Active Democracy: Citizens and Society United

We’re preparing an application for a project (for the deadline of June 1st, 2012) under action 1, measure 2 of the Europe for Citizens programme (http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/index_en.html) and looking for partner organizations from participating countries to join them.

Venues:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Partner countries
- Lisbon, Portugal (map:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=38.734804,-9.118652&spn=0.25656,0.606308&t=h&z=11)

Dates:
Preparatory Meeting - February 15 to 17, 2013
Local Informational Sessions - April to July, 2013
Democratic Congress - November 11 to 17, 2013

Partners:
At least 4 partner organizations from participating countries according to the following distribution:
- 1 partner from Denmark, Finland or Sweden;
- 1 partner from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Slovenia or the United Kingdom;
- 1 partner from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania or Slovakia;
- 1 partner from Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta or Spain.

Participants:
No age limit

Summary:
The project "Active Democracy: Citizens and Society United" will discuss the future of the European Union and its basic values and foster active european citizenship through civic and democratic participation. In this project we will collect the opinion of european citizens, explore new methodologies of promoting active interaction and create mechanisms to develop civic competences. We'll involve a minimum of 5 countries and 200 participants, this porject will start on December 2012 and will go on until December 2013.
In order to achieve the proposed goals, ACV plans:
a) A Preparatory Meeting where we will all present, discuss and assess proposals related to main themes of this project (european citizenship, participatory and representative democracy, amongst others);
b) A Local Informational Session will be developed in all participating countries where local people will get to know better the democratic and political process through presentations and political debates, among others;
c) Democratic Congress where the european citizens / participants will experience how the representative system works and as a result a document will be produced in order to present to the policy makers at a European level;

Once all relevant information is gathered, the partners will determine a way to combine and disseminate all knowledge, hoping that this information is useful and may contribute to make European citizens' more active and more conscient about civic participation.

How to apply to be a partner:
Send us an email with...
- The Partner Identification Form (attached to this email);
- The Expression of interest - EFC form (attached to this email).

The deadline to reply this call is Monday, May 28, 2012, at 24:00 (GMT).
Selected partners will be contacted afterwards.