City/territory

City of 400000 inhabitants

Coordination group

Created in 2010 in the framework of the national project headed by CRIES - to be completed

Process

Second cycle of SPIRAL was applied from 2010 to 2012. to be completed (number of homogeneous groups, action plan,...)

Participation in Responding Together project (1st cycle)

The idea of the meeting was to have a two-day working session, with the first day focused on identifying creative actions to fight against exclusion and the second day on the creative identification of resources and common goods.

The methodology involved : - Inviting people from a heterogenous group + members of the coordination group + members and contacts of Edgeryders (namely, locally active young people) - First workshop : adapted open space methodology to identify creative actions with three themes : 1. Purchasing power, education and jobs ; 2. Active citizenship, dynamics and collective will ; 3. Social solidarity. The persons were randomly placed around the different tables for a 3-hour period of intensive interaction (with the idea to switch tables in-between) - Second workshop : Resource banking : Three tables were set up in the room : 1. a Time bank: to have participants register volunteering propositions, and working time available for local projects of their choice; 2. a Skill bank: to map which skills could be used, taught or provided, and in which projects people wanted them to be used ; 3. a Material bank: to determine useful contacts, tools, spaces, material items or financial support that could be provided or collected together, and for which project.

The first workshop resulted in the following outputs : - Interesting project ideas that weren't formerly proposed by the local coordination group but by others involved in the session; - The participation of 20 people of mixed background and origins, an aspect which was extremely positive since the exchanges were easy going; - The setting up of guidelines (Gilda's guidelines for the project + guidelines chosen by the local group), which proved to be very useful; - At each table criteria was identified by the citizens, according to indicators used, about who had the most; citizens also linked indicators to the different themes; - Each table had an external animator (a facilitator from another Romanian city) who helped with keeping persons focussed and time management, while also participating in the discussions with his/her experience; - For the first round, everybody at each table was asked to write down some initial ideas for actions to be discussed together and shared (plus modified, ameliorated, etc.); - The 2 hour timeframe was too short to switch participants to another table. On a positive note however, it was good to have persons working on themes they weren't used to. It also proved to be a source of "cross-creativity" and co-responsbility; - There was deep discussion about how to expand, i.e. how to increase citizen participation or generate creativity empowerment. The main conclusions noted the importance of having heterogenous groups, to mix the different backgrounds. Therefore, one proposal discussed and agreed upon by everyone was to ask the homogenous groups for ideas and guidelines for actions, then to separate the people wanting to get involved into "heterogenous action creative groups" (this we describe below).

Today will be the resource banking meeting

We had the following ideas : - To start from the actions proposed yesterday - "Be creative in what you may see as a resource !" - It can be resources you want to share or resources you might be able to obtain - Participants will first write some ideas of resources they have in mind - After this, they all share and exchange ideas and find new types of resources - Once they have finished, the tables switch - At the end of the workshop, there might be a common pooling of each table to answer the following question : what action might already have the required resources, meaning that we could actually start it today ?

Joel, Mihaela, Andrei, Noemi