Mois : janvier2019

The Local Democracy Agency (ADL) Kairouan-Tunisia organised an event on the occasion of the International Solidarity Week entitled “Festival of Solidarity”. It is the first time this festival takes place in Kairouan and it was held in cooperation with the Municipality of Kairouan, the Junior Economic Chamber of Kairouan (JCI-junior) and the Super Bike Kairouan group, taking advantage of their experience and know-how in managing public events about biking.

The program of the festival resulted in two major events held simultaneously on the 22nd and 23rd December 2018. The first day was built around the values of sharing and cultural exchange among young people from Strasbourg, Burkina Faso and Kairouan who have presented dance and theatre performances, photo projections and testimonial videos about their civic engagement. These exchanges are intended to continue in order to build more bridges allowing youth from all the Mediterranean region to discover and communicate better. The cultural evening took place in Dar Bouras, a former residence in the heart of the Medina of Kairouan, which has become for the ADL a privileged place of commitment for the preservation of the heritage.

The key event of the second day was the “Kairouan City Bike”, which played a vital role as a call to promote youth citizens’ engagement for sustainable human development. The support and participation in the activity of the Mayor of Kairouan, Mr Radouéne Bouden was extremely appreciated. Mr Bouden has biked through the city and its historic monuments with many other citizens, thus representing a concrete example of the prominent role of cycling as an instrument to promote sustainable urban development.

This mobilization of citizens aims at preparing the continuation of the partnership between the city of Kairouan and the city of Strasbourg, ALDA and ADL Tunisia on urban mobility.

More than a third of Brussels’ inhabitants are foreigners with voting rights in their local elections. But despite many of them working within the EU institutions at the heart of the Continent’s democracy, Belgium has close to the lowest voter participation rate among EU citizens in Europe.

Why? Which barriers EU mobile citizens face to exercise their political rights? Which initiatives have been developed to tackle the issue?

This is what the webinar taking place on January 29th will exactly dig into. With their stories and experiences, Thomas Huddlestone, leader of VoteBrussels campaign and research director at the Migration Policy Group, and Anna Zaremba, EU Rights Coordinator at the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS), will lead the participants to explore the trends, barriers and initiatives of EU citizens that live in an EU country different from their original one (ici the registration link).

About: The webinar is part of a series of webinars that the European Association for Local Democracies (ALDA) has been developed in the framework of the FairEU project, aiming at fostering the successful inclusion of EU mobile citizens in their host EU country’s civic and political life.

The 6 webinars will take place once per month starting from January until June, with a duration of about 1 hour each. Drawing on FairEU project’s results and on the experience of invited specialist speakers, the webinars will be devoted every time to a different aspect: stakes and tools to increase the turnout of EU elections, facts and learning from last Brussels’ elections, the Road Trip Project to foster youth’s support to EU, reports on political participation of EU mobile citizens in the European countries.

Target: The series targets all those professionals (CSOs, public authorities, companies) and citizens interested in citizen engagement, political participation and expat-related services, such as offices/ platforms/ blogs/ services supporting the arrival and integration of newcomers.

A participatory-oriented approach, within the limits of online webinar technology, characterizes the webinars. Participants will have the possibility to make live questions and observations, provide feedbacks that will be integrated in the following webinars and propose the topic for the last webinar.

Info: We are glad to inform you that the registration to the webinar is free of charge. It can be done by registering ici. You can keep update about the outcome of every webinar and the introduction of the following ones by subscribing to this monthly, 5-minute-reading-time newsletter (subscription form).

Have a look at our first newsletter! 

Le prossime elezioni del Parlamento europeo, che si terranno nel maggio 2019, sono cruciali per il futuro dell’Unione, e dunque per il nostro futuro.

In tutta Europa i cittadini di 18 anni saranno chiamati a votare per eleggere i rappresentanti degli Parlamento europeo e per migliaia di loro sarà la prima opportunità per esercitare il diritto di voto.

Abbiamo bisogno di te, anche e soprattutto a livello locale, per raggiungere i giovani elettori e chiarir loro cosa è in gioco in queste consultazioni.

In che modo puoi assicurarti che i tuoi coetanei sappiano per cosa sono chiamati a votare, come votare e le conseguenze delle loro azioni?

ALDA offre 5 contributi di 300 € ciascuno a giovani fino a 21 anni residenti nella provincia di Vicenza, per la realizzazione di iniziative (azioni di strada, campagne online, ecc.) volte alla sensibilizzazione dei giovani sulle prossime elezioni europee. Tali azioni potranno essere messe in atto tra Febbraio e Aprile 2019.

 Hai una grande idea su come incoraggiare i giovani a votare? Sei un residente in provincia di Vicenza ed hai un’età compresa fra i 18 e i 21 anni?

Invia il profilo della tua iniziativa in PDF (max. 2 pagine) a irene.zanetti@aldaintranet.org entro il 15 febbraio 2019, spiegando chiaramente:

• quante persone raggiungerete e attraverso quali modalità

• i costi previsti per attuare l’azione (sarà necessario inviarci giustificativi dei costi sostenuti).

Selezioneremo 5 iniziative nel territorio, considerando la loro creatività e il potenziale di raggiungere un ampio numero di giovani.

