The project aims at connecting civil society leaders from Western European cities that engage locally for better living conditions. For that purpose, initiatives in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Duisburg, Turin and Rome that adopt Community Organizing (CO) as a tool of political engagement are linked through a) one meeting of 30-50 local leaders (heads of civil society organizations, religious representatives, informal groups members, etc.) in every participating country to support mutual learning from local experiences and b) new and translated materials on Community Organizing in Europe in German, Italian and Dutch languages for teaching purposes. The activities c) are supported by a European organizing committee that will foster these local learning experiences and connect them on a European scale. Thanks to this project, local community leaders in Western European cities will get engaged with each other and create a European network of solidarity. Experiences from one country could be reflected in another and leaders will be able to get directly in contact with each other to learn each other’s best practices and help in times of need.
After the creation of an informal network of European Community Organizers, out of the several local projects already in place in the countries participating in this project, the need for a broader exchange programme based on local experiences was obvious, both to support local leadership and to foster local leaders’ political learning. All local community organizing efforts in the participating cities face comparable problems around political engagement and have to deal with the same issues (i.e. housing, education, transport) that could be better tackled together. We also see the development of a European community organizing network as a remedy, through the bottom-up involvement of civil society leaders, to the phenomenon of right-wing populism that is growing steadily in Western Europe, especially in marginalized urban areas such as the neighborhoods where our projects take place. CONCEIVE therefore aims to bring together experiences of community organizations from three different countries to broaden the knowledge, experiences and network of organizing in Amsterdam, Torino and Cologne.