Katrin
Parve
Validated Lead Expert
Generic Skills
B.1. Understanding of integrated and sustainable urban development:
I have a Master degree in social sciences in education management. In my master's thesis in 2018, I researched the creation of the vision of leaders and its sharing within the institution. Purposeful and inclusive leadership is very important to me.
I have been involved in many projects at very different levels, from internal to international.
I have been working in education more than 20 years. Started working as a teacher. For almost 10 years, I was the head teacher at a large school (over 1,000 students) and I was in charge of the whole school learning process. For the last 4 years, I have been working at the Tallinn Education Department and my task is to coordinate the work of schools and participate in the general development of education in the city. 1/3 of Estonian education is concentrated in the capital, because the population here is the largest.
Estonia's development has been very fast and Estonian Education is also very well developed and highly valued in the world. Our biggest challenge in education today is to develop soft values and a physical school environment. It is also a part of my daily work - finding ways to develop it. However, education cannot be developed in the city alone. Education is only one part of urban development, and we are also involved in urban development, population change, sustainable economic development, and so on. Therefore, the development of the city must be seen as a whole.
B.2. Understanding of exchange and learning processes at transnational level:
The first experience of exchanging international best practice is from working at a school, where I organized many meetings with twinning schools from other countries (Finland, Sweden) as a head teacher - the content of the meetings I organized.
Since I started working in Tallinn Education Department (the Estonian capital city, 1/3 education is in that city), I have been involved in several international projects. First, I was involved as a member of the project team in the URBACT III Stay Tuned project.
After that, for 2.5 years I have been the Estonian leader in the URBACT On Board project. It has been up to me to lead this whole project and to organize the network.
In April 2019, I represented Estonia on the Baltic Nordic Transfer Network Campus. I was a representative and leader of our team. In May 2020, I represented Estonia on the Baltic Nordic Online meeting.
I have written the successful and funded Erasmus + project Inclusive Education Mobility project, which I led. Within this project, experiences were exchanged and co-operation with Estonian and Dutch universities took place, and 10 educational institutions participated in that project. We visited a Dutch university with a local team, where we studied for 5 days and visited local educational institutions.
I have also been a participant in the immersion projects of the Estonian Ministry of Education: participated in local international study days, study visits in Finland and Ireland - a 1-week study visit.
B.3. Proficiency in English:
In the Estonian education system, all those who have obtained a Master's degree have English at B2 level. I have a Master's degree in social sciences in the field of education management, which I acquired at Tallinn University in 2018.
Expertise for the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities:
Summary Expertise for the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities:
I have experience in transnational projects. I am able to design, organize and deliver activities aimed at facilitating peer learning and effective working relationships not only through physical meetings/ seminars but also at a distance, in between meetings (using webinars, social media, online surveys, etc.), including virtual meetings. I understand how to adapt methods and tools to various levels of understanding/knowledge/experience that can be found in transnational partnerships. I have arranged transnational meetings to create lively exchange and focused discussion, also paying attention to the physical environment of the participants. I consider it important to create strong teams that take into account the different needs of the partners and are very flexible. My role as an expert is to develop an action plan based on the interests and needs of all participants. I know different tools to engage and mobilize stakeholders. I have good leadership qualities, clear self-expression, I am a good listener, I can generalize and make connections, I am able to solve conflicts peacefully, I know how to empower and motivate stakeholders.
I can create presentations that are short but meaningful, use a variety of web solutions, support the verbalization and documentation of knowledge and practice from participants to enable comparison, exchange, peer review. I am able to capture learning and produce concise reports that incorporate good practices and policy messages.
Thematic expertise:
Theme / Policy:
Active Inclusion of Target Groups
Summary Thematic expertise:
My main goal for the last 4 years has been to continuously promote education and involve people in the implementation of educational innovations.
I have many years of experience in carrying out various projects and actively involving target groups at different levels. I have participated in several international educational projects: two-way immersion development in Estonia (with Ireland); inclusive education mobility project (with the Netherlands); educational innovation networking project (5 partner cities). I have launched a number of projects at local level related to the involvement of parents; the establishment of regional co-operation between educational institutions; the creation of a co-operation network between the school and the child protection and police; the empowering of class teachers-tutors.
For many projects I have produced thematic inputs to feed in the learning process of in projects, reports that incorporate learning from exchange and learning activities. I am able put forward good practice and policy messages targeting city practitioners and urban policy-makers. I have written several successful project applications that have received funding.
Expertise support to local authorities and other stakeholders in designing & delivering integrated and participatory policies
E.1. Knowledge on participatory methods and tools for co-production and implementation of local polices :
As I have mentioned earlier, I started working with the local URBACT III On Board team using the problem tree method.
