By Marta Gawinek - Dagargulia
Every day we hear more and more about the crisis of the belief in the European concept. Lack of understanding of the EU, no feeling of belonging... In fact, it is difficult to love Europe today. A remedy would be more participation of European citizens that creates stronger feeling of belonging and understanding of the EU.
However, the postulate for more participation
in the EU has been demanded so many times. Therefore the participants of the I
AM EUROPE project decided to take matters into their own hands and instead of
talking about change start being this change from now on.
They made specific proposals in several areas
of how to enhace participation of European citizens in the policy making. They
presented them at the Closing Conference in Brussels on 22nd June.
Let me mention a few of them:
I AM EUROPE newspaper launched at the
conference is one of the bridges to make the distance between European Union
and its citizens smaller. The newspaper makes the EU citizenship more
accessable by giving specific answers of what does Europe mean to real
individuals. It covers issues burning in
the hearts of Europeans – how to empower communities, how to foster
transparency, cope with ageing society, create public spaces developed with
community participation? The European citizens report directly from their sites
trying to criticise constructively, i.e. while reporting about the vicitims of
housing crisis in Spain and their ways of protest and participation.
How to enhance EU functioning awareness? Let
us use the experience from Belgium of G1000 meetings or organise town hall
meetings once every year on the Day of Europe - 9th May to discuss
the future of Europe and to foster more colaboration between politics and
citizens.
How to make allocation of the EU funds into
public spaces more participatory? Following the good local practice from
Bulgaria of Community Participation Forum let us organise meetings of different
stakeholders in the field of urban planning and involve local communities into
the planning process and priorities setting of EU grant allocations for public
spaces. As a result, the local authorities might be obliged to ensure a code of
conduct which foresees participation process in budgeting and implementation of
the projects for public spaces. This
will make the idea of public spaces for people and by people come true.
How to foster social inclusion? Let us use
mapping tool created by the I AM EUROPE citizens as a social change platform.
Showing civic engagement initatives from all over Europe will be a bottom up
approach to involve those who have so far been marginalised, such as lonely
mothers, the poor ones, Roma minority. Everyone can share good practices
related to social inclusion initiatives in a very easy way and promote them all
around Europe.
2013, the year of European citizens is an
additional occasion to this about what European citizenship exactly means to
the people and instead of convincing the citizens to believe in the concept,
encourage them to create another Europe they will really love. The citizens
gathered around I AM EUROPE has just started to make Europe really lovely.
