A key consortium meeting of the Grass Ceiling project took place in Vilnius, Lithuania. Bringing together representatives from all nine partner countries, the meeting provided an opportunity to review project activities and discuss future plans for each work package.
The meeting was part of a broader work trip to Lithuania, as the day before, the project held its second Showcase Event as part of the agenda of Agri Food Lithuania 2024. During the Showcase, nine women participants from each partner country presented their business projects and received professional and academic feedback. These women participated in the Consortium Meeting, enriching the resulting debates and learning about the project’s conclusions and results.https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBURAb
The purpose of the consortium meeting was to present, discuss, and update the progress of the overall project, focusing on the status of each Work Package. Sally Shortall, the project’s general coordinator from Newcastle University, facilitated the meeting: Grass Ceiling is a play on ‘glass ceiling,’ and the objective is to assist rural and farm women in achieving equality in leading socio-ecological innovations across Europe, Shortall said.
In total, the meeting reviewed the seven Work Packages of the project, with a particular focus on Work Package 6: Online Training Academy and MOOC Modules Workshop, where Laura Quijano, from CIHEAM Zaragoza (Spain) presented the progress and proposed a work plan for the learning platform. This platform will include academic and scientific resources in various formats, such as presentations and training videos.
Professor Shortall highlighted at the end of the meeting that the main goal of the project is to be able to conduct a comparative analysis of the situation in the different participating countries: “so it’s very helpful to see how policies operate in one country differently to another”. The GRASS CEILING coordinator emphasized that “the European Commission can assume that there is a perfectly matched national document that is implementing their policies”, and used the example of the Common Agricultural Policy, where each country has its own national plan, but it isn’t the case for the Green Deal or Farm to Fork strategy: “while there is an assumption that these are being translated at the national level, that is not always the case. This may be one of the most important findings that our project has shown.”
Finally, Sally Shortall emphasized the need to collaborate with men to understand how they socialize in environments where women are absent and they do not perceive this as an issue, “while they’re missing out on an understanding of half the population”, Shortall concluded.
GRASS CEILING will carry on throughout 2025, advancing its research, overseeing the Living Labs involving 72 women across 9 European nations. The project will also highlight the development of these women’s entrepreneurial ventures, all of which are centred around female empowerment in rural areas and territorial conservation.