We All Belong Here: Creating Safe And Diverse City Spaces.

This project seeks to rethink the concept of empowerment as used in the context of deprived urban communities and to equip both professionals working with adults and the learners themselves with guidelines and tools for creative more inclusive urban spaces through designing and implementing activities that are based on real needs of the inhabitants.

Innovative methodologies

Our main goal is to rethink empowerment and discover how inclusive city spaces can be created based on the actual needs and wants of their inhabitants. The major output will be a set of educational materials that present methods for community need assessment, helping educators, activists, and city hall officials to use creative techniques for discovering what kind of changes inhabitants would like to see.

Inclusive Urban Spaces

The core approach we adopted is based on a strong believe that more inclusive urban spaces are only possible to be created when different actors share an understanding that people at risk need to be supported and given an
opportunity to speak about their own needs and becoming change-makers ready to implement their own solutions.

Cross-sectoral cooperation.

In the project we included partners who are NGOs, but also those who represent municipalities. However, to expand the project impact, we
are devoted to closely cooperate with other actors who are not directly partners of the consortium.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs

OUR PRIoRITIES

As the project is to contribute to the development of targeted local communities and provide the adult learners with more opportunities for active involvement in local projects, the last priority we want to address is fostering civic engagement. As the whole concept of the project is strongly based on rethinking the concept of empowerment and through its activities it seeks to give more power to the local inhabitants, the involved participants will also be able to become change-makers in their local communities, coming up with their own solutions to the local challenges and, with the support of partner organizations, implementing activities improving the live conditions of them as individuals and their communities as a whole.

Project activities 

These meetings are organized between project partners for implementation and coordination purposes. The first meeting will take place in Poland, then Turkey and Spain.

One of the main activities to be implemented in the framework of this project Urban Community Development: Training Course for Practitioners. It will gather representatives of all the partner organizations who will come together to explore and discuss the innovative community needs assessment tools and to plan how to use them in a local context.

The training course is to introduce four different methods of community needs assessment:

1. Citizens’ city map
2. Participatory photography
3. Digital scavenger hunt
4. Talk to your city

After getting to know, analyzing and discussing the methods, partners will be able to create a concrete plan for the testing phase during which they will be conducting workshops with adults at risk of exclusion.

Local Workshop

After the Learning Teaching Training activity, each partner organization is obliged to implement local activities in a form of workshops for adult learners at risk of exclusion. The main aim of the actions in the community is to test the methods that were shared in the previous stage of the project and to investigate how different ways of community need assessment can help inhabitants of urban areas to become the change makers in their local surrounding and beyond.

After each workshop conducted, partner organizations will evaluate all the methods used and writing a report as for how they could be adjusted to the very specific needs of the target groups they are working with. This will help us to build up more comprehensive and universal outputs and other educational materials for professionals working with adult learners in deprived urban settings.

As the last activity of this project, we plan to implement a final conference that will serve two purposes: first and foremost, it aims to promote the final results to a wider public and to reinforce the cooperation with different stakeholders from other sectors. Second of all, the meeting will serve the purpose of final evaluation of both the project results and the cooperation itself. During the meeting each partner organization will present their final internal report as part of the evaluation. Additionally, we will also have time and space devoted to developing concrete follow-up ideas for the next project related to adult education that could be implemented in cooperation between the partners in a foreseeable future.

To promote the project after completion of all the activities, each organization is to hold a separate national dissemination event to promote the promote the intellectual outputs and present the project’s results. Each of these events aims at instigating a wider, cross-sectoral debate on the problematics of supporting and empowering urban communities, especially those with high incoming migration rates. To achieve this, each national dissemination event will feature in-depth expert presentation on community building using innovative approaches, such as creative needs assessment methods. The presentations will be followed by a large open space session, in which different stakeholders can network and come up with concrete ideas for further actions in the thematic scope of the project.

“Everyone claims to want a city, but no one here wants city living.
City living by its definition is crowded. It is tolerant of other people.
It is dependant on a sophisticated population that makes
a hundreds compromises daily so that they can benefit
from the collective energy that a city generates.”
-Robert N. Davis

Digitalized training course

The training course for professionals working in urban setting will consist of mixed-media materials on the topic of creating more inclusive urban communities and working with adults at risk, especially due to the migration background. The training will be primarily targeting educators and staff members from both non-governmental and governmental organizations and institutions working with adults at risk in cities. The main need behind creating this output is the observed lack of knowledge and, in some cases, willingness to give more responsibility to the people themselves and act only as supporters rather than experts implementing ready solutions.

The main focus of this output would be to introduce the concept of community development in the city and encouraging educators and staff working with adults to broaden their approaches and focus not only on supporting people to raise their competences individually, but also to implement activities that could create a community and give people both more sense of belonging and tools to become changemakers.

 

Tool Kit on Needs Assessment in Urban Communities

The tool kit itself will be in a form of a digital publication with a step-by-step description of four different community needs assessment methods. Each method description will be complimented with printable handouts and a checklist of task and materials needed to implement it.  Along with the description for each method, the tool kit will also include a short report from the testing phase done locally.

WE ALL BELONG HERE: CREATING SAFE AND DIVERSE CITY SPACES

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein