Community Facilitation within the EU LEADER+ Program: Experiences from Denmark
This paper reports on the LEADER+ programme and on the work carried out supporting a rural community in Denmark under this programme. This is a programme that supports development in particularly vulnerable regions of the European countries members of EU. It supports creative and innovative projects that can contribute to long-term and sustainable development in these regions. The main tasks have been the organization and facilitation of conferences and workshops to design innovative projects for the development of the community. Learning to design, plan, manage and facilitate conferences and workshops have also being another central activity. The main purposes of these activities was not only problem solving and strategy making in connection with community development but also the transfer of problem solving skills to the community
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What can one learn from this experience in reference to the practices, the meanings, the knowledge gained?
Conferences/Workshops (C/W) can be conducted for a wide range of purposes. A typical purpose is to help communities and group of individuals to create ideas, visions and projects about the future. These will then be used as input to the process of strategy development. Similarly, C/W can be suitable for involving diverse groups affected by imminent developments in the larger systems, which include many actors such as industries, regions and communities. We have used the C/W to support grass root innovators and organisations in relation to the task of creation of new ideas and projects for community work. A Conference ideally brings together 30-60 participants representing all relevant actors. The participants must adequately and accurately reflect the groups’ range of interests, but participation must be voluntary. Workshops are ideally designed to 10-12 participants with a common interest and are more focused on a given theme. Most of the issues discussed in this paper are applicable to both conferences and workshops.The purpose of C/W is not only to create ideas, projects and visions about the future but ideas, projects and visions that are suitable as a basis for the process of strategy development to be carried out by the community (or LAG) in question. C/W are both a learning and creative experience characterised by:
• The community learns about the different actors’ ideas, wishes and visions,
• The different actors communicate to each other their visions,
• The participants learn to work creatively, collectively, and purposefully in a group, and
• The participants learn how to design and manage C/W.