RECHARGE Diary

In the round of RECHARGE NEXT introduction, it's the turn of The Serfenta Association and its labour of love: a passionate, long-term commitment to craft

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Name of the institution: The Serfenta Association

Based in: Poland, Cieszyn, Srebrna 1 Street

Mission: Serfenta is one of the three UNESCO-accredited NGOs in Poland. Our international craft journey has continued for 16 years now. We base on the tradition and connections with the world of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) thanks to our long term ethnographic research conducted in Poland and other European countries. Our goals include promoting, managing and redesigning knowledge about the crafts in an innovative way. Our activities cover craft experience basketry workshops and expert events about the meeting point, between the heritage world and nowadays people’s needs. In 2022, they received the Jeonju International Award for Promoting Intangible Cultural Heritage (JIAPICH), with strong focus on sustainable business. The organisation is also a finalist of New European Bauhaus Award 2023 with the “Innovation Model of Craft Revitalisation”. The motto of Serfenta is "craft experience available for all".

Business model idea: Serfenta has worked for over 16 years in the field of modern and business approach to basketry craft. The experts who create the organisation, Paulina Adamska and Łucja Cieślar (together with business advisor Urszula Szwed) designed their own “Innovation model of Craft Revitalisation”. Their goals include sharing, promoting, and managing knowledge about the intangible heritage. The main challenge is the hermetic nature of the traditional crafts world. We observe that traditional crafts is available to a small enclave of people, not for a wide society. It concerned the production of products (basketry - baskets) - repeatable and served only useful purposes. Access to this world is possible only for a few - due to the nature of the craft work, which is long-lasting, difficult, and arduous. We realized this, we started designing our services to make the crafts widely available. Thanks to the years of ethnographic research, we understand how much value is in the ICH world, especially in crafts. We found, that the opportunity to experience a handwork, is one of the core skills, that determine us as human beings, brings values to the modern world, connect people. Craft is needed not only for craftsmen, so we decided to simplify and make craft’s goods accessible to everyone. Hence, our "craft experience" program, which we’ve been successfully implementing since 2016. Our services are based on tradition, but they are designed and based on nowadays people’s needs. These include the need for rest, relaxation, moving away from the online world, well-being, need of being an active part of tradition, having an influence and agency in the creation process.

For 16 years, in Serfenta, we are doing as much as we can to create a change in World - in the cultural heritage area. That’s why we are working with the Model of Craft Revitalisation where the main change is “less products, more experience”. Our experience based on basketry craft, but we know, that we can share it with craft at all, other areas, different cases. We want to make craft - available, modern, well known, being attractive to young generations, because we believe, that the transmission is the future of craft. 

We’ve got the feeling, that we can’t go further without a help from the outside - experts, advisor, mentors. So, we decided to take a part in the RECHARGE Next program, because we want to scale our ideas and we require help in this move. Furthermore, we are an NGO on the way to economic independence, and the economic development means people’s lives getting better. We are working in-between tradition and the modern market. We are researching people’s needs, and we are ready to listen to the market. Also - it’s important and quite unique in the cultural areas - we are not afraid of selling our services, but we want to make it wider, better. As an organisation we are ready to grow, and we have hope, that REcharge Next will help us on our way to develop. 

We are strongly motivated to participate, this program fits exactly to our development strategy. We’ve started 16 years ago with ethnographic research, through the design thinking process until now – where we connect traditional world with modern people. We have developed a teaching method that attracts people about the basketry crafts not involved before in crafts at all. We’re ready to scale and spread our methods. We see the significant need to combine cultural heritage world with the challenges of a rapidly changing reality: new technologies, AI, digitalisation. We see the possibility and a need of scaling our achievements and also sharing the results with another domain of the crafts or ICH sections. This is our motivation, to leave the hermetic and to move crafts into the future by creating a group of experts working periodically to develop new solutions.