All projects start with a single meeting, and on March 17th, our 32-month long EuropeAid project, “Actors of Urban Dialog: Growth of Activism in Uzbekistan” brought together its partners to informally meet for the first time.
Present were representatives of CGE Erfurt e.V., the coordinating organisation, and three partners from Uzbekistan: Yuksak Salokiyat, NGO Taraqqiyot and Khorezm Rural Advisory Support Service, all NGOs firmly engaged within urban civil society in Uzbekistan.
The meeting aimed to lay the groundwork for our project to jump into a strong start. Central to this was all our partners having the opportunity to get to know each other, both their organisations and the staff who would be working on this project.
As this project connects civil society realities which are over 4,000 kilometres apart, it was also important to have an introduction to the organisations and the local contexts they are operating within. As well as this, partners also decided on the visual identity of the project and some concrete dates for the project to kick off.
This is a particularly valuable moment for a large scale project on urban activism. This project emphasises the value of young people and youth organisations in co-creating public policy as we are emerging from a global pandemic that saw burdens shared unequally, with a youth unemployment crisis still ongoing. Moreover, the capacity of civil society to network internationally and learn from one another has never been more important, considering our many common global challenges.
The meeting concluded with a sense of our common goals and the vision for the project having been established, and a build-up of energy for implementation to begin!
If you wish to explore how urban dialog is relevant to challenges within your own context, you can visit the Resources http://urbandialog.4learning.eu/resource/ section of our website, to see the civil society and academic publications and projects which have informed the development of this project.
