MadreProject. School of places and breadmaking #Bread #Territory #Enterprise
MadreProject is a one-of-a-kind school inviting participants to approach bread as a way to connect local communities, places and practices. The idea is to train future entrepreneurs who can create social impact and maintain a dialogue with the context in which they operate, and, in particular, breadmakers who are aware of the network they are part of and the benefits of an all-round approach.
Local
Italy
Milan municipality, Lombardy
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Associazione Terzo Paesaggio ETS Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Marta Last name of representative: Bertani Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via San Bernardo 42 Town: Milano Postal code: 20139 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 333 904 2347 E-mail:madreproject@terzopaesaggio.org Website:http://terzopaesaggio.org
Name of the organisation(s): Avanzi spa SB Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Davide Last name of representative: Dal Maso Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: CEO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Ampere 61/A Town: Milano Postal code: 20131 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 02 305160 E-mail:info@avanzi.org Website:http://avanzi.org
Name of the organisation(s): Cum Panis srl Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Davide Last name of representative: Longoni Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: CEO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Tiraboschi 19 Town: Milano Postal code: 20135 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 329 411 3807 E-mail:progettispeciali.cumpanis@gmail.com Website:http://davidelongoni.com
MadreProject, School of places and breadmaking is a collective effort from Terzo Paesaggio, a non-profit organization specialized in regeneration through culture, Avanzi S.p.A., benefits society with 25 years of experience in sustainability and innovative urban projects, a|cube, social impact startups accelerator and Davide Longoni, master breadmaker, co-founder of the movement P.A.U. Panificatori Agricoli Urbani (Urban Farming Breadmakers), first national network of agricultural bakers
Milan municipality selected the project as eligible for the city civic crowdfunding 2021, an innovative funding mechanism for bottom-up projects involving no profits and inhabitants. So far, the project has involved 360 donors from different backgrounds, citizens, businesses and artisans.
MadreProject was also awarded the “Best Start-up For Impact” award from Fondazione Social Venture Giordano dell'Amore.
MadreProject is a one-of-a-kind school inviting participants to approach bread as a keystone to connect local communities, places and practices. The program wants to have a positive impact by training people with an entrepreneurial spirit to be capable of making bread, interacting with the whole production cycle through a horizontal, self-reflective and practical teaching approach.
The school intends to approach and deal with all the challenges faced in all the environments and by all the actors involved in the production and supply chain: the growers, the breadmakers, the consumers - just to name a few - by intercepting each one of them throughout the entire course.
MadreProject addresses the challenges of the just transition. It transfers people skills and competencies for social businesses and inclusive projects.
There are no academic courses or training like MadreProject that put together learning practical knowledge with urban and social exploration and field tests.
Breadmaking
Urban regeneration
Future entrepreneurship
Social Impact
Innovative learning
MadreProject proposes a model of education that trains people to preserve [I] their environment and to acknowledge [I] the different local specificities and resources of a territory. However, it goes further in introducing learnings on systemic thinking and human ecology, which, together with concrete activities, could change the participants’ worldviews and behaviors [III], leading to the training of entrepreneurs and breadmakers of the future who are able to create circular processes [II] to produce a positive social, economic and environmental impact through their sustainable activities and business.
In addition, the project integrates a plan for the regeneration of 10 hectares of abandoned agricultural fields [III], rescued from desertification and speculation, that would shorten the supply chain [II], increase biodiversity - with an agroforestry system - and boost employment opportunities in the rural district of Chiaravalle (Milan), where the project is implemented.
MadreProject (re)activates [I] an ecosystem of cultural places in Chiaravalle (Milan), ancient cradle of European agriculture, situating the school’s activities across different renovated and repurposed buildings such as Cascina Nosedo, a former farmstead made available for community use, and Padiglione Chiaravalle, a former school gym which is now a cultural center and Terzo Paesaggio’s headquarter.
During the first year of MadreProject’s experimentation, 1 hectare of agricultural fields was also sowed with ancient grains and regenerated with the involvement of 1000 children from local kindergartens and primary schools, to build a “Biblioteca del Grano” (Grain Library) and connect [II] different people (children, families, teachers, citizens) conveying the importance of local bread production and short supply chain.
A mobile pop-up bread lab will also be set up [I] to allow MadreProject students to have access to a production, learning and sales space throughout the course of the school and even after the end of classes.
