"STEP UP Involving Citizens of Europe"
"STEP UP - Involving Citizens of Europe" is a project implemented with support of "Europe for Citizens" program developed by the City of Rzeszów as a leader with 9 European cities; Nyíregyháza, Satu Mare, Pula, Stropkov, Svidník, Prešov, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Luck. The main goal of the project is to exchange experience and good practises in the field of Participative Democracy and to present tools used by local governments in order to create opportunities for all citizens to make meaningful contributions to decision-making process. Exchange of experience and possibility to talk through wide range of different tools of social inclusion will facilitate its implementation in the future to each partner and allow them to avoid unnecessary difficulties and costs. Furthermore it will be opportunity to strengthen cooperation between cities on the regional level.
Added value and significant outcome of the project would be conveying all knowledge and experience to partner cities from Ukraine (Ivano-Frankiwsk, Lviv and Luck), which is in dynamic process of transformation and decentralisation requiring from local governments much closer cooperation with citizens.
The starting point for the “Debate on the future of Europe" should be a debate about actions which lead to the creation of strong social commitment and activate cooperation between different groups of local communities. Participative democracy is a bottom-up process of defining priorities and co-creation of common solutions related to the city development. Participation allows to create and to build urban space by residents for residents, and their involvement has direct impact on applied solutions and measurements. It is also an important educational process, increasing the level of competence among citizens, including responsibility for their own community and surroundings which leads to the more dynamic and sustainable local development. It also implies increase in quality of decisions made by authorities and effectiveness in public money spending by monitoring this process on multiple stages.
With a large variety of groups participating in the project will be possible to learn different points of view and to gather more opinions about applied solutions as well as to outline different perspectives related to the subject. During our sessions we will work on issues related to the difficulties in implementing the tools of participatory democracy, methods of encouraging people to take active role in local community life, the advantages and disadvantages of each tool and much, much more.
Added value and significant outcome of the project would be conveying all knowledge and experience to partner cities from Ukraine (Ivano-Frankiwsk, Lviv and Luck), which is in dynamic process of transformation and decentralisation requiring from local governments much closer cooperation with citizens.
The starting point for the “Debate on the future of Europe" should be a debate about actions which lead to the creation of strong social commitment and activate cooperation between different groups of local communities. Participative democracy is a bottom-up process of defining priorities and co-creation of common solutions related to the city development. Participation allows to create and to build urban space by residents for residents, and their involvement has direct impact on applied solutions and measurements. It is also an important educational process, increasing the level of competence among citizens, including responsibility for their own community and surroundings which leads to the more dynamic and sustainable local development. It also implies increase in quality of decisions made by authorities and effectiveness in public money spending by monitoring this process on multiple stages.
With a large variety of groups participating in the project will be possible to learn different points of view and to gather more opinions about applied solutions as well as to outline different perspectives related to the subject. During our sessions we will work on issues related to the difficulties in implementing the tools of participatory democracy, methods of encouraging people to take active role in local community life, the advantages and disadvantages of each tool and much, much more.