Start of a fall European odyssey

This fall’s trip to Europe covers a tight and hectic schedule: two months of planned activities and projects, which will hopefully result in positive outcomes.

Two days after returning home from a planned fundraising event Michigan, I flew to Milan, Italy, where I found cold weather (47F / 7C) and fog. Less than 24 hours later I reached, by train, Bologna, where I wanted to attend an international conference regarding “Building networks of cooperation and dialogue between civil society and public administrations in the enlarged Europe”. An unexpected high number of participants from 25 different European countries attended the 2 day affair, conducted in 2 languages: Italian and English.

I was one of a large number of women attendees, mostly from the youngest European member countries of Slovenia, Czek Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, but the only one from the US (however, representing an Albanian Foundation) that did not need any equipment for the simultaneous translation.

This conference was the first attempt (on the part of the Emilia/Romagna region of Italy in partnership with the European Citizen Action Service of Belgium) to launch a cooperation project aiming at promoting civil society and national administrations, as well as European socio-economic development by exchanging models of multilevel democratic governance, where the actors are the public, private and third sector (NGO’s) in the new Europe.

My reaction (shared with the organizers that solicited my input) was that it’s a good start, but the program included too many reports and not enough time to really do workshops, as it was planned. The speakers (mostly Italians) had very little time at their disposal to elaborate about the many problems they alluded to in their presentations, and no time at all to get reactions. Some moderators were more interested in giving a speech themselves rather than summarize what was accomplished in the respective workshops. The results, therefore, were not very conclusive, but everyone hoped that next year organizers will plan the follow up conference in Turin, by learning from the experiences of this one.

What was accomplished in this occasion was the launching of a new web site “cooperate”. Everyone recognized, however, that it takes much more to develop and understand what can be done to offset the lack of information about what’s available, the need to share experiences not to reinvent wheels, and to create procedures and cooperation for a just sharing of what’s legally established and available (including financial help) from the European Union. This was the key to planning this conference, but the only presentation on this subject was given by a top official who flew from Brussel toward the end of the works. He gave an interesting 30 minutes overview of how the European Budget is established and modified, and took the next plane out within the hour.

Personally I met a couple of interesting people, who promised to keep in touch in the future.