Second transnational meeting

Mållångsta, course plant Gläntan 19th  – 22nd of September, 2018

 

Wednesday the 19th of September

We had to start with arrival one day before the meeting as the course plant Gläntan are situated in the rural area in the municipality of Ovanåker in the county Gävleborg which is between 3-4 hours transport with bus from the airport. After a long journey for the participants they arrived at 20.00 in the evening and it was only time for dinner and short information about practical issues.

 

Thursday the 20th of September

– We started of with a short presentation of the course plant and of the project READ IT.

– Then we used 2 hours for a round whit presentation of the participants and what kind of work they are doing about rural area development at home. Every participant had a maximum of 5 minutes. This was to give everyone a glimpse of all different kinds of problems and solutions used in every country.

During these presentations we also got a feeling of rural contexts as the wind blow of the electricity for around 1 hour!

– After this we had a presentation of the Swedish organization for rural areas development “All of  Sweden shall live”, to be renamed to “Rural Sweden”, with My Fransson, board member of the national organization. She also mentioned that this Swedish organization took the initiative to start what is called the European Rural Parliament which has been held 2 times so fare and will meet again in Finland 2019.

– After lunch My also gave a short presentation of a new proposal in the Swedish parliament about rural development with 75 different points of efforts. These proposals are focused on giving equal opportunities for citizens to live and work in rural areas and cities. Efforts are to be done around communication and transport infrastructure, innovation and skills, social planning and housing construction, commercial service and welfare service, culture and the presence of the state.

– To end today’s presentations the mayor of Ovanåker municipality, Yoomi Renström told us about the municipality and about the work with local development there. The most important things at the local level are to support the creation of work and to use all skills and knowledge from the new inhabitants (refugees) that has arrived during last years. Yoomi is also a member of the Committee of Regions in the European Union and she told us a bit about their work with rural development.

– Finally it was time to work in small groups with ideas for the “manual” that the project will try to produce for working with rural development. The idea is that the manual shall be written to describe and give ideas for a process in 7 steps from “kick off” to evaluation.

The groups ended up with presenting the results of their work which is to be used by the project steering group later on.

– The steering group had a 1 hour meeting after dinner to evaluate the situation in the project and to decide about the coming transnational meetings in Rhodes and Poland. The dates was fixed for Rhodes to the 11th to the 15th of April and the dates for Poland is the 26th to the 29th of June 2019.

Most of the discussion was about the “manual” and we divided the work with the 7 steps between us to be able to start the work during the coming months. The idea was that we shall write a kind of draft for each step before we have a Skype meeting in December.

Friday the 21st  of September

– After breakfast it was time for study visits. We divided us in 3 groups to go by minibuses to different places in the county of Gävleborg to meet local development groups. We visited the villages of Järvsö, Stråtjära and Holmsveden. In the different study visits the participants meet people from local development groups in all places, entrepreneurs engaged in different touristic business, farmers etc. and had the opportunity to ask questions and discuss with them.

– After the return on the afternoon every study visit group gave a short summary of their visit with what they had seen and learnt during the study visits.

– To end the formal time of the meeting Henk from the steering group gave information about how the project will proceed until next meeting in April 2019. He asked the participants to be engaged, both in their local work but also in the project, sending in ideas, communicate with each other, report in different types of media etc.

– During the evening it was arranged with the making of and eating a special Swedish meal, used by wood workers 100 years ago. We also had the opportunity to listen to 2 culture workers from the surroundings, playing an instrument called “nyckelharpa”, with a lot of strings and buttons.

Saturday the 22nd  of September

Departure day with transport in a bus to the airport Arlanda after breakfast.