Demokratie & Bürgerrechte

At home in Europe: Building participation at the edges of the EU

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The project aims at prototyping and putting into practise new avenues for citizen participation in European politics in order to tackle public disengagement from European institutions and values.

0 €
0%
finanziert
€ 12.302
Budget
Perry Walker
Eingereicht von:
Call4Europe 2015
Kooperation mit:
Call4Europe 2015
Projektumsetzung: 01.01.2016 - 30.06.2016
Land/Region: Großbritannien/Hereford and Worcester
Social Media:
Status: Finanzierung gescheitert
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Worum geht es in dem Projekt?

In the process of becoming reality, the European Union has constantly faced difficulties in providing an identity for all its citizens and actively engaging them in its policy-making processes. In order to strengthen citizen participation in Europe, the project has two different dimensions:

Its pedagogical dimension consists of a series of engagement events addressed to citizens. Innovative participatory methods will be used to allow and encourage citizens to engage and come to a view on key European issues. The second dimension will draw in dissemination and advocacy events to prompt policy makers and other stakeholders to use the knowledge gathered from those public events in shaping relevant policies and debates.

The project is aimed specifically at countries where public disengagement from European institutions is prominent at present. The selected countries are UK, Greece, Serbia and Turkey. However, only the inception phase of the UK country component of the project will be realised via crowdfunding through the Call4Europe. This phase comprises two pilot engagement events to be held in the city of London and a second different location over the first half of 2016.

Was passiert mit dem Geld bei erfolgreicher Finanzierung?

BUDGET FOR THE PHASE 1 OF THE UK COUNTRY COMPONENT

 

Human resources (€)

Part-time project manager: 5.000

Events consultant: 2.400

Events facilitator: 1.300

Volunteer expenses: 300

Subtotal: 9.000

 

Activities (€)

Pilot engagement events: 1000 x 2 = 2.000

 

Overhead cost (€)

Bills: 200

 

Total: 11.200 €

How to build participation

In the process of becoming reality, the European Union has constantly faced difficulties in providing an identity for all its citizens and actively engaging them in its political agenda-setting and policy-making processes.

In order to strengthen citizen participation in Europe, what is needed is on the one hand, to provide citizens with the means for gaining an understanding on relevant issues and an informed opinion on what could be done to tackle them, and on the other hand, to ensure that all voices are effectively heard and consequently incorporated into policies and legislation.

To that end, the project has two different dimensions:

Its pedagogical dimension consists of a series of engagement events addressed to citizens. Innovative participatory methods developed by Perry Walker will be used to allow and encourage citizens to engage and come to a view on key European issues, while collecting data on their initial opinions and the evolution of their ideas by the end of the activities. This will provide an insight into common conceptions and the most widespread visions and proposals to address those issues.

The project intends to develop an outreach work by placing the focus on groups with different degrees of exclusion such as the youth, migrants and women. The reason for that is to encourage that the voices that usually remain unheard in political affairs be at the core of the activities and debates in this project. In order to ensure that the project reaches those targeted groups, we will identify for each country at least one organisation to work with in each of the above categories.

The second dimension will draw in dissemination and advocacy events to prompt policy makers, civil society organisations (CSOs) and other stakeholders to use the knowledge gathered from those public events in shaping relevant policies and debates. Moreover, a publication will be produced to systematize all the knowledge drawn from the comparative analysis of the different country components of the project.

As the main outcome of the project, it is expected that participants would develop an informed opinion on European and national issues and an interest in engaging in the building of Europe. Furthermore, through those learning-sharing activities, the insights drawn from the debates will not remain solely in the realm of the individual enhanced understanding, but will also transcend to the public sphere.

The project is inherently transnational and aimed specifically at countries where public disengagement from European institutions is prominent at present. This is a consequence of their changing situation within the European Union, as they are either in the process of entering the EU or in a current situation that might lead them to leave it or deepen the existing disengagement from EU institutions.

The project will be ideally developed in four countries: UK, Greece, Serbia and Turkey. However, only the inception phase - Phase 1 - of the UK country component of the project will be realised via crowdfunding through the Call4Europe.

 

Phase 1 of the UK country component of the project

This phase comprises two pilot engagement events to be held in the city of London and a second different location. The first event will take place around April and the second one in June at the latest. The preparation stage of those events will last around three months. Over this time, the event consultant in the team will work with relevant organisation to bring together 25 participants for each event within the targeted groups.

