The Job Shadowing activity of the LADDER Project is ongoing and during the month of November 2016 other three exchanges were successfully developed.

From 14 to 18 November, the Municipality of Vejle hosted Mrs. Stoyana Chavdarova, a representative of NAMRB – National Association of Municipalities of the Republic of Bulgaria. Mrs. Chavdarova after her experience stated “I had the opportunity to meet different organisations working within the municipality. The common feeling had during all these meetings was that everybody is doing something relevant for the future: to be more sustainable and more developed”.
During her 4-day experience, several activities promoted and implemented by the Vejle Municipality were presented. Particularly, Mrs. Chavdrova had the opportunity to get to know better the Centre for Integration VIFIN – a centre of knowledge and research, which rethinks, develops and implements projects concerning integration and development in a diverse world; the Økolariet eco-laboratory which is a kids’ centre promoting awareness raising throughout non-formal education approaches; and the Spinderihallerne space, which is a dynamic working environment gathering together more than 60 creative micro-companies in the field of business, design and art that work together in order to stimulate business development via networking, collaboration, knowledge sharing and resource pooling.

Mrs. Chavdarova highlighted how this exchange helped her gaining several strategies and tools in order to provide citizens with interactive methods of awareness raising and how the collaboration between government, municipalities and NGOs can support the avoidance of future infrastructural, ecological and social crisis.

A 2nd peer-to-peer experience developed in November (from 15 to 19) was the one organised by ALDA Brussels hosting a representative from EGTC Amphictyony. This exchange focused especially on DEAR best practices, providing the partner with the chance of getting to know three other DEAR Projects: Global Schools (Italy), Know your lifestyle (Belgium) and SAME World (Italy). The meetings were fruitful and they offered the possibility to the LADDER coordinator and partner to share their own experiences, challenges and lessons learnt related to DEAR and connect with other DEAR-funded projects. In addition, Mrs. Avgoulidou participated to  the HUB4 – Global Citizenship education meetings, organised by CONCORD over 3 days. Regarding this meeting, Mrs. Avgoulidou stated that this event was especially remarkable as it provided her with the possibility of knowing how NGOs working in the development education field are moving at a European level. At the end of her experience, Mrs. Avgoulidou declared “It has been a very useful experience […] it was an opportunity to develop way of communicating for further establishing new ideas and developing them for the benefit of the project and the partner in the last year of the project”.

Finally, the Italian partner CIME had successfully hosted Ms. Tatiana Bokuchava from NALAG in the week from 22 to 25 November. The peer-to-peer learning experience marked not only the opportunity to create synergies among the two partners and starting a cooperation between them, but also to foster the collaboration between the Georgian partner – who is also the secretary of the Georgian delegation in the Council of Europe Congress – with AICCRE – Association of European Municipalities and Regions which is based in Rome. From the LADDER project perspective, the exchange was particularly relevant in terms of learning from the activities developed so far. As declared by Ms. Bokuchava, during the week she was involved in the preparation of CIME’s Special Initiative, and as NALAG already had this kind of initiative it was an opportunity for Ms. Bokuchava to share with them her experience: what problems she faced while organising the Special initiative and how they were solved.

2016 will see the implementation of other two JS between SLOGA & SOS Malta and CAC & Donegal County Council. Stay tuned to read more stories about these fruitful and successful learning experiences!  

Useful Links
Photogallery

JS: Vejle – NAMRB
VIFIN
Økolariet
Spinderihallerne

JS: ALDA Brussels – EGTC
SAME World
Global Schools
Know your lifestyle