The Gdansk School of Solidarity Everyday

What is URBACT CHANGE! in Gdansk about?

Urbact CHANGE! in Gdansk is very much about finding ways in which different local stakeholders might start or develop their co-operation to improve the lives of people in their local communities.

When we think about the stakeholders we mean social services, municipality, community organisations, district councils, and so forth. When we talk about local communities in Gdansk, we mean very intuitively created networks of people who live in local areas which they identify with and whose needs (social, psychological, economical, etc.) are to some extent met within these local networks.

Locality has been an important subject in Gdańsk and other large Polish cities for quite some time. It is due to a certain type of a “sociological vacuum”  left as a legacy of communist regime which caused distrust that made people retreat to their closest families. This legacy of lack of trust is a major fallback for post-communist societies affecting social, economic and political spheres.  

Therefore deepening our understanding of how local communities work or don’t work is crucial for developing new ways of delivering public services in Gdansk.
 

What are the important challenges listed in IAP?

In the first phase of working on our IAP we named an important challenge which was lack of adequate co-operation, mutual understanding and level of competence among people who dedicated their careers or life-practice to developing local communities. In the process of discussing this matter we realized that we often work nearby each other, use similar language to describe things but we seem to understand it all differently. Another important issue was “lack of successors” in some areas. Therefore we decided that we need to begin a process of developing each other’s’ competence, networking and supporting each other in order to improve the services we provide.

Why did we think that testing might be a good idea before we confirm the IAP?

The URBACT CHANGE! IAP in Gdansk is planned to be confirmed as a local policy by the Council of Gdansk. Therefore it is expected to be quite well thought through and be lasting for a fair amount of time. As a local URBACT CHANGE! group we wanted to make sure that what we recommend fits well in local reality. That was the reason why we decided to test the training project first and see how it works. Another reason to undertake this task was to uphold motivation of local group stakeholders - who started to ask questions about “when are we going to actually do something after all this discussing?”.
 

Planning

We started planning the test in spring 2017 and implementing it from October to December 2017. Essentially we wanted to organize a seminar cycle for people engaged in local communities who were supposed to be quite advanced in their practice and would want to reflect on how the local training programme should be like. We wanted to invite people who work on subjects mostly from outside Gdansk to show us their experience regarding issues that we are facing. The main subjects being:

• the role of a community facilitator and a community organizer
• regeneration projects
• streetworking
• community organising for excluded minorities
• communities and urban spaces
• communication styles/needs/challenges
• support we need in Gdansk

It was also important to send out a message the we see the need to take care of people who focus on supporting and animating people in local communities.

On a practical level we cooperated with European Solidarity Centre and the BoosINNO local group and placed our training seminar in Solidarity Everyday Programme for social activists planned for implementation by the European Solidarity Centre in partnership with Municipality of Gdansk.
 

Implementing

The recruitment process came out as a surprise, because apart from people whom we knew also some new community facilitators and NGO employees came, who found our add interesting and wanted to expand their understanding of their role in the locality. The group we finally got consisted of: community facilitators and organizers from NGOs and social services, NGO workers working on local community projects, municipality employee responsible for local development, neighborly houses facilitators and managers, a district councilor, local activists, social economy managers. 

People’s expectations were quite general and mainly focused on networking and getting some insight as to what their role should/could be. We also explained the broader picture: the URBACT CHANGE! group work on the IAP, testing exercise, what we already knew about local communities in Gdańsk. 

We met with our group five times for long, 8-hour sessions on Saturdays between October and December. The group consisted of 20 people and took part in workshops, presentations and discussions lead by a coach, a social psychologist, a social worker, a streetworker, a community organizer and an urban planner, and reflected on our experience with the help of their experiences and tools, which touched upon regeneration, street education, Roma community inclusion, city planning, as well as self-development and communication.
 

Evaluating

Before entering the process we planned an evaluation and the evaluator was present at all sessions, lead a workshop, made notes and undertook a short survey. What we looked at was not only the feedback but also enabling factors and recommendations. Here is what we found:

1. the feedback was positive and participants gave a very clear outline about what they expect from the continuations (they even gave the dates for 2018!);
2. they gave clear information about the subjects they wanted to be covered in 2018: theory regarding community development and community organizing, list of competence of a facilitator/organizer, effective communication, local community diagnosis, working with specific groups, e.g. children, seniors, using project methodology in community development, code of conduct of people who work with communities, streetworking techniques, urban planning for local communities, working with conflict (solving, self-organizing), sports in community development;
3. with regard to teaching methods they recommended: case studies, service learning (learning on-site), workshops, motivated facilitators, individual consultations regarding participants’ own projects, on-line materials and tool kits;
4. on organizational level participants expect: continuation, dates given well in advance, meetings only on Saturdays.

An important learning for us was to see how the co-creation and networking process performed by the local URBACT CHANGE! group helped to build an offer which was very well adjusted to the needs of our participants. The fact that it was ingrained in a long term process also helped to make it trustworthy and open to suggestions, which gave people sense of ownership.

While implementing the workshop we looked at possible needs of other groups working in localities of Gdansk. We used our local URBACT CHANGE! group to find out who may also need this kind of support. It turns out that while the programme for community facilitators/organizers continues in 2018, we will most probably organize additional cycles dedicated to: advanced community activists to prepare them to become local trainers; district councilors and leaders of groups experiencing social exclusion.
 

Summary

The process of testing the capacity building programme for stakeholders involved in different aspects of community development was an important step for us to see how co-creation can be used to adjust solutions to participants’ needs; to ensure IAP recommended actions are adequate, and last but not least, to keep our local URBACT CHANGE! group participants interested throughout the project .    

Written by Monika Chabior
Gdańsk, January 2018