A summer school on rural enterprise, heritage and tourism development, organised by five EU funded Horizon 2020 projects, will take place online on July 13, 20 and 27, as well as August 3, from 9:30a.m to 12.15p.m.
Horizon 2020 is an EU funding stream through the European Commission. Through research and innovation and its emphasis on science, industrial leadership and tackling societal challenges, it helps to achieve the EU’s plan of smart sustainable and inclusive growth and jobs, increasing Europe’s competitiveness in the global market.
Horizon 2020’s goal, through partnership projects, is to contribute to helping Europe produce world class science, remove barriers to innovation and make it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation.
Online ‘summer school’ for adults
The five projects have merged their forces and knowledge to come up with a free online summer school. Representatives of the various projects will present their rural development tools which can be used in a wide range of influential roles across rural development.
The target audience of the condensed presentations includes: teachers; lecturers; rural enterprises; agriculture and business advisors; activists; policy makers and leaders in rural community development.
Since its creation, the EU has funded a variety of projects dealing with research and innovation in agriculture, forestry and rural areas, and also on the future of a long-term vision for rural areas.
RUBIZMO; LIVERUR; PoliRural; RURITAGE and Ruralization are five of the Horizon 2020 projects which all aim to offer a variety of practical and effective tools, as well as expert knowledge.
Initiated by the RUBIZMO team, the five projects have combined their efforts to create short but sharp sessions on their most important outcomes.
“Basically this summer school will give a really condensed overview of all the project results and tools that have been developed by these five projects,” said Justin Casimir, the coordinator of the RUBIZMO project.
“The final goal is to show that EU projects can collaborate and I think that’s really important. We are all part of the solution.
“If we don’t collaborate, we just hold on to our own little piece of the puzzle and we don’t share it. I really hope we will show that.”
The programme is free to attend but advance registration is recommended. After registration, participants will receive introductory material which will help to make the most of the short interactive workshops.
“In the end, our stakeholders and our end users will not care from which project the results come. They will care what the results show and how those will help them in their day-to-day life. And for this, we are absolutely cooperating in every possible way in order to get the best results out there to create something of common value,” said David Christopher Heiser, the coordinator of the LIVERUR project.
“This format of cooperation fosters also the knowledge sharing between those initiatives. There are a lot of initiatives which impact rural development. Some are more focused on technology; some more focused on the actual training.
“This summer school is a really interesting idea for us because we are expecting to have a lot of participants and actually bringing the knowledge learned and acquired to rural areas, in order to train the next generation in our methodologies,” he said.
For more information, contact: [email protected]; [email protected] or [email protected].