Contiamo su di voi perché i giovani europei possano dire la loro, per un’Europa più forte!

With 2018 just finished, ALDA has come to the end of the implementation of some projects which have kept us busy in recent years. This is the case with ENLARGE, which has allowed to strengthen the mechanisms of participatory governance at the local level in various communities across Europe, or Get-Up which has supported the acquisition of gender-sensitive practices in various aspects of the world of work, and INCOME which has explored co-working as a tool to fight youth unemployment in Europe.
2019 will not be for less! Numerous and various are the projects we have kicked off.

Dans le cadre du projet Erasmus Program, ALDA and other partners will engage for a more sustainable and inclusive involvement of disabled people in the society thanks to the project Mind Inclusion 2.0.
Based on Europe for Citizens, one of ALDA’s dearest European programmes, there are two projects you will hear about during the following months: Cross Over et FromMe2EU. The European elections getting closer and closer, Cross Over reflects our commitment to foster participation in the European Parliament elections and, more in general, active engagement in the European community life. Through local paths and international events, the dialogue will be valorized as main tool for knowledge and social growth, with debates on the future of Europe, nourishing thus a sense of belonging to the European space. Even if on a different level, dialogue, inclusion and participation are also the key themes of FromMe2EU, a project promoting a new concept of cooperation between EU citizens and migrant’s communities to renovate multiculturalism in Europe.

Among the countless declinations of local democracy we should include the preservation of cultural heritage, and maybe more important, its valorization. To this end the project CUT takes the field. CUT – Twinning tourism promoting cultural heritage involves a selection of partners from all over Europe and the Balkans and it foresees the involvement of local CSOs in the protection and promotion of local beauties, enhancing this way cultural tourism.

Thanks to the European Union LIFE programme, ALDA’s efforts towards citizen participation will also concern environmental protection and preservation. The FALKON project will protect and defend biodiversity through the conservation of the Lesser Kestrel, a falcon species whose population is experiencing a crucial moment in the Mediterranean area, while BEWARE will fight, through preventive actions, the risk of flooding in various municipalities in northern Italy, and finally with Metro-Adapt, cost-effective climate change adaptation strategies will be developed and promoted in the Metropolitan city of Milan and replicated all over Europe.
For more information on these, and other ALDA projects, visit: https://www.alda-europe.eu/newSite/project.php

As our social media activity testifies, ALDA has been recently involved in a myriad of different activities. Apart from projects, we have been working on awareness-raising campaigns against bullying and hate-speech, in favor of an inclusive view of strangers in local communities, and to foster quality information against fake news. More, on ALDA Facebook account you may find hints on relevant local events and festivals, as well as job offers.

Every single action and communication ALDA carries on has a reason to be and its outputs are developed to add up to the realization of a better society. In other words, we do our best to work for the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity seeking to strengthen universal peace and end poverty in all its form. Such an ambitious and weighty resolution will be pursued through the fulfillment of the 17 SDGs – Sustainable Development Goals. SDGs are broad and interconnected, yet each one has its own target list to achieve and, unlike the Millennium Development Goals, they concern a wider range, to cover all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental.

In an attempt to make them more visible and valued, from now on we will mark selected news with the label of the SDG they apply. Moreover, in so doing what we work for regarding the 2030 Agenda will be clearer and interested reader will have the chance to learn more about every single SDG with a simple click! Because SDGs are not simply new year resolutions, but full-fledged priorities to keep in mind and implement in our daily life.

The upcoming European Parliament elections taking place in May 2019 are crucial for the future of the European project – for our future.
All over Europe, 18-year old citizens will be called to vote for the European Parliament. For thousands of people, it will be the first opportunity to exercise their right to vote.
We need you, to reach out to young voters and make it clear what is at stake in these elections. How can you make sure fellow young people know what they are called to vote for, how to vote, and the consequences of their actions.
ALDA is offering 10 grants of 300 € each to young Europeans up to 21 years old, for the implementation of initiatives (street actions, online campaigns, etc.) raising awareness of youth about the upcoming European elections, which can take place between February and April 2019.

Do you have a great idea on how to encourage fellow young Europeans to vote? Are you a European citizen up to 21 years old?
Send the concept of your initiative in .pdf (max 2 pages) to irene.zanetti@aldaintranet.org by 15 February 2019, clearly explaining:
• how many people you will reach, and how
• costs foreseen to implement the action (you will need to send us the invoices of costs incurred).
We will select 10 initiatives all over the EU, considering their creativity and potential of reaching a wide number of young Europeans.

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On our side, ALDA is active on multiple fronts: we not only call for external actions but we are doing our best to provide and spread European facts as objective as possible.
Thanks to the Europe for Citizens programme, ALDA has been able to launch the “YOU4EU – Towards European Elections 2019” campaign. We are actively engaged in the implementation of social media campaigns in contrast to the rampant fake news and we are committed to spreading correct information about crucial aspects of the functioning of the Union such as the budget and the composition of the different Institutions. To do so, we produced different sets of infographics, each one dealing with a specific misconception, thus trying overcome stereotypes.
Our aim is to realize a simple but effective anti-rhetoric to prevent radicalization and finally leading European citizens to the polls.
We count on you to get all Europeans to have their say, for a stronger Europe!