A range of methods will structured the engagement events and encourage people to discuss political issues at two different levels:

European level. Participants will discuss about the kind of Europe they would like to live in. In doing so, they will be faced with important current issues within the European Union agenda that will define to a large extent the future of Europe and, as a result, the lives of European citizens.

National level. For the UK component of the project, the specific national issue to be approach in both events is the referendum, to be held by 2016 or 2017, on whether to stay or leave the EU.

Promotion of the crowdfunding campaign

Research shows that most successful crowdfunding projects receive 25-40% of their revenue from their first, second and third degree connections.  Once a project has seen some traction, other people appear to support campaigns they believe in.

So in order to promote the crowdfunding campaign, we will start contacting these connections by email and / or sharing the campaign with them through our social media profiles.  Moreover, we will use the Facebook Page of the project to reach a greater number of people. We will be posting about relating subjects on that page for the duration of the campaign.

Another strategy will be contacting targeted individuals or organisations that may potentially have an interest on the project.

More about the methods

Democs is a game that can be played anywhere. Rounds of cards enable people to look at a wide range of salient issues from different perspectives in a group discussion. The aim is not to win or persuade others but to understand. The other distinguishing feature of Democs is that it integrates the provision of information with its discussion.

See <link http: www.scotlandlovesdemocracy.org>example of use.

<link http: www.crowd-wise.org crowd_wise home.html>Crowd Wise is a face to face format for 20 – 30 people over two to three hours.  As a starting point, four to six possible answers to a starting question are provided. People are divided into small groups, one for each option, and asked to advocate for that option.

The method uses preference voting - where people put all the possible answers in order of preference.  Another important difference with the above method is that with Crow Wise people ‘do politics’: groups may alter their option or merge it with others, in order to make the result more appealing to all the participants in the second preference vote. There is often considerable agreement by the end of the event.

<link http: www.openupuk.org>Open Up is an online tool. Like Crowd Wise, it also offers - for most topics- a set of possible answers to a starting question, with participants asked to put them in preference order at the start and again at the finish. There are additional facts and stories provided for those who do not know a lot about the subject area. The arguments are paired, with each pair being ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in relation to a key question for that topic.

Project team

Perry Walker is a Fellow of two London-based think tanks, the New Economics Foundation (NEF, where he used to work, and Involve, where he used to be a trustee. In his early career he worked for the British civil service and for the John Lewis Partnership, a large employee-owned retailer in the UK. For the last fifteen years, he has been developing and using innovative methods for participative democracy.

MP Leroux is an environmental and political artist. She is French, but lives in England. She has a background in publishing.

Virginia Calvo has been active as a human and planet rights advocate for more than a decade. Her specialisms are on women's rights, trade justice and democracy. While she started her work in the international development sector, focussing on Central America and the Middle Eastern and North Africa region, she has more recently shifted her geographic focus to Europe. Professionally Virginia has worked for 5 years as a project manager for two women's rights organisations in the UK (Central America Women's Network and Roj Women's Association), and more recently as a campaigner for a year in a trans-European organisation (WeMove.EU). She is currently serving on the Board of a transEuropean feminist network (Women in Development Europe).

Maria Botella is a computing teacher and social researcher. Back in Madrid, her hometown, she worked as cultural mediator in Medialab Prado, a digital culture space, where she developed an interest on the sociological dimensions of digital technologies and practises and built experience in mediation processes. Since she arrived to London, she has worked and volunteered for different organisations, in most cases focused on issues related to democracy and / or the environment. Within these organisations she has contributed to event planning and content creation, conducted researcher for campaigns and work in the development of digital tools to map small community groups or improve the election process in Sierra Leona.

Projektstandort: , , Großbritannien

Finanzierungsziel:
€ 11.200,-
Abwicklungsgebühr:
€ 1.102,-
Crowdfunding-Summe:
€ 12.302,-
Auszahlungsbetrag Teil 1:
€ 7.500,-
Auszahlungsbetrag Teil 2:
€ 1.230,-
Abgabedatum Abschlussbericht:
14.07.2016

Weitere

We are looking for volunteers to help with the facilitation of the engagement events

Noch benötigte Zeit: 4 / 4 Stunden

Weitere

We are looking for volunteers to help with the facilitation of the engagement events

Noch benötigte Zeit: 4 / 4 Stunden
Perry Walker
Eingereicht von:
Call4Europe 2015
Kooperation mit:
Call4Europe 2015