By doing so, MadreProject will realize [I] an ecosystem of physical places - both indoor and outdoor - where the school activities will take place and which will be able to animate the territory [II] with activities that enrich the offer of services. Alongside the school's activities, in fact, a public programme will be proposed: to share the news about MadreProject, to identify new students and/or supporters/stakeholders, but also to broaden the offer of cultural activities for the neighborhood (with book presentations, open lectures and workshops, participatory artistic performance) and transform it [III] into a city-wide attraction.
At the end, MadreProject brings participants together [II] in the creative and collective experience of breadmaking and re-invention of places [III], and encourages them to engage with their cultural, social, and natural environment, fostering their sense of belonging and taking care of their territories.
The project counts on solidarity and cooperation to achieve its goals: the launch of the city civic crowdfunding campaign fed into the opening of the school, helping MadreProject to re-activate the neighborhood, culturally and socially, with the help of its citizens.
MadreProject's journey is therefore built on the participation of its stakeholders and beneficiaries. In addition to the crowdfunding, in fact, the training programme itself was co-constructed with a group of potential students in an initial test phase called Cantiere MadreProject (“MadreProject’s Construction Site”), which took place in February 2021: a pilot week of free testing of the training programme that led to its redesign through direct discussion and experimentation with participants.
The school itself - redesigned and opened with two campuses in autumn 2022 - is based on strong principles of participation and collaboration [I], therefore it aims and does everything to constitute [II] an horizontal learning community between teachers and students, with informal moments, roundtable discussions, explorations, community lunches and through residential moments of living together . It is a school “rooted in collective intelligence” which proposes that each learner builds their own educational path based on their needs and interests. The school presents itself as a horizontal, self-reflective education model [III].
Furthermore, the opening of the school is part of a programme to reactivate [I] the neighborhood, culturally and socially; it also intends to grant accessibility and affordability with scholarships to attract disadvantaged students [I].
Finally, some of the proposed bread-making workshops led to the production of bread that was distributed and donated [II] to fragile families in Corvetto, a suburban neighborhood near Chiaravalle.
Citizens were involved [I] as early as the design phase of MadreProject, thanks to the civic crowdfunding programme through which people have been encouraged to contribute [III] financially with donations to support the project(s) they considered most useful to the community and closest to their interests (360 donors have supported MadreProject).
Since then, the design process of MadreProject has followed the path of co-production [II] through the participation of beneficiaries and inhabitants in the different stages of implementation.
Outside of the students, however, MadreProject proposes various activities capable of involving a broader target audience: this is the case of the one thousand children from nursery and primary schools in the area involved in the process of sowing the nearby fields (“Grain Library”); the public programme of cultural (public talks, in situ artistic creations in public space, art residences, piano concerts and performances in the wheat fields), social and educational events (collective bread-making in public spaces: community gardens, municipal market, social housing courtyards) open to the neighborhood and the city to broaden [III] the self-govern impact of MadreProject and make the project better shared.
Finally the objective is therefore to build a school that trains future entrepreneurs capable of generating impact on their chosen territories with their business activities, but the school itself wants to generate impact on its own territory, not constituting itself as an elitist and closed space but as a widespread, inclusive educating community [III] that welcomes external contributions and brings ideas, inputs and opportunities outside.
MadreProject builds on a diverse coalition of actors (non-profit associations, enterprises, startup accelerators, food artisans, urban farmers) active at local [I] and across various scales (regional, and national) [II].
The project was selected by the city of Milan to take part in an innovative funding mechanism such as the civic crowdfunding campaign; by the Italian Ministry of Culture in the Creative Living Lab 2022 call; by Fondazione di Comunità Milano for the realization of a proximity social project involving 8 local schools. Although it is strongly anchored at the local level [I] it has a supra-local scope [II], so activities are already underway to establish thematic nodes in other regions, also using PNRR funds dedicated to the regeneration of historic Italian villages at risk of depopulation. MadreProject has an active project in southern Italy, in the village of Morcone (BN) [III].
It also received the “Best Start-up For Impact” award from Fondazione Social Venture Giordano dell'Amore as part of the mentoring programme Get It for Lacittàintorno, in order to scale [III] the model to other contexts.
The 360 donors who crowdfunded the project and the many organizations involved constitute a locally and supra-local rooted formal and informal network [I]. Among the organizations involved there are the international network Lo Stato dei Luoghi which brings together activators of regenerated spaces, and the PAU network [II]. We also report the participation of MadreProject in international cultural festivals such as Resilienze in Bologna and Campo Base in Val d’Ossola [II].
