If there would be a ranking of successfully kicked-off projects, SKIVRE’s first meeting would definitely win a price! SKIVRE partners met in Bronnbach Monastery which is a perfect place for meetings that need concentration and an inspiring environment to foster collaboration.
The multidisciplinary European SKIVRE team discussed their access to the project’s target groups and their expertise for the sustainable impact of SKIVRE:
- media k GmbH as coordinator (Germany) is a social enterprise which has implemented numerous projects with a focus on religious heritage preservation,
- the former Cistercian monastery Bronnbach (Germany) is now operated by a regional public authority and started developing monastery products and a monastery shop,
- the European network “Future for Religious Heritage” (Belgium), the European network for historic places of worship, has access to religious places all over Europe,
- INI-Novation (Bulgaria), our training development expert, acts as knowledge provider for all the training aspects of SKIVRE and
- GUnet, our digital development partner, is going to set up our training platform.
Our Austrian partner Wissenschaftsinitiative Niederösterreich (Austria) will join us in the next meeting.
The team reached agreement on the most important implementation steps and discussed the training development. We decided to start with a survey in monasteries in order to find out more about the state of the art in terms of training needs. Additionally, we agreed on developing and distributing a survey on best practice example in order to integrate them in the training scheme
Our Bronnbach hosts shared their experiences with setting up the monastery shop and the development of monastic products (e.g. monastery honey and quinces production). The honey is produced in cooperation with a local beekeeper and was a real success story for the young monastery shop: “We could have easily sold the double quantity”, told us Dr. Matthias Wagner, managing director of Bronnbach monastery. “There is a huge market for monastic products and therefore our SKIVRE project is very interesting for us to learn more how to professionalize the development and marketing properly.” [/caption]
Finally, there was an extraordinary study visit to Wachsschenk, the only candle maker in close-by Würzburg, who is still producing hand-made candles specifically for religious purposes. The owner, Mr Schenk, demonstrated the challenging production process and told about the difficulties of positioning this handcraft in the market. An amazing experience!