Description
The overall aim of the project is to support local community life and partnership building through the application of various methods - participative community planning, community mapping and, most importantly, the creation of community boards and a platform called "local partnership network". At Prague 14, there are many active local community groups and our projects aims at exploring their potential in order to achieve more participative, transparent and inclusive environment. Both local municipal government and local NGO's are welcoming the idea of building such a network and already expressed their will to participate in it. Participative community planning only recently became a trend in Czech Republic. We created a partnership with HERE, based in small community on Iceland. The creators of HERE have long-term experience in community planning and engaging citizens in the decision making processes and they have thus been invited as mentors for this project.
Summary of project results
With the use of innovative concept of community coordination the project responded to the general need for local development in Prague 14. In the context of the capital city this district has been showing signs of suburbanisation and negative labelling. Community coordination is an intensive community work incorporating anthropological fieldwork focusing on everyday life in Prague 14. During its implementation the project has been optimized for a particular neighbourhood setting and actively responded to individual local stimuli. In the long term it shows that local government is not sufficiently informed about the needs of the people. We see the benefits of the project particularly in the fact that we managed to mobilize local residents and intensify communication across various entities and especially with local government. The impact of the project can be assessed in several respects. Thanks to the contact with marginalized communities in Prague 14, it was possible to communicate their needs and inconveniences to the local government. We also managed to develop an intergenerational dialogue together with a discussion on aging and future development in certain locations. We also succeeded at arousing the issue of declining nature of public spaces in housing estates. Set goals and outputs were community boards formation (15 gatherings while 14 were the aim of the project) and the organization of two meetings of Síť lokálního partnerství (Local Partnership Network), were met with the prospect of further sustainability of formed groups.
Summary of bilateral results
1) Partnership with Here - creative centre provided a great opportunity to share our experiences with community development activities. Shortly after the first contact, we had realized, that situation in Iceland is quite different, especially in area of the financing issues. Iceland has very sophisticated system of grant policy aimed on community development. In the opposite, the experiences with the application of the local cultural and community development showed to be very similar – PR, how to persuade the local residents to pariticapate, etc. 2)Contribution of the parnership should be described as very motivating. We communicated the strategies of our Iceland colleagues and realized that we are on the right way to implement the local cultural and community development to the agenda of our partners. Project goals, like community coordination or "community boards" still exist after the end of the project.