On the 14th of September 2021, EU Horizon project COCOREADO celebrated the launch of a pan-European ambassadors’ network. The project has opened a call to select individuals passionate about food and agriculture who would bring forward the project’s ambition of rebalancing the food supply chain and reconnecting farmers and consumers in Europe. The 40 selected people, ambassadors, will take part in the project’s training program aimed to enable them to facilitate sustainable changes in food systems.

People passionate about food and agriculture have a key role to play in generating and fostering social innovations in rural areas and changes in food systems: they enable rural enterprises and communities to co-create innovations. In the COCOREADO project, these activists are called ambassadors. During a period of two and a half years, COCOREADO will support ambassadors, in attempts to promote innovative and sustainable food supply chains through several 3 day trainings and numerous (online) meetings. This way, ensuring that ambassadors have knowledge, skills and confidence to offer targeted information to other representatives of local communities (initiatives, businesses, NGOs…), who are interested and/or active in innovative food supply chains. In addition, will the project also provide the ambassadors with tools to critically reflect and evaluate existing food practices and co-create new initiatives. The ambassadors will thereby have access to different networks of organisations and experts as well as seed funds to implement created visions of novel food system initiatives.

SELECTION OF SEED INITIATIVES
Over the course of the project, the ambassadors will alongside the project partners develop the initiatives using all of the best practices gathered and the support of a wide range of experts across Europe. These will be five new ideas selected from the ambassadors to form new and interesting food supply chain initiatives. The five selected will be fully funded with around €10,000 euros per initiative and will be a practical way in which the project will actually implement real new change.

To read more about the project and the ambassadors’ call, visit COCOREADO’s website – www.cocoreado.eu