CITIES4CSR Action Planning Network had its Phase2 kick-off meeting on the 25 and 26 June 2020 and it was conducted online, due to the ongoing restrictions of the Covid-19 emergency.
It was a significant meeting for all partner cities to highlight the main steps and outputs of the path carried out so far on Corporate Social Responsibility theme and on its relevance for municipal governments. Moreover, it was the occasion to mark the project’s main activities of Phase 2 and to share and discuss the local situation of each partner dealing with the economic, health and social crises caused by the pandemic.
CITIES4CSR virtual Phase 2 kick-off meeting, presented by Ms Anna Scavuzzo (Deputy Mayor of the City of Milan) was the occasion for all cities to meet again after the network Phase1 final event organized in Nantes at the beginning of February. Therefore, at the very beginning, partners presented their CSR focus to the public showing a significant photo of its local context and explaining how it was affected by the Covid-19 crisis.
Despite the overall difficult situation of Europe, CITIES4CSR partner cities showed a great commitment and a very strong intention to continue working together in the stream of the project activities, as they all recognize the value of the Corporate Social Responsibility in this hard time and how this asset will be important for the recovery period.
During the kick-off meeting, attention was also paid to all activities to be carried out on the next 2 years and to project’s milestones and deadlines. In fact, the City of Milan (LP) and its Lead Expert, Mr Steffen Wetzstein, organized the meeting into 3 thematic sessions, tackling the following contents:
Session 1: Let’s re-start our shared URBACT journey under challenging conditions
Session 2: Reconnect with our CSR-policy challenges and communicating our URBACTjourney to the world
Session 3: Getting local engines on fire towards High-Impact Integrated Action Plans
In all these sessions, the knowledge and method received from URBACT during the APN kick-off meeting was shared and the project rationale underlined.
Particularly interesting were the participative sessions organized in the form of “Breakout rooms” of discussion, tackling CITIES4CSR main topics: Environment and Food and Social policies, where cities had the possibility to deepen into these themes by learning from the experience of Milan Resilience and Food Policy coordinators, who explained their best practices in involving local stakeholders.
Another interactive exercise, carried out through Miro digital tool, was the mapping of local stakeholders involved by each city in network activities. In fact, it was relevant to see if (and how) the composition of local ULGs was modified by the Covid-emergency also to find out how cities could tackle their new local issues through the involvement of other relevant stakeholders, enlarging their URBACT local group.
In the next on-to-one check up calls with each city partner, that will be held in August, each local situation will be assessed by the LP and LE in order to revise and adapt the project work plan according to partners’ local needs and each municipal context.
Feedbacks from partners on the revision of the submitted work plan were received by the Lead Partner and the Lead Expert, that will take them into consideration in the formal procedure of amendment specified by URBACT.
Article written by: Chiara Minotti, Deputy Project Coordinator
