the last few years in Hungary, aimed at developing skills and knowledge appropriate for rural areas in basic agricultural areas. At the same time community employment programmes („Közmunka program”) have begun, in an attempt to address entrenched rural unemployment. Unfortunately there is still a lack of capacity at local government level that justifies the need for employment trainings, reskilling programmes and human development resources on which our project focused.The ECO-Motive project provided the training background, including technical knowledge and skills coupled with knowledge transfer methodology and social sensitization and motivation practices to provide user groups (primarily local authorities, and their programme staff) with course materials and training modules for trainers (practitioners, unemployed adults with an agricultural background, or with working experience in agriculture) by preparing capacity to train trainers of disadvantaged/ unemployed/low skilled adults (end-users) of rural areas in the field of small-scale ecological production. In order to facilitate the training of trainers we prepared the following 5 modules, which constitute together the main intellectual output of our project: social sensitivity skills and motivation, ecological small-scale farming (introduction), ecological small animal husbandry, ecological vegetable production, ecological fruit production. Each module includes applied pedagogical methods and submitted for licensing, forming together the complex training-the-trainers curriculum for ecological small scale production under the title “Competence development training for trainers of disadvantaged target groups by deepening ecological small-scale farming knowledge and developing equal opportunities approach”.The curriculum is accompanied by training-the-trainers teaching materials that facilitate the teaching work of trainers in ecological farming. The 6 distinct sections (corresponding to the curriculum modules and the ‘Collection of games and methodologies for trainers’) of the teaching material provide professional knowledge based on the well-established good practices appropriate for teaching approached in a holistic way.The end-users course material supports the learning of end-users during trainings in ecological small-scale production facilitated by trained trainers. The content of the end-users targeted course materials are closely linked to the accompanying training-the-trainers teaching materials. The end-user course material, which is rich in graphic illustration for the purpose of easy understanding, is produced as self-contained teaching aid, in order to facilitate its use.The well-established good-practices incorporated into the professional context are transferred from partners according to their area of expertise. In the project 7 prominent institutes with different institutional structures participated from 4 European countries (Hungary,Romania,Spain,UK). The common feature of all partner institutions is their focus on rural unemployment and social disadvantage related to agricultural activities. Pilot courses (18 day) organized for future trainers and end-users (6 days) during the project lifetime provided the opportunity to test out the transferred solutions before they are incorporated into the final project outputs. Localization mechanism ensured that all elements of exchanged, transferred and developed best-practises became adoptable under Hungarian conditions.Our goal with the project was to provide tools to local authorities to initiate training in small scale organic farming practices which leads into the creation of, not just utilising the manpower, but providing human development opportunities, which can lead to longer-term solutions. We believe that the project has important impacts at all levels including the social dimension, as the trained trainers influence the thinking of the decision makers in local authorities and by becoming acquainted with the global, holistic approach of organic farming they also influence higher level decision-making.