The local nonformal educational activities for senior artisans took part between January – May 2023 and were developed by professionals in adults’ education who took part in the first training in Reading and in local ToTs. Also partner organizations cooperated with different local or national structures active in cultural/crafts fields in order to select participants.
Each partner chose proper ways for developing this activity but all partners had a mixture of in attendance and online activities, also the group learning activities were completed, in most of the cases, with short one-to-one mentoring sessions (particularly related to support participants in creating accounts on https://seniorcrafts.nkey.it)
Finally we had 286 artisans (about 40 in each partner’s country, some partners couldn’t reach this number but others – as Romania and Italy had more) covering a wide area of crafts.
As we may see in the graphics below, the dominant age range is 61-65 years old (71 persons) followed by 56 – 60 years old (67 persons).
Regarding the level of education we noticed that almost a half of artisans have an university degree – 117 persons, that is normal particularly for those artisans who have their own business, as they graduated different forms of economic or business schools.
The biggest number of artisans with University degree is in Italy – 26 followed by Romania – 24. Thus in Romania is a particular situation because many of our artisans are retired persons – engineers or teachers – who made a professional reconversion after 1989 or just after their retirement. The lowest number of University graduated is in Spain but there is in general the smallest number of artisans and more of them have migrant background (mainly from South America) and their studies weren’t recognized in Spain.
Regarding the ”relation with the craft” we can notice that an important role had the local associated partners each organization worked with in participants’ selection. Partners from Malta, Italy an Portugal worked with professional bodies of craftspeople/artisans (National Council for Craft in Malta, Chamber of Commerce in Italy, CINDOR in Portugal) so here who own their own business in craft/artisanship predominate.
At the opposite pole there are ex-communist countries Romania and Poland, where the number of persons that have a craft business as the only source of income is very small (6 in Romania and 9 in Poland). This is due not only to our local partners (Centers for Promoting Folk Culture and Traditions – in Romania, focused on ”folk craftspeople” who work in different traditional crafts, an University or Seniors in Poland – focused on seniors that want to learn and practice a craft as a hobby) but also to the low level of support and facilities for people who would want to develop a business in this direction – as the research ArITsan Feedstock reveals.
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