Creating new Public Spaces for Learning

JOINING FORCES: EU PROJECTS AS ENGINES OF CHANGE

A learning community can be driven by a systematic collaboration between relevant partners in the community to identify and exploit European lifelong learning resources.

This approach can be extremely powerful and it is often used as a co-driver in many communities. Often the participation in one or more European projects by an institution in the community requests contacts to many different partners of the community, for instance parents, social organisations, the local government, etc.
Sometimes the project participation even includes infrastructure such as focus groups or local networks as an integrated part of the project implementation, and in this way the project automatically gives rise to new collaboration opportunities.
Such a European project can be exploited further and create more networking, and in this way the European project can be a strong driver towards the establishment of independent and sustainable networks.

If possible, the European participation should be expanded to include new initiatives in other fields of work, or lead to mobility for staff, citizens or learners.
Furthermore the increasing interest in European initiatives could lead to a more focused identification of useful European resources that might be exploited in the community.
Of course, a successful EU application initiative might replace the direct project participation.
Many emerging learning communities will be able to identify such drivers at the beginning of the process.

Some threats should be taken seriously, though:

• It can be problematic that the initiative is motivated outside the community, namely from a European consortium
• Sometimes to community processes stop when the EU funding ends
• The new infrastructures should develop into structures independent of European funding: the European initiatives are drivers, not permanent financial sources

 But the EU project driver offers much potential:

• It offers automatically interesting collaborations with other European communities
• It includes institutions and people at practice level
• It justifies new contacts and invitations to different organisations in the community
• The local networking activities can be co-financed by the Commission for two or three years
• A successful participation in a European initiative often leads to more participation

SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS
The European participation should be shared widely and openly in the community.

It is important from the beginning of the learning community process to acknowledge that the EU funding can support community initiatives, but that they are not designed to finance community operations on a wider scale.

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