From 5th to 7th of June 2023 we held our final evaluation meetingin Copenhagen in the frame of our project „Emerging communities“
Our 8th (and the last)project activitywithin the framework of this project was our final evaluation meeting, which we held in Denmark from 5th to 7th of June 2023. Meeting was hosted by the association Ethos NGO.
Project „Emerging Communities: Empowerment for social engagement, self-organization and development of local solutions“ gathers 8 partners from 6 European countries: INWOLE (Potsdam, Germany), Im Wandel (Berlin, Germany), Ethos NGO (Odensee, Denmark), Communitism (Athens, Greece), GKP (Novi Sad, Serbia), Italia che Cambia (Torino, Italy), Open cultural center (Barcelona, Spain) and Ethos – Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki, Greece).
At the core of our project is empowerment for social engagement and citizens participation in relation to the development of sustainable communities, neighborhood initiatives and local spaces and networks. This includes the ability to take active roles in the political, social and urban-development processes relevant for the local community, develop cooperative models of social welfare and housing and solidary economy designs that generate income and financial sustainability, as well as to find solutions relevant in the sense of ecological sustainability.
Within 3 days of programme in Denmark, participants have had an opportunity to be introduced with the work of Ethos– their topics, goals and problems association is dealing with, target groups and methods, as well as solutions it developed and some of the local partnerships and networks.
We had a chance to take part in festivities related to the „Festival of minorities“ in a famous city quarter of Christiania, which gave us very good opportunity to learn more about this quarter and its inhabitants. Because Christiania is not (as many wrongly belive) a hippy oasis for tourist consumption („soft drugs“ included), but a very successfull model of an autonomus self-organization of co-housing projects into a real community. It wasn´t a coincidence, but our intention to visit such a symbol of communal self-organization at the end of our Project dedicated exactly to those topics!
However the main goal of our meeting in Copenhagen was the final evaluation of the project Emerging communities. We dedicated to this purpose one whole day, doing detailed recapitalution of the projects main points (goals, objectives and activities), as well as their assessment.
In the course of 3 years we have witnessed one really amazing development of our partnership, which was very much promissing from the early start and the first meeting, but no one expected such an excellent gradual, organic growth. Almost three years later we have one excellent and very inspiring network of 8 organizations, with additional partner groups and individuals (from Thessaloniki, Athens, Mantova, Berlin and other cities) involved in various ways. Network which we have built goes beyond our ongoing project, and its impacts are visible in the form of several, very diverse follow-up activities and new projects developed in the course of this time-frame. And the main outcome of the project – our follow-up project application – we have submitted already in march and we are only waiting for the (hopefully!) good news to arrive in a one month time!
It was a great experience, very empowering in every sense of this word, to participate in this amazing project! Thanks a lot to all, who took part in different stages of the project! Our adventure will for sure continue! Because this is not an end, its just a Beginning!
Photos: Lorena di Maria, Branka Curcic, Petar Atanackovic
Project „Emerging communities“ is co-funded through Erasmus+ Program for adult education of European Union.