The final objective was to strengthen civic engagement and participation of citizens in Austria, Poland and neighbouring countries through trainings and a manual for more skill share events in even more countries. Social movements are an important part of European political and societal life, may it be associations and groups fighting for human rights, ecological protection, gender justice or anti-racism. But there are many hurdles impeding people to get active and get involved. One of them is a lack of skills and methods, which lead to frustration, inefficiency, burn-out and high fluctuation. The leverage we chose to address this problem was to support movement trainers and educators to provide quality support to a variety of civil society actors. The goal is to provide people with the opportunity to learn hard and soft skills that aid them in the participation is one way of lowering these hurdles. So the project wanted to a) directly train activists and organizers and b) to collect knowledge about quality skill-share and share it with other educators in order for them to improve on their work too. Which, in turn, will contribute again to the strengthening of engagement and participation.
The application was driven by a strong desire to strengthen democratic civil society actors in the face of the current crisis of rising authoritarianism, war and climate crises. The angle we chose was one of capacity building amongst actores. We wanted to provide direct training, but moreover collect insights on this kind of education in order to share it with educators across Europe and support the up-scaling of this type of skill-share. The needs we saw and thus addressed revolve around providing valuable insights, learning and research for a group of actors which does not have a lot of resources. Educators need high quality tools to support civil society organisations in unfolding their impact. We provided them with a detailed and clear handbook of how to do it. Additionally, we provided training to numerous organisations in Austria and Poland directly, contributing to their capacity building. The needs of the applicants we tried to address were a further development of skill-share formats (Humus), strengthened connections to different civil society actors (Czas Kultury) and international connection between Poland and Austria (Civil Action Network).