Artifactory is the Greek partner of the Erasmus+ Training Course CoSIYA (Co-creating Socially-inclusive Youth work with Agroecology). CoSiYA brought together, for a 7-day training, 30 youth workers from 9 organisations across Europe (Denmark, Italy, Greece, Kosovo, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain). They are all involved in agroecology and social justice topics with diverse and complementary backgrounds such as arts and artivism, youth education and pedagogy. These people are creative and passionate about bringing a positive and sustainable change to society - for which young people are the catalysts.

In November 2022, Anastasia, Vaso and Sofia travelled to Amsterdam in order to attend the Erasmus+ Training Course CoSIYA (Co-creating Socially-inclusive Youth work with Agroecology); a training on intersectionality, decoloniality, artivism and participatory action research, where the participants were invited to co-create practices for social justice and inclusion that support agroecology initiatives. 

This is what they would like to report upon it:
The project started on Monday, November 7th, where the participants from Portugal, Kosovo, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands gathered and got to know each other through non-formal education activities. After taking a tour of the surrounding area, discussing social injustices, we touched upon the concepts of intersectionality, food justice and participatory action research- concepts that would follow us throughout the duration of the training.  

The next day we visited the Day Center World House, a centre for migrants mainly coming from Africa, where we got introduced to their farming and community cooking activities and in two groups got to know their actions and potential challenges. In the afternoon, we co-created social inclusion practices and then had an art in activism creative workshop.  

Wednesday’s excursion was on the western suburbs of the city, in the Cascoland project, where we had a tour on the premises and got to cook all together and prepare our lunch, while talking on the issues of urban gardening, food waste, food justice and social inclusion of migrant communities through neighbourhood cooking and intercultural-intergenerational learning.

A mid-way evaluation process took place on Thursday, and was followed by presentations of 3 different initiatives fighting for food justice and a nearby food market visit for some active research and involvement of the participants with the local community.

The fifth day was dedicated to farming as we spent all day in the Pluk farm, just in the outskirts of the city, where we had a workshop on gender issues in agriculture and food justice, while enjoying hands-on experience in the farming process, weeding and transferring compost. The day ended with a seed exchange ceremony, full of gratitude and appreciation for the treasures of earth.