On participatory research, co-created knowledge, and the voices that shaped «Stronger Together» from the inside Published as part of the Erasmus+ KA210-ADU project «Stronger Together» — ABARKA & Zembul Women’s Cooperative

Most projects begin with an idea. The best projects begin with a question.

The question that set Stronger Together in motion was not primarily about programmes or methodologies or European funding mechanisms. It was simpler and more important than any of those things: What do these women actually need? Not what a project designer imagines they need from a distance, not what a grant application template suggests they need based on statistical indicators, but what the people who would eventually become the project’s participants, its beneficiaries, and its educators genuinely said when someone sat down with them and asked.

The surveys, interviews, and focus groups conducted in both Tunceli and the Basque Country were the project’s attempt to take that question seriously. They were not administrative exercises designed to produce numbers for a report. They were acts of listening — deliberate, structured, and imperfect in all the ways that listening always is, but genuine in their intent to let the voice of the participant shape the direction of the work.

What came back from that listening shaped everything that followed.

The Research Architecture: Two Communities, Two Methods, One Question

The Stronger Together project conducted participatory research on both sides of its bilateral partnership, in two different communities, using approaches suited to each context.

In Tunceli, the primary tool was a structured survey distributed to members and employees of Zembul Women’s Production Cooperative. The survey explored five interconnected areas: understanding of social economy and cooperative management principles; digital tool usage and management practices; digital marketing and social media knowledge; gender equality awareness and attitudes; and collaboration skills and leadership capacity. The results were supplemented by individual and small-group interviews with cooperative members, which gave texture and specificity to what the survey data could only sketch in outline.

In the Basque Country, the primary tool was a focus group conducted by ABARKA with eight participants involved in BDS Koop and associated women-led and cooperative initiatives in the Bidasoa region — covering Irún, Hondarribia, Endaia, and Navarra. The focus group, facilitated in person in Irún in May 2025, explored governance dynamics, intercultural collaboration potential, digital transformation, barriers to women’s economic independence, and the participants’ experience of cooperation within and beyond their immediate network.

The two methodologies were chosen deliberately for their different strengths. Surveys produce breadth — a consistent set of data points across a population that allows patterns to emerge. Interviews produce depth — the specific, contextualised account of an individual experience that a questionnaire cannot reach. Focus groups produce something else again: the collective intelligence of a group working through a question together, where what one participant says triggers a response in another, and where the conversation itself produces insights that none of the participants would have arrived at individually. Together, these three approaches gave the project a research architecture that was genuinely multi-perspectival — able to see the two communities from different distances and different angles simultaneously.

What Tunceli Said: The Survey and Interview Findings

The survey results from Zembul members told a story that was, in several ways, different from what project designers might have assumed without asking.

Familiarity with the concept of social economy was more widespread than expected — most members were able to articulate what the cooperative model meant and why it mattered. But the depth of that familiarity varied enormously, and when it came to the strategic and operational dimensions of cooperative management — financial sustainability, governance structures, community economic planning — significant gaps emerged. Participants expressed a clear and consistent desire for more thorough training on the theory and practice of cooperative management, not because they lacked experience of it, but because they wanted to understand the architecture behind what they were already doing by intuition and habit.

The digital picture was honest and perhaps more nuanced than a simple deficit narrative would capture. Participants showed basic competence with tools they used daily — spreadsheets, social media platforms, basic administrative software — but identified a significant gap between using these tools at a surface level and deploying them strategically. The specific needs they articulated were precise: they wanted to understand how to use project management platforms to track and coordinate cooperative activities; they wanted to develop financial monitoring and data analysis skills; they wanted to learn how digital marketing could extend the cooperative’s reach beyond its immediate local network. These were not vague aspirations. They were specific professional needs expressed by people who had already identified, from inside their own work, what was limiting their capacity to grow.

On gender equality, the survey revealed something that deserves attention beyond the context of this single project: awareness was high, commitment was genuine, but the structural conditions that would enable that commitment to translate into organisational change were not consistently in place. Participants wanted more regular training and discussion in this area — not because they needed to be told that gender equality matters, but because they recognised that the gap between values and practice is not closed by conviction alone, and that the tools for closing it require deliberate, ongoing work.

