Get a glimpse of the inspiring CHANGE! study visits

In Amarante the CHANGE! partners explored the first step of the Collaborative Framework, and how partners’ IAP themes can be linked to that first step. Next to that, Amarante provided some insight to some of their good practices together with the ULG. These practices included: 1. social innovation mapping “Habitat Project”, 2. Urban Innovation Lab: “Amarante Invest” 3. youth centre; 4. youth council and youth participative budgeting; 5. University of Amarante Seniors. CHANGE! partners were inspired by these practices and some said they would explore options of implementing it (partly) in their own cities.

 

In order to keep on working with some tools provided at the Urbact Summer University, one of the ULG methodologies, the Problem Tree and stakeholder identification, was again explained, followed by a practical exercise, where CHANGE! partners created the Problem Tree and identified stakeholders for challenges of partners from Riga, Skåne, Forli and Nagykanizsa. This exercise proved to be very helpful to really understand how this tool works in practice. 

 

We finalised the meetings in Amarante by playing the Sociopoly board game, a board game designed by László Bass, sociologist and professor of Eötvös Loránd University, on the model of the well-known game Monopoly. Players (virtual families of players) go through days of an average month – accelerating time with the dice – and they try to survive the month under the financial circumstances of a long-term unemployed person. The game fits very well with the CHANGE! topic and has proved to be a good tool of raising awareness and changing approaches concerning the hardship of poor families.

 

 

 

The third transnational meeting of CHANGE! took place in Gdansk, Poland, on 4 and 5 April 2017. These two intensive days of meetings focused on the second stage of the Collaborative Framework: “How alignment between sectors, cultures and silos can be boosted by new approaches to risks, incentives and resources?” This second step looks into the need for strong and equal partnership among stakeholders collaboration in public administration, especially with regards to public services. 

 

CHANGE! partners already partly tackled this issue during the first and second study visit, but in Gdansk we looked into the issue by jointly analysing how this second step works/worked in four partner cities, namely:

After short introductory presentations of these four cities, CHANGE! partners were divided into four groups, one group for each of the presented cases, to provide partners the opportunity to obtain more detailed information and to discuss the cases in-depth. 

Gdansk organised some inspiring field visits to show some of their cases with a special attention to Neighbourhood Houses as the main theme of their IAP, and internal reorganisation of the municipality to better meet emerging social needs (working groups, crossing silos).

 

The meeting in Gdansk also provided the opportunity to get feedback from CHANGE! partners on the network and on the Urbact programme in general: where do we stand? What goes very well? What are learning points? This input was asked by the representative of the Secretariat to discuss the Mid-term review.

Before the meeting in Gdansk took place, it already became clear that some partners had some difficulties with the development of their Integrated Action Plan, or that it was not entirely clear what such plan really entails. The coordinator of CHANGE!, Eindhoven, provided a short presentation, with links to guidelines and examples of such IAPs, followed by a working session, during which each city separately would already start working on their IAP, on the structure in general, and what could be written in each chapter. This session really helped partners to get a better understanding of what is expected.