Empowering Local Development with Com.Unity.Lab

   Com.Unity.Lab is a partnership of 8 European cities within the framework of the URBACT European program, whose final event took place on the 26th of May 2021. Lille but also Aalborg, Bari, The Hague, Lublin, Ostrava and Sofia were invited to learn from Lisbon’s Local Development Strategy for areas of Priority Intervention. Indeed, Lisbon is renowned for its innovative capacities and integrated tools to tackle urban poverty and empower local communities (social mapping, activator grant, local task force, CLLD collaborative network). This strategy is based on a co-governance and bottom-up participatory perspective, ensuring a horizontal and collaborative local approach, to mitigate social, economic, environmental and urban exclusion.

   For the last 2 years, a delegation was formed to explore and adapt these policies in the other European cities of the network. The delegation visited Lille Metropole in late 2019 for the 5th transnational meeting. This two days meeting focused on social economy and all the participants were able to discover three projects that applied social economy in an explicit way in Lille Metropole. "La Coopérative Baraka" is a unique place in Roubaix which gathers a social inclusion program, an urban farm as well as meeting rooms and a restaurant. It was also the occasion to visit the Accorderie, a NGO in Lille which helps inhabitants exchanging services, and finally the house of social economy "Stéphane Hessel".

   In the framework of this partnership, Lille Metropole implemented the Lisbon grant tool for integrated local development in 2 « monitoring neighbourhoods » (priority neighbourhoods where most inhabitants live below the poverty line). Lille Metropole was really eager to learn more about the Lisbon strategy and the large funding programme for small and micro grants to support new social initiatives, local partnerships and small-scale interventions in priority areas. An URBACT Local Group (ULG) was set up, a first trial version of a ‘Projects Factory’ was launched — aiming at supporting people with good ideas that can benefit their community and turn into small scale innovative projects — and the region agreed to fund grants. The principle is that local initiatives should be empowered to become as much as possible autonomous. The grant requires that at least two non-profit organisations team up, with preferably at least one of the organisations being local. Community members are encouraged to cooperate rather than compete for the funding. These local partnerships decide and carry out projects autonomously and are only accompanied by the administration which coordinates, supports and monitors the local granted projects.

   For instance, « SOS babies & mums » is a team project whose goal is to collect and redistribute childcare equipment to precarious families. The community centre Le Parc has designed carrier bags to deliver those equipments - limiting their environmental impacts. An online workshop was led with the members of the project in front of an audience to tell more about their project, their ambitions and their needs. The project could then be started thanks to the great approval and participation of the public. Therefore, Lisbon’s tools are very wide and initiatives to empower communities are a long process which need consistency, even beyond the network’s lifetime. The next steps are now to continue developing the ‘Projects Factory’, to secure more funding, and to accompany new neighbourhood projects.

Want to learn more about it ?

• About URBACT – Lille Metropole: https://urbact.eu/lille-0
• About ‘Good Practice Transfer - Why not in my City?' cf. Lille Metropole (p.20)  https://urbact.eu/files/good-practice-transfer-why-not-my-city
• About the French "Politique de la Ville": https://youtu.be/yb1uDEZSsYM