Description
The “Active citizens for Bacau" project addresses the need for development of the civil society in Bacau County. The project is aimed at informing citizens about their local and county councilors and also about the activity of the members of Parliament, elected to represent their interests. Other objectives of our project include setting up a citizen's group that will give feedback to authorities regarding local public policies and the formation of specialists in the field of advocacy, lobby and the mechanisms of influencing the decision-making process. The project will use a variety of tools and methods to achieve its objectives: monitoring the local elected officials’ activity for 20 months, elaborating activity reports on Bacau’s elected officials, organizing conferences and training courses on lobby and advocacy and creating a citizen group for providing feedback on local policies. The main target groups of the project are the citizens of Bacau County, non-governmental organizations, voters, policy makers and researchers in the socio-political sphere.
Summary of project results
This project started from the civil society’s poor involvement in the local and central decision making process. Up until 2014, no associations from Bacau were committed to engage in actions that would make the local political scene more responsible. The project included a number of civic duty actions, starting with developing
www.bacaulactiv.ro platform. Through it, the project promoter monitored politicians’ activity and informed citizens about the findings. In project activities, they used a series of methods of direct involvement such as speaking during the County Council’s meeting and making recommendations for the institution’s transparency, sending public letters to the aldermen and the local aldermen regarding some local projects. They requested that the aldermen would public their activity reports after a model proposed in the project. Also, within the project a complex methodology which helped monitor the politicians’ activity more easily was developed. Tackling citizens engagement as well, they organized a unique event in Romania called Map me Happy. On a 50 square meters laid in the city centre, the project team asked citizens to identify their favourite places from Bacau. Furthermore, they organized many events with a remarkable impact on the community: a debate with the presidency candidates, round tables on youth activities, two conferences on political matters during which they presented the result of monitoring each and every politician. They succeeded in modifying a series of decisions and behaviours of the local institutions, such as: - managed to persuade the local and county aldermen to publish their activity report; - the Local Council started to publish the time and the date of the meetings in due time; - on the website, it was made available to the citizens the specialist committee meetings of the Local Council. Also, the institution started to publish their schedule on its website; - they eliminated the abusive 5 lei per page fee for requesting public information from the town hall; - the local youngsters` initiatives developed in the project conducted to establishing 5 street libraries (Little Free Library Bacau), that still exist and got their license to operate; - they influenced the local elections campaign. The candidates to the Mayor’s chair adopted many of the subjects that the organisation promoted regarding transparency.
Summary of bilateral results