The first online EU-Belong Inclusion Café took place on 16 October to discuss how to address temporary housing needs in a sustainable and collaborative way. The inclusion cafés aim to become a regular space for exchanges with peers mutual learning and exchanges.

One challenge, one solution, and where to begin

For each inclusion café, one particular challenge is examined, and a practice is explored. Regional stakeholders working on inclusion exchange experiences, receive and provide advice on how to address similar situations in different places in Europe.

Giulia Boldrini, from ANCI Toscana, opened this series of structured informal peer meetings by sharing how her organisation supported the region of Tuscany in addressing temporary housing needs by:

1/ co-designing a methodology for the development and implementation of successful collaborative housing measures
2/ developing a tool to assess a housing measure following 5 dimensions:

• The proposed housing offer
• The development paths of relationship and networks supporting housing transition
• The approaches and modalities of the collaborative socio-educational initiative developed within the projects
• The profiles and skills are to be included and supported within the experiments.
• The contextual elements provided by policies and funding programmes

3/ co-developing regional guidelines
The resulting tool is open, flexible and adaptable. It represents a guide on the aspects to be considered when preparing, initiating and implementing a housing transition project in a collaborative and inclusive key, directed (also) at third-country nationals.
Co-creation in this pilot also makes it possible to avoid creating new reasons for divisions and resentment between different populations

The video presenting this practice as well as the guidelines are available on the Includ-EU website.

Getting started with multistakeholder co-design

The EU-Belong consortium has created tools and methodologies in their own process of developing intercultural integration strategies. These can be used by any region and can be found on the EU-Belong website:

• A methodology to develop and implement Multi-Stakeholder Learning Labs
• The EU-Belong Intercultural Integration Self-Assessment Questionnaire
• A Peer Review of European Replicable Good Practices
• A handbook for Regions and Stakeholders to build intercultural competences
• The Multi-stakeholder model framework and Toolkit for Regional Intercultural Integration Strategies

Planning intercultural spaces

Stakeholders interested in the topics of gentrification, sustainable housing and green urban planning, may want to check the work of the Intercultural Cities programme on housing, public spaces and urban planning.

Upcoming activities

23 November 10:00-11:00 CET: Webinar on “Addressing racial discrimination in housing: a multistakeholder approach”. More information and registrations here

11 December 10:00-11:30: Inclusion Café
The topic is yet to be defined, if you would like to share an interesting practice on using the intercultural approach in education, health, or labour market integration, let us know!

Do you have activities you would like to share with peers working on inclusion? Let us know! The EU-Belong website aims to relay information and facilitate interaction between initiatives too. For more information, please contact AER Coordinator for Policy and Knowledge Transfer Johanna Pacevicius.

About EU-Belong

EU-Belong is a 3-year project run by the Assembly of European Regions (AER) and 12 partners, co-funded by the AMIF Programme (AMIF-2020-AG-CALL) of the European Union. The project is pioneering the field of inclusion & integration, by using an intercultural approach developed by the Council of Europe to innovate regional policymaking. EU-Belong will showcase how multistakeholder approaches, tailored capacity-building, co-design and transnational mutual-learning leverage regional efforts and generate innovation.

Picture by Albert S on Unsplash