I am Europe

For almost 10 years, the Evens Foundation has been initiating and supporting projects that stimulate active citizenship and advocate citizens’ political participation at local level. Our overall aim was to encourage citizens to transform ‘from client to agent’. To achieve this we set up or supported projects based on the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) or Can Do methodologies, both of which focus on making better use of local capital and talent – in brief, community development based on all the resources in a community.

We had projects in Antwerp (Belgium), Sevran (France) and Warsaw (Poland), all sharing the same principles and goals, but working apart from each other. So we started to wonder how we could link these initiatives. This prompted many other questions. Could we enable these projects to exchange and learn from one another? Could participation methods be applied at a higher policy level – for example, at the European level? What participation tools was the EU providing? Were they working well? Could they be improved? Could we come up with good ideas to make the EU more democratic?

All these questions (and more) lie at the basis of the I AM EUROPE project. To answer them requires a major investigative process. We are thus inviting you to keep reading the blog and to join the discussions. Or maybe you’d just like to follow the progress of this quest.

We welcome any suggestions that will help to enable and strengthen the participation of citizens in the policies and workings of the EU, and to make it more democratic.

Let us know what you think!

Tim Verbist
Evens Foundation