Grant Award View - GA205828

This project supports women craftspeople in Japan and Australia to develop their leadership capacity through accessible, relevant gender-inclusive leadership training in the form of co-designed workshops and events. In both countries, younger craftswomen particularly face challenges in assuming leadership positions in their communities and organisations, due to persistent socio-cultural and economical inequalities around gender. The project leverages and extends secure partnerships established through the Designing Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific (DESIAP) and Asian Women Social Entrepreneur Network (AWSEN), two networks already working with relevant organisations focussed on building leadership capacity in women and young entrepreneurs. The project links these partnerships with KOGEI-net, a network of researcher-practitioners committed to co-creating plans for sustainable futures with crafts communities in Japan’s Hokuriku and Kyushu regions. By empowering groups of women craftspeople in Japan and Australia through co-developed mentoring, the project aims to increase equity, diversity and inclusion in crafts industries and communities. This will facilitate collaborative learning, seeding to long-term multilateral, reciprocal relationships between craftspeople and social innovation-leadership experts in Australia and Japan. The project will support diversity in leadership more widely by sharing powerful tools for entrepreneurship through bilingual dissemination events, online resources and social media.