The individual interviews, conducted with Zembul members, added the human dimension to these findings. The interview report captured what surveys cannot: the specific histories behind the data. Women describing the early days of the cooperative — a single pan, ten people, the difficulty of sourcing raw materials, the critics who said women could not succeed in such an initiative — were not providing background information. They were explaining why the training they were asking for mattered. The journey from those early days to a cooperative that runs a café, supplies local markets, and now participates in European projects is not automatic. It is the result of accumulated competences, collective learning, and the particular determination of people who have had to build everything without being sure the structure would hold.

What the Basque Country Said: The BDS Koop Focus Group

The focus group with BDS Koop participants in Irún produced a set of findings that were, in their own way, as revealing as the Tunceli survey — and equally resistant to the simple narratives that external observers tend to construct about civil society organisations.

The eight participants — six women and two men, ranging in age from 25 to 55, from cooperative backgrounds across the Bidasoa border region — were not a homogeneous group with a unified view. They disagreed with each other, challenged each other’s assumptions, and produced what the focus group facilitator noted as a session with high emotional resonance, frequent humour, and occasional genuine tension around questions where the participants held genuinely different positions.

What emerged from the governance discussion was a portrait of cooperative culture that was both inspiring and honestly complex. Power in these organisations did not correlate with financial resource — smaller and less well-resourced cooperatives frequently led initiatives, demonstrating that cooperative governance can create forms of authority that are not dependent on economic weight. Decision-making was collective and trust-based, which made it both resilient and vulnerable: resilient because it did not depend on any single individual’s continued participation, vulnerable because the emotional injuries produced by failed collaborations or broken trust took a long time to heal and could destabilise functioning relationships in ways that more bureaucratic structures might absorb more easily.

The digital dimension produced a particularly vivid discussion. Participants were using AI tools — ChatGPT, DeepSeek — experimentally and cautiously, with the specific kind of ethical attentiveness that cooperative actors tend to bring to new technologies that could affect their communities. One participant’s description of learning to navigate AI tools captured something precise about the experience: the shift from being overwhelmed by information to developing the capacity to discriminate between what is useful and what is not. The focus group identified the absence of dedicated technical and communications personnel as a structural gap that limited the network’s ability to use digital tools strategically, regardless of individual member competence.

The intercultural dimension of the focus group was one of its richest threads. Participants expressed genuine excitement about cross-border and international collaboration — specifically naming interest in connections with Kurdish cooperatives, organisations in Brazil, and other international partners. But this international aspiration coexisted with an honest frustration: the BDS Koop network, despite its geographic position in a border region and its theoretical proximity to both French and Navarrese civil society, felt disconnected from the broader Basque institutional landscape. Endaia — literally a few kilometres away — felt harder to reach than Tunceli. This was not a paradox. It was a description of how institutional networks actually function: international ambition is often easier to cultivate than local coordination, because the former benefits from programme frameworks and formal incentives while the latter depends on the slower and more difficult work of building trust across adjacent communities that have their own histories and their own territorial dynamics.

The Act of Being Asked

There is something that participatory research does that goes beyond the production of data, and it deserves to be named explicitly.

Being asked for your opinion — being invited, in a structured and deliberate way, to describe your experience and have it recorded and treated as material that will shape what comes next — is itself an experience with consequences. This is particularly true for populations who are not accustomed to being asked. Women in cooperative settings who have spent years being the subject of other people’s analyses, the beneficiaries of other people’s programmes, the objects of other people’s development agendas, are not necessarily accustomed to being positioned as the primary source of knowledge about their own situation.

The Zembul survey was designed to position participants exactly this way. The interview protocol gave members the opportunity to speak about their cooperative history, their leadership practices, their aspirations for the future, in their own terms and at their own pace. The BDS Koop focus group created a structured space in which participants could express disagreement, surface contradictions, and work through complexity together without being required to resolve it into a neat summary.

Research in participatory adult education, drawing on traditions from Paulo Freire’s dialogical pedagogy through to contemporary community-based research practice, consistently identifies this positioning — the shift from being a subject of knowledge to being a producer of it — as having its own educational value, separate from and in addition to whatever the research itself produces. The act of articulating your experience for a structured purpose changes your relationship to that experience. It gives it the weight of something that has been recognised, recorded, and treated as worth knowing.