Internationally, MadreProject will take part in Corriere della Sera's "Festival Cook", with notable international guests from the world of bread-making [III].
In the future we hope to let our mobile pop-up bread lab travel around the Mediterranean, continuing the cultural collaboration started in 2022 with MUCEM - Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée [III].
As written before, the project emerged through the joint efforts of Terzo Paesaggio ETS, Avanzi S.p.A. SB, a|cube and Davide Longoni. These entities combine and pass down cross-sector expertise [II] to overcome common challenges [II].
The didactic programme of the school assembles [III] three thematic nodes, reflecting the competences of its promoters: Bread, Territory, Enterprise.
The school has interdisciplinary approach [II], therefore the three thematic fields mix, interact with each other, build unexpected dialogues. The territory [II] is therefore seen as the 'project space', the area in which an enterprise, a process or an initiative is located and with which it must necessarily dialogue; a territory is thus seen not only as a physical space but also as a social space: made up of actors, practices, policies. Enterprise [II] is understood as the thought behind the students’ projects: it is the thought behind the design of businesses with a social impact, that are able to generate change and positive benefits in the territory, which is why these two themes (territory and enterprise) constantly dialogue within the lessons. Finally, the theme of bread [II], the heart of the school, which in this case becomes a tool, an instrument to build relationships with the territory and its inhabitants (bread is the gateway to the community), to give life to a business, to produce - through an artisan product - social impact, to make an intention concrete and material.
At last, the involvement of participants from various backgrounds and with differing levels of familiarity with breadmaking allows for peer learning and the harnessing of both formal and non-formal knowledge [III].
MadreProject offers a learning path, divided into different stages, that replicates the process of designing, building and opening one's own business, inviting students to experience each step: from the yeast to the dough, from the choice of the territory where to set up the business, to the creation of one's own product, MadreProject goes through all the essential steps to develop a business idea.
Unlike traditional schools, however, it does so by underpinning its teaching model with an experimental approach - where one learns from experience and doing - and a horizontal model where teachers and learners test the field together, through methods that cross disciplines and stimulate the development of their own critical awareness.
MadreProject treats bread as an element that is as simple as it is complex and that cannot disregard the relationship with the space in which it is produced and consumed, nor its possible impacts. This is why it combines laboratory lectures, urban explorations and workshops, creating a fertile relationship between elements of breadmaking, urban regeneration and enterprise; participants will learn how to do market research, develop a vision of change, design services, plan and test a sustainable business idea, and learn how to analyze the territory in which they will settle, in order to define concrete projects capable of dialoguing with the local context.
Unlike a traditional culinary school, it trains its students on business issues to turn manual knowledge into a real profession (sustainable and socially impactful), combines knowledge of the subject with knowledge of the context, and finally leads participants to develop critical thinking, question their worldview, experiment, make mistakes, and test unusual relationships between different fields.
MadreProject proposes a type of training that can be easily replicated in different contexts, different locations, and with different groups of beneficiaries.
The school requires spaces (school-spaces or multifunctional ones, formal or informal, indoors or outdoors) to host classes and an accessorized laboratory for bread making workshops but can be repurposed to adapt to different situations, depending on the space and time available.
The training model, in particular, can be repurposed to short intensive weeks, focused on particular aspects of entrepreneurial design or baking. In fact, it is not important that the entire production process is replicated and learned: the core element of MadreProject is, on the contrary, the development of critical thinking, a careful look at places, a production mode that focuses much less on the result and more on the process.
The format could also be adapted on other content and topics, besides bread, designing one's own training model on other specific contexts to be regenerated and on their specificities and needs, adapting to different categories of professionals (more in need of training, more numerous and therefore with more need to experiment with innovative models etc.)
As mentioned above, MadreProject is based on the intersection of three strands (bread, territory, enterprise). To this are added further themes capable of soliciting reflections, transversal visions to re-imagine the way we produce and live in the world.
In short, MadreProject is built on an ever new and unusual combination of knowledge but is based on some well-established principles:
Active experimentation
MadreProject challenges traditional teaching methods and is based on a model where we learn from experience and error. Participants are invited to experiment first-hand with their own goals and turn them into concrete entrepreneurial projects.
Reflexivity
Participants are encouraged to broaden the horizons of their imagination, develop their critical capacity, question established certainties and points of view, allowing them to experience new and unforeseen ones.
