WHAT IS TARARAINA?
TARARAINA is a Social Initiative Cooperative, rural-based and non-profit, specialized in innovation and rural revitalization. Their mission is to contribute to a more balanced, sustainable and inclusive territorial development, applying innovation and social creativity as a strategy to achieve it.
TARARAINA is organized around five lines of work:
Own Projects: Developing pilot projects to address rural challenges, testing solutions, and creating replicable intervention models.
Social Consulting: Providing consulting services and collaborative projects with public and private entities in areas like training, project management, rural participation, SDGs, CSR, and more.
Social Economy Promotion: Supporting the Social and Solidarity Economy in rural areas through cooperative project development, training for entrepreneurs, and awareness of social economy frameworks.
Training and Mentoring: Offering education and mentorship to foster social economy and capacity-building in rural communities.
Innovation Umbrella: Providing support to new initiatives with social or environmental impact, helping them grow and establish themselves.
Some Tararaina projects
Entrepreneurial Center in Yebra de Basa.
EREA Project: participatory sessions in rural areas of Aragón.
Ideas de Pueblo: a platform supporting rural entrepreneurship with social impact.
Camino ESS: alternative tourism with Social and Solidarity Economy experiences.
La Almada de Yebra Hostel: utilizing municipal structures to drive local tourism and development.
ECO-RIZ Project: revitalizing an old community laundry to process organic licorice into products.
ECORaIZ project
The ECORaIZ Project aims to revitalize an old community laundry in Pina de Ebro, transforming it into a workshop for organic licorice production. This project restores the traditional cultivation of licorice in the Ebro River’s flood zones, adapting these areas for sustainable production. Additionally, ECORaIZ processes the licorice locally, increasing its market value and generating economic benefits for the region.
Sustainable practices are a priority, with biomass from the licorice crop cycle being reused every four years to maintain the fields. Finally, the project offers employment and training opportunities to socially vulnerable women, fostering a collaborative environment that strengthens the social fabric and contributes to inclusive rural development.
Actors involved
Besides the founders of the cooperative Tararaina, Bárbara Marqués and Ángela Millán, this initiative is being developed together with the local government and agri-food entities of the region. A close public-private collaboration will be established, with the direct involvement of the City Council of Pina de Ebro, through the support in the planting of liquorice in the municipal fields of private use and the transfer of the premises of the old laundry. The municipality also provides support in the selection of the women who will participate in the project and in facilitating their training. Agri-food actors in the region are involved particularly to add value to the cultivation side streams.
Impact for bioeconomy development
The ECORaIZ project is a great example on how social and biobased economy can be developed side by side, bringing both social and economic benefits to rural regions. Revitalizing the cultivation of liquorice not only restores the tradition of the area but also enables the sustainable production of valuable ecologic products with many applications. These cultivations can withstand the geographic particularities of the floodable areas near the Ebro river, and the mechanical steps that will be implemented will increase the product value substantially. Furthermore, the project envisions the use of secondary side streams (leaves and trunks from prunings) which can be converted into pellets for energy production and animal feed, for example. Thus, the envisioned value chain aims at maximizing circularity while respecting the environment.
Social Impact
Although it is still at an early stage, this agri-food and social innovation project can become a driving force for the regional development, and an example against depopulation. The workshop will be offered for collaborative management so that other organic producers in the area can transform and prepare their own organic products for consumption and / or marketing, provided that this transformation is carried out in similar processes to liquorice, requires the same infrastructure and meets ecological criteria. The people selected to work with liquorice will be women from the Ribera Baja del Ebro region, in a situation of social vulnerability, who will be trained in the product and in self-management, with the aim of setting up their own cooperative in the medium term, in a process supervised and supported by Tararaina. Importantly, the premises are close to the public school and kindergarten, which will facilitate conciliation and self-management.
Challenges for implementation
This project has been well supported by the local government and well received by the population. The main current challenge involves the development of economically sound value chains from the liquorice side streams, as its collection happens within a large timeframe of 4 years and in this meantime other valorization activities must take place.