From April 17 to 21, a pilot tutored training activity was held in Jurmala, Latvia, for trainers and other interested parties on calculation of social value. The event was organized by Latvian Rural Advisory and Training Centre and brought together partners from six EU countries.
The training was attended by 18 participants from Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Croatia, Greece and Latvia. Among the participants, six were representatives of diverse agricultural cooperatives.
In the framework of the training, theory was mixed with practical tasks in order to understand and master the main principles in monetizing the social value of cooperatives.
The practitioners’ discussions crystallized the opinion that the developed social value monetization system should be further developed, it should be tried to standardize more, make it simpler and look for ways to shorten the time required for the process.
Along with the training, the participants were given the opportunity to visit Latvian agricultural food cooperatives to get to know them and try to understand their possible social value in discussions with their management.
The team visited agri-food and agri-tourism enterprise “Ŗamkalni”, where healthy candies are made from self-grown berries, a unique, self managed milk processing cooperative “Straupes Piens”, Wine factory “Zilver”, explored the Bio market, where organic farmers and artisans trade together and tried Latvian organic honey from “Medotava”.
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