Alison Partridge: "My top goal is to help cities"
Alison Partidge, the Lead Expert for URBACT's Esimec project, has made a career of working for European development projects. For 20 years now, she has been helping local authorities and other key players (NGOs, universities, etc.) to implement projects receiving structural funding. She has been convinced by URBACT’s goals and approach to dissemination, and here she explains why she takes her role very seriously, sharing her vision of one of today’s key challenges: post-downturn economic recover for medium-size cities.
When you ask Alison Partridge what makes a good Local Action Plan, she responds without hesitating: "a constructive partnership, a hands-on and realistic project and, of course, the participation of a local authority to facilitate funding." This dynamic, 42-year-old entrepreneur knows what she is talking about. Since 1992, she has been the day-to-day link between European regional development financial instruments and their implementation in the field. She began her career working in a variety of local authorities, and then in 2002, she co-founded her own consulting agency, Aurora Ltd, based in London. Her agency works with cities, regions and European programmes, and today can boast a high success rate when it comes to raising European funds.
Most of all, Alison Partridge loves networking with partners. For three months now, she has been the Lead Expert for URBACT's Esimec project, and her first job was to help the Lead Partner, the English borough of Basingstoke and Deane, to broaden its network of partner cities.
The next step consists of "learning to work together from a distance." From this point of view, she sees herself as a kind of orchestra conductor: "a facilitator, who at once can simplify complex information, mobilise the troops and the project itself over time, and bring the so-needed dimension of pleasure to the work."
She hopes to bring to this two-and-a-half-year project the added value she provides her customers on a daily basis. She is currently touring Esimec's ten partner cities and helping the teams ask the right questions: How did the recession impact the economy? What strategies have been adopted? What obstacles exist? How can Esimec contribute to removing them?
Esimec sets out to boost the economies of medium-size cities, which is something that Alison Partridge knows well, having first-hand experience working on this issue. She was an outside consultant for URBAN and worked with the 19 European cities that were part of Interreg IIIC's CAPTURE network, which her agency helped Brighton & Hove coordinate. "The solutions may not necessarily be transposable, yet medium-size cities all face the same problem of unemployment, particularly during bad times, because they are dependent on a limited number of enterprises."
"My top goal is to help cities, because this issue raises a real challenge in positioning. Medium-size cities have more limited resources than larger conurbations and have to manage a dual nature. On one hand, their size often lends them a better quality of life, which can attract qualified jobs, and make it easier to get key players involved quickly; on the other, their weak academic and economic tissue means they have a hard time keeping new graduates. The crucial issue medium-size cities have to raise in their economic recovery strategies is how to become more attractive internationally and promote local entrepreneurship. I think that a knowledge economy has an important role to play in meeting this challenge."
In the future, she plans to provide Esimec with good practices that have already proven effective in stimulating medium-size cities, notably from the Eurotowns network and from Basingstoke Lifeline Fund, which found an effective and quick means to help small businesses via funds granted by local authorities.
For now, Alison Partridge is taking this challenge seriously. "With the worst of the crisis behind us, Esimec is starting at a good time. I appreciate URBACT's determination to influence urban policy on a European level by developing shared solutions."