modified Tuesday, 13 December 2011

2011 – 2013, a project funded by the Europe for Citizens Programme, with a budget of 173,790 Eur (including own contribution).

The project is conducted by CeRe – the Resource Center for Public Participation in partnership with the Central and Eastern Europe Citizens Network, Center for Community Organizing (Slovakia), Forum for Community Organizing (Germany), European Think Tank Pour la Solidarité (Belgium) and the Unit for Social Innovation and Research – Shipyard (Poland).

The project aims at creating a framework for common action and reflection for citizens, practitioners and researchers from five countries (Belgium, Germany, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland). CeRe and its partners analyze the current state-of-art and explore solutions to increase the citizens' involvement in local public decision making. The project also generates direct collective action, identifies, researches and promotes models of citizens' empowerment at local level.

Gathering partners from all the above mentioned countries, the main activities follow three components:

• Action – the partners in Romania and Slovakia, with input from the German partner, carry out a community organizing process stimulating local citizens to take civic action.
• Reflection and debate – the partners in Romania, Slovakia, Belgium and Poland research citizens' participation initiatives, exploring local specificities, identifying successful strategies as well as obstacles met by practitioners. Each will produce case-studies as well as a paper on the state of art of public participation in their country. For Romania, a survey will also be contracted. All this work will be analyzed and presented in two international conferences gathering various stakeholders.
• Dissemination – all the deliverables will be distributed to practitioners, academia, think-tanks and decision-makers to inspire their work.

The project also builds a cooperation network of practitioners and academia interested in increasing and researching citizens' participation.

Building on local activism the project aims to bring new voices into debate and to find ways to bring the local activism into European decision-making.