For the Zembul participants, several of whom had limited experience of being consulted in formal research contexts, this was not a trivial experience. For the BDS Koop participants, whose political and cooperative formation had equipped them with a vocabulary for articulating their needs and a habit of collective self-reflection, it offered a different kind of value: the opportunity to have that reflection enter a European project framework and potentially shape the training content that would eventually be delivered to cooperative communities in Turkey.

From Listening to Designing: How Research Shaped the Training

The direct line between the research findings and the project’s intellectual outputs is worth tracing, because it is the clearest evidence that the participatory research was not ornamental.

The needs identified in the Tunceli survey — cooperative management theory, digital tool usage, digital marketing, gender equality practice, collaborative leadership — correspond directly to the eight training modules that the project subsequently developed, four from each partner organisation. The training manual, the presentations, the booklets, the module tests: all of these were designed in response to what participants said they needed, rather than in advance of asking them. The 60% of content delivered in Spanish, Turkish, and English and the 40% in partner local languages was itself a response to the multilingual reality of the participants that the research had documented.

The focus group findings from the Basque Country shaped the project’s understanding of the institutional context it was entering: the challenges of digital literacy, the governance patterns of trust-based cooperatives, the specific gap around communications and technical capacity, the cross-border aspiration that was seeking a framework for realisation. These findings informed how ABARKA positioned its own contribution to the training modules — not as a more developed cooperative advising a less developed one, but as a partner navigating many of the same structural challenges from a different position in the same landscape.

The evaluation surveys conducted before and after each training session — 256 questionnaires across the LTTA activity alone — continued the research process throughout the project, creating a feedback loop that allowed training content to be adjusted in response to participant experience rather than waiting until the project was over to ask what had worked.

What Co-Created Knowledge Looks Like in Practice

Co-creation is a term that appears frequently in Erasmus+ project documentation and carries the risk of becoming a formula — something declared rather than practiced. In Stronger Together, it had a specific and traceable meaning: the knowledge produced by the project was not the knowledge of the project designers imposed on the participants. It was knowledge that emerged from the encounter between the participants’ own expertise about their lives and contexts, and the facilitated research process that gave that expertise a form in which it could be used.

The Zembul cooperative members who completed the survey were not answering questions designed by someone who already knew what they needed. They were responding to an open-ended inquiry, and the specificity and precision of their responses — the identification of Trello and Asana as tools they wanted to learn, the articulation of SEO and email marketing as gaps they had identified in their own promotional capacity, the nuanced recognition that gender equality is both a social goal and an operational imperative — demonstrated that the participants knew what they were talking about in ways that no external needs assessment would have captured.

The BDS Koop participants who spent two hours working through difficult questions about trust, digital tools, territorial disconnection, and the meaning of international cooperation were not being studied. They were thinking, collectively, about the condition of their own work — and in doing so, they were producing a document that will outlast the conversation and contribute to the broader knowledge base about women-led cooperative networks in the Basque borderlands.

This is what participatory research, at its best, does: it transforms the act of data collection into an act of collective intelligence, and ensures that the project built on top of it is built on ground that the participants themselves have stood on and assessed.

What the Data Will Not Tell You

There is one thing to say about the limitations of what surveys and focus groups produce, because the honesty of this article requires it.

Numbers tell you what a population thinks, on average, across the questions you thought to ask. Quotes from a focus group tell you what eight people said in a particular room on a particular afternoon, under the particular conditions of that facilitation. Both are valuable. Neither is complete.

What the research in Stronger Together could not capture was the quality of specific individual experiences — the woman who filled in the survey in a cooperative kitchen with her hands still smelling of the morning’s production, the BDS Koop participant who said something quietly at the edge of the focus group that changed the direction of the conversation and was not fully recorded in the notes. These are not methodological failures. They are the honest edges of what any research instrument can reach.

The articles in this series — this one included — are an attempt to carry some of what the research left at its edges. Not to replace the data, but to live alongside it. To remember that every survey response represents a person, and every focus group theme represents a conversation that was alive and particular in ways that a thematic heading cannot fully hold.

The project listened. The project was changed by what it heard. That change is what makes the listening worth doing.

This article is part of the dissemination series for «Stronger Together» (STOG), an Erasmus+ KA210-ADU Small-Scale Partnership in Adult Education, co-funded by the European Union. The project brings together ABARKA (Spain) and Zembul Women’s Production Cooperative (Tunceli, Turkey) to promote women’s economic independence through education and intercultural exchange.