EPALE - Piattaforma elettronica per l'Apprendimento permanente in Europa

As an organisation that opened its doors early in 2020 - just in time to have them closed by the global pandemic, the arrival of KA210 Small Scale Partnerships into the Erasmus + initiative was serendipitous. While members of our fledgling team each had long experience in EU-funded projects, EurAV, as an entity, was young and in the process of establishing its networks both locally in Drogheda - Ireland's biggest town, and with other like-minded organisations across Europe. Erasmus + projects, in the previous iteration, had developed a reputation for being unwieldy from a management perspective. The KA210s, with their lighter touch and lump sum funding model, promised to be more accessible. 

Our first successful application was in the area of climate action - one of our three core focus areas. We meticulously developed it with the Irish National Ecology Centre, Sonairte - a well established and much respected non-profit organisation in nearby Laytown on the Meath coastline. It was an 18 month project that was based on a community television series we had made where we asked members of the Facebook groups of non Irish national communities to vote for a dish that represented their country. When, after much heated debate, they settled on a dish, we then challenged a member of that community to cook the dish using only Irish ingredients. Such was the success of this format, that we collaborated with Sonairte to write a VET project aimed at food service industry professionals. We would look at what imported ingredients were being used on menus across the country, and then find ways to recreate the dishes with Irish ingredients. Research led us to the Mediterranean diet as the source behind many Irish menu offerings so we used EU platform search facilities to find a partner that could help us to import the ethos, but not the ingredients, in to Ireland as the basis of the training we'd develop. That partner was the Mediterranean Agronomics Institute of Chania.

Writing the application was a collaborative effort and, looking back, it really helped to lay the foundations for our interaction throughout the project implementation. The CASK project proved to be a wonderful success. We exceeded our objectives and formed new connections that will extend way beyond the lifespan of the project. Aside from giving all three partners a smooth learning curve into Erasmus +, though, our involvement in CASK has given us a model that we are now upscaling to a Cooperation Partnership project. We're involving additional partners from additional countries. We're now not looking only at Irish dining tastes, but we're looking at the habits in each partner country. While the Mediterranean diets still features, we're looking at the Italian influence alongside the Cretans, and we're examining other popular cuisines - Indian, Chinese, Thai, French, Polish. It's a large undertaking. For organisations who've never written a KA220 application it's a real step up from KA210s. But the principles are the same and our experience successfully implementing the CASK project has given us the confidence and core results around which to build the cooperation partnership. 

Small scale partnerships, then, are the projects that keep on giving. They serve a training purpose,  they build capacity in the newcomers or lesser experienced partners and, when they prove themselves successful, they provide the seed from which bigger projects can grow. Not bad!