Horizontality
Teachers and learners are considered on the same level and learn together, coming into contact with each other. Students themselves are invited to build a learning community together by sharing their expertise. The teaching programme is itself subject to (some) remodeling, depending on the interests that emerge from the students during the lessons.
Collaboration
MadreProject bases its teaching on the assembly of networks and communities and imagines the emergence of collaborative enterprises, born from the open encounter between subject, place, students and professionals.
Trespassing
MadreProject crosses disciplinary boundaries, bringing together innovation and tradition, different views, subjects and approaches: from urban planning to baking, from management to philosophy, from artistic performances to ecology, every point of view is taken into account and put into dialogue with each other.
MadreProject intends to respond to a series of global challenges: first of all, it looks at the environment by trying to foster the construction of short supply chain networks, bringing future producers (student breadmakers) into dialogue with the resources of an area.
It also intends to encourage urban regeneration processes and the creation of new services in underprivileged (and not) neighborhoods through the creation of bakery shops with a social impact that can also host transversal services capable of responding to the needs of the community (a cultural and educational offer, neighborhood concierge, etc.), as well as processes that favor the fifteen-minute city model, reducing the number of inhabitants' journeys (and therefore reducing atmospheric pollution) and creating richer and more cohesive living environments.
Another of the challenges to which MadreProject tries to respond is that of Great Resignation, the increase in job dissatisfaction due to conditions that undervalue the vocations and desires of workers: in this sense, the school intends to work on the emergence of the entrepreneurial desires of people in order to guide them in the design and implementation of their own business ideas that respond more to their talents and are able to satisfy both their desires for 'a new life' and - as highlighted in the previous two points - the needs of a territorial context.
At the time of this application, MadreProject has achieved the following results:
360 donors;
1 pilot week in February 2021 to test the educational offer with 16 aspiring students;
20 public events (2000 participants) in Chiaravalle and the neighboring Corvetto district;
1 ha regenerated with 1000 children and 8 local schools;
2 experimental campuses, in autumn 2021;
A portion of disused public building redeveloped as classroom;
A mobile pop-up bread lab in the making;
2 of the people who attended the campus are currently pursuing their entrepreneurial path.
A school redesign is currently underway and will be concluded with the launch in May of a 6-month course divided into theoretical lectures one evening a week, intensive weekends of practical workshops, 2 intensive weeks of team building and modeling one's own project, and an additional, optional week focusing on a specific strand that can be attended according to the specific vocations of each student.
The idea is in fact to redesign the school to meet the needs that have emerged, especially from 'out-of-town' students or working students, while not losing the community and collective learning characteristic that marks out MadreProject. Similarly, the need to allow students to build their own personal learning path has been taken into account (some lessons/workshops can also be attended individually for those who are only interested in one topic and/or want to test the MadreProject path before enrolling as students).
Looking at a longer term, we intend to test MadreProject with other mediums besides bread: the idea is to apply the same format to further artisanal knowledge and raw materials because we believe that it is necessary to rethink the entire agricultural and artisanal production from the perspective of a healthy, fair and dialoguing relationship with territories and communities which could, in the future, rebuild and regenerate places and traditions.
MadreProject aims to train students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for a more sustainable economy and society, implementing integrated production cycles, social impact business and regeneration projects from an environmental and cultural point of view. It does so by involving people in a training course oriented to the principles of bread-making and through the involvement of citizens and children in open educational and social activities.
Referring to the European competence framework on sustainability, MadreProject intervenes in the development of the following competences:
1. Embodying sustainability values with particular reference to valuing sustainability (through mentoring activities oriented to the design of socially and environmentally sustainable business models) and promoting nature (through the (re)discovery of local natural resources and support in the realization of initiatives that enhance them)
2. Embracing complexity in sustainability with reference to systems thinking (the school accompanies students to recompose networks between the supply chain); critical thinking (a central element of the school that pushes its participants to question consolidated ideas); problem framing (each project developed by the students is accompanied by a process of analysis to match the resources and criticalities of a context)
3. Acting for sustainability, with particular reference to collective action (students are invited to work in groups and form networks with local stakeholders and/or their colleagues) and individual initiative (support for the implementation of their own sustainable projects)
4. Envisioning sustainable futures: through discussions with experts from different disciplines, in continuous confrontation with problems, critical issues, opportunities and real-life contexts, participants are encouraged to think about future scenarios, exploring different visions of change and developing adaptability and innovation skills.
