The rural and urban situation of territorial communities in Latvia has been very challenging in the last years – nevertheless we’ve had an enormous increase in community activities, more and more inhabitants of rural and urban communities been interested to contribute their local development and many local actors started to discuss questions of how to act in shrinking communities and cities.
We all are eager to elaborate ways, develop instruments of how to involve ourselves, our communities and to start up change management in our environment, how to set attractive incubators, tackling some of the serious questions of our current situation: Rural and urban depopulation, lack of economical activities, stimulation of education and communication in our communities, social segregation and marginalization of extremely vulnerable groups and creating more attractive living and working environments.
Many rural and urban awareness and specific economical and civic training and activities have been carried out especially during last years, many experiences have been gained, first concluions been drawn, even poilitical involvement and lobbying the interests of communities has been started – yet we haven’t spend enough efforts to bring all this existing and newly gained information together, to start to invest in a training program that aims to promote a holistic idea of community work and combines as many as possible of those current important actors in community work and its recent development.
This program aims to bring in local, national and interntional expertise, to create and support more concentrated and networked action and collaboratively design the future of rural and urban community work in Latvia. Collaboratively and participatory in this respect means: We seek to bring all important actors together and commonly design, be it as a trainee or as a trainer the future of our communities.
We set up a chain of twelve workshops with various state authorities, national lobby groups, local and regional experts as well as international best practice examples and institutions and WE NEED YOU, community activists, formal and informal interest groups in order to work out the best possible training program, local activity plans and development scenarios and a national guideline for community work in Latvia.
This national pilot program offers space for six actively engaged communities and two trainees from each community.
We invite you to actively participate in our information event on April 16. in Riga
N.B. Submissions are now closed!