My role has been to prepare the content of all ULG meetings, to plan the agenda, to select and invite speakers, to prepare the necessary materials and to pass them on to the working group. In different meetings, I have used different types of group work: analyzing questions, supplementing the writings of previous groups in world cafe format, analyzing statements and voting between them. I also used various URBACT methods provided by the Lead Excpert and some from URBACT Campus (Riga). I have used different energizers, because our meetings were usually at least 3 hours long.
By creating a child support network at the City level in cooperation with the school-child protection-police, I used the method of case analysis. There are 8 districts in Tallinn. I organized meetings in each district. At the meeting, we formed groups where all the different stakeholders were represented and discussed the role of someone in such a situation on the basis of a real-life story. Later, we drafted cooperation agreements from all districts descriptions. As a result of these meetings, a number of new agreements were reached on how to reach the child in need more quickly at different levels, and ways and forms of exchanging information were agreed upon.
E.2. Knowledge on integrated approach for the design, delivering, monitoring and evaluation of urban strategies/policies:
In the URBACT III On Board project, we agreed that with ULG to draw up an Action Plan for ourselves at the beginning and to see how we progress in each ULG meeting. We created the Action Plan together and everyone contributed to that. That helped us to monitor the progress of the project. At the end of the project, we used a questionnaire sent by Lead Expert to assess the impact of project and composed a survey. We added few more questions, because we were just writing a follow-up project at the national level at the time, and we also wanted to get input from the participants.
When creating the Transfer Plan, we wrote down the expectations and needs of different stakeholders based on the project. We have followed and kept in mind their fulfillment throughout the project. So Transfer Plan was our work document.
E.3. Awareness of the main policy and funding schemes for sustainable urban development at EU and national level:
On EU level The ERDF aims to strengthen economic and social cohesion in the EU by correcting imbalances between it's regions. The URBACT programme has been the European Territorial Cooperation programme aiming to foster sustainable integrated urban development in cities across Europe. It is an instrument of the Cohesion Policy and co-financed by the ERDF (around 78%), the 28 Members States, Norway and Switzerland.
Urbact has 3 types of networks: Action Planning, Implementation and Transfer.
I have been personally part of two types.
It is possible to write an application for being a lead partner or you can competite on open calls to be a member of network which is interesting for your country.
Each country has it's own local NATIONAL URBACT POINT (NUP). In Estonia, it is located in Tartu and is led by Kadri Leetmaa. The role of the NUP is to bring together as many partners as possible. They translate the necessary materials into the local language, mediate applications, describe which countries and on which topics they are interested in Estonia, etc.
Thus, they are best informed about which cities in Estonia are already involved in URBACT projects and can give advice on how to become a member of the URBACT team. They also have the experience and competence to support the preparation of applications. They are the primary source of URBACTnews in Estonia. You should also keep up to date with news and calls published on URBAT's website.
E.4. Ability to understand specific local situations and adapt tools and content to different local realities:
When we were building the URBACT III On Board project, I have taken full account of the specifics of our city. From the early beginning, it was clear that the Lead Partner, city of Viladecans, of this project and our city are very different in size, and it is certain that the Best Practices will have to be partially implemented and adapted.
The first decision was initially to involve 3 out of 8 districts.
In addition, we also involved kindergartens in the project at the local level. There were no any other country which involved kindergartens, but kindergartens are equal partners for Tallinn, and if we have a project for educational institutions, it is elementary for us to involve them. This is a local reality of Tallinn.
The involvement of the political level proved to be the most difficult for us, because in Estonia the institutions are in a sense very autonomous, but while they want to make changes in the staff, city are very conservative.
We also adapted the projects of different cities for ourselves and we did not manage to implement any of them in exactly the same way.
My role was to be a leader of the team that made different decisions.
Summary Expertise:
I have knowledge and experience about different methods and tools for co-production and implementation of local polices (including proactive outreach to different stakeholders, conflict resolution, community dialogue). I have been designing and applying monitoring tools for integrated and sustainable urban polices. I have ability and experience to understand specific local situations and adapt tools and content to different local realities so as to ensure consistency in the design and delivery of integrated and participatory policies across participants in transnational projects.
I have been participateing in networking at different levels. I have carried out analyzes of networking needs and identified possible outcomes and indicators to measure outcomes.
I have faced of involving the political level in the project. I have some useful ideas why this is so important and what the obstacles may be if it is not achieved.
I know the ERDF funding principles for URBACT and NUP operating principles. So I know how to keep myself informed about sustainable urban development policies, trends and funds.
Informations
Residence location:
Estonia
Languages:
Estonian - Mother tongue
Foreign Languages level:
Foreign languages:
Email:
kati.parve@gmail.com