Civil Trust Building

AT A GLANCE

This one year co-operation and capacity building action developed by the European House, Budapest, Hungary, include LDAs in the Western Balkans as 7 local contact points for promoting EU integration and regional networking actions for improved understanding and awareness of both enlargement and integration related issues.
The project is supported by the Prince programme of the European Commission.

OBJECTIVES

In particular, the project wishes to

• provide factual, up-to-date information to the larger public of the 6 project participating countries on the enlargement process and candidate and potential candidate countries in the Western Balkans showing their contemporary reality;
• “bridge-building” between the citizens of EU Member States and the candidate and potential candidate countries in the Western Balkans with the aim to promote tolerance, mutual understanding and trust;
• raise public awareness and understanding about the importance of the European venture in general and the significance and impact of the enlargement process in particular through stimulating informal public debates and activities;
• foster European identity in the region of the participating countries through cross-border actions.

ACTIVITIES

• Internship Programme

7 CSO representatives from the Western Balkans region will spend an intensive 2-week period and assist the work of the project partners. This will include among others the distribution of a questionnaire on enlargement, preparation of the national citizens’ consultations and the bus tour with the Enlargement Labyrinth and participation at the mid-term evaluation event in Vienna. The 7 interns (one per Western Balkan country) will be identified locally.

• “Civil Trust-building” bus tour visiting 5 participating countries with the Enlargement Labyrinth

The bus tour focuses to bring the idea of enlargement and citizens of the candidate and potential candidate countries to the everyday citizen of the EU member states. The tour will last 8 days. The bus will take place in mid-2012 and have stop-overs in those locations (Budapest-Bratislava-Klagenfurt-Ljubljana-Udine) where the Enlargement Labyrinth (a 100 sqm portable instalment made of plastic rods) will be installed to attract local people, collect reactions and video messages.

Other Activities:

• kick-off event in Budapest (17-18 February 2012), mid-term evaluation event in Vienna (June 2012), final conference in Rome (November 2012)
• national citizens’ consultation (one per project country)
• enlargement information distributed on international trains in the regionThe project will last from 2011 to 2013.

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