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

So beschreibt die Plattform "Respekt.net" das Crowdfunding-Projekt "At home in Europe: Building participation at the edges of the EU"

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 analy...