FIRST SLOVENE NATIONAL PARTICIPATION DAY
The Danube region brings together 14 countries and some of them are very close to Slovenia (geographically, also culturally and historically) and some of the most important economically important ones, as well as some more remote countries, which makes the macroregions a good tool to get to know them more closely. These are – besides Slovenia – Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, (part) of Germany, (part) of Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and (part) of Ukraine.
National Participation Day (NPD) are annually held meetings of all interested active or potential stakeholders of the EUSDR on a national level. The NPDs specifically addresses civil society organisations and their networks, local actors from municipality level, academia, public authorities on local and regional level as well as national institutions active in the EUSDR and EUSDR Priority Coordinators (PACs) based in the country, as well as the National Contact Point (NCP). The NPD should be open to interested stakeholders from abroad such as representatives from PACs, academia, umbrella organisations (CoDCR, DCSF) and civil society. National Participation Days are powered by the Priority Area 10 and the Danube Civil Society Forum – Funded by Foster Europe.
Topics in which Slovenian project partners are involved are very different. Because we are stronger together, it was decided that an informal meeting should be organized for everyone active in the Danube Region. Thus, at the half-day event, we brought together projects from various transnational and cross-border programs, all involving Slovenian partners. We exchanged experiences on communication, reaching target groups, influencing policy making, discussing how the projects can work together, getting to know the EuroAccess online search tool and finding out about the role of the Danube Strategy Point that has just been established. At the end, the participants were divided in groups according to their filed of work and exchanged opportunities for cooperation with colleagues from the same field.
Center for European Perspective as co-coordinator of the Priority Area 10 – Institutional Capacity and Cooperation – EU Strategy for the Danube Region organized a meeting where about 60 participants from different fields were gathered – NGOs, institutions, ministries, agencies, private companies, municipalities, institutes, faculties and universities. Everyone agreed that such networking event was indispensable and that it would be reasonable to repeat it sooner and even in greater number.
