Great stories are worth sharing
The European Week of Regions and Cities took place in Brussels on 8-11 October 2018. And what a week it was! With such a packed agenda, rich and varied programme, and range of sessions and activities, there is plenty to look back on and reminisce about now that the event is over.
Here are some of our highlights from the #EURegionsWeek 2018.
Project stories in different formats
Everyone loves a good story, right? Luckily, there's plenty of them all around Europe. Interregional cooperation is all about sharing experiences and we decided to focus on two particularly inspiring case examples from past and present projects in our session 'Stories about the impact and added value of interregional cooperation'. In a short 30-minute session, Lilita Sparane outlined how interregional cooperation and the Design4Innovation project have contributed to policy development and the Latvian Design Strategy, while Ian Bloomfield tracked the path through the RENERGY project and beyond to illustrate how the inspiration shared in a project yields long-term impact and spin-off activities in local communities. A session summary is available here.
What do a mountaineer and a social enterprise have in common? They both have a mountain to climb - at least if you ask the RaiSE project. The project manager, Paula Santarén, hopped on stage in an Interreg Project Slam to demonstrate how interregional cooperation helps social enterprises become more competitive. Showing that working together does not only deliver impact, but it can also be a lot of fun, RaiSE took home the 1st prize when the audience chose their favourite. The entire session line-up was full of inspiring, funny and touching examples of the power of cooperation.
The official proceedings from these and other sessions will be available soon on the #EURegionsWeek website.
Our thanks to the organisers, contributors, and of course all the participants, who made this year's #EURegionsWeek experience such a great one - once again!
This article is Part I in a series of #EURegionsWeek highlights. See also Part II and Part III outlining project and #policylearning activities during the European Week of Regions and Cities.