Euroregion Baltic present during the XV UBC General Conference in Kaunas

The XV UBC General Conference “Building an inclusive and resident-focused city. The Baltic way” hosted over 250 participants from all Baltic Sea Countries. The UBC Youth Conference was held parallel to the General Conference, with around 70 participants from the Baltic Sea Region.

Magda Leszczyna-Rzucidło, Head of the International permanent Secretariat moderated one of the workshops: The value of the citizens‘ participation for cities governance co-organized by the Interreg BSR “EmPaci” project, Baltic Institute for Regional Affairs from Gdynia and Klaipeda University.

The goal of the workshop was to focus and to become a trigger for discussions and debates around capacity challenges to citizens’ participation in public policymaking in the countries of the Baltic Sea region and legitimation of participatory budgeting, citizens’ co-production of the public services in the cities and concrete remedies for those challenges. The workshop gathered over 30 participants representing cities and municipalities for all around the Baltic Sea Region.

Full conference programme available here:
http://ubc.kaunas.lt/conference-programme

UBC General Conference documents available here:
http://ubc.kaunas.lt/documents

The General Conference is the highest authority of the Union and has the power to make decisions concerning any activities of the Union, e.g. electing the Presidium consisting of the President and three Vice-Presidents of the Union for a two year period, as well as electing the Executive Board for a two year period. In addition, a number of plenary sessions and back-to-back meetings are organized during the conference.

As in previous years, a Youth Conference will also were included, and the Baltic Sea youth will actively participated in all conference programme.

The Association of Polish Communes of Euroregion Baltic, IPS, is currently part of Europe for Citizens project SIA4Y- Strengthening civil society rights by Information Access for European Youth (http://civicyouth.eu/2018/12/19/sia4y-project-kick-off-meeting-in-gdansk-european-debate/).

The project, led by the Polish Economic Society (Gdansk, Poland), foresees a series of mirroring events “Access to public information from the youth perspective” in each partner country (Poland, Estonia, Finnland and Belgium), and we’re about to start the organization of ours that will take place in Elblag (Poland), on 7th March 2019 (1-day event).

Our event will count 80-100 participants from our ERB network (Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, and Poland) and from our SIA4Y partner countries, especially from Finnland and Estonia. We still have to define the details but I think that our target group will be mainly young people aging between 18 and 25 years old.

The main objective of the event will be to inform and train the participants in the use of the right of access to public information, including practical training on socially responsible relationships and participatory budgeting knowledge for youth. Our idea would be to dedicate half of the time on right of access, and the second part on participatory budgeting through a role game.

We are currently looking for speakers that would be able to give a significant contribution to our event, with experience in the topics described above, and used to work with youth.
If you are interested in participating as speaker, please contact Valentina Scandola at valentina.scandola@euroregionbaltic.eu