Family Reunion: The Small Projects Lead Partner Seminar in Kiel

From 16 to 17 June 2026, the Interreg BSR team welcomed lead partners of the newly awarded small projects and friends, among them was our German national desk representative Johanna Kamin, as well as Franziska Kapteina (PA Culture) and Tīna Šipkēvica (PA Spatial Planning), in Kiel at the beautiful IB.SH offices. Some partners were new to the family, others were happy to meet again. Besides learning about the programme and the rules for the project implementation, we had the opportunity to check out projects with whom we might collaborate during our SISU project. A key objective of SISU is to valorise existing good practices introduced or piloted by other projects and transfer them to SISU subject to prior evaluation of their suitability for the type of communities we wish to engage with.

In the same spirit, we met with the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Kiel to learn about their experiences with participatory methods they implemented during projects such as Cultural Pearls or Liveability. We are grateful for their valuable insights which help us preparing the strategy and roadmap for the first reach-out campaign to rural communities.

We have already met individually with our partner GFIS mid-way between Gdansk and Berlin in Poznan curtesy of Prof. Katarzyna Rzeszut who welcomed us warmly at the Poznan University of Technology. In addition, we met with ESTAruppin e.V. at our Berlin office, as well as online with Tampere University of Applied Sciences our other two partners. To not lose time between the official kick-off scheduled for 20 August and our first physical meeting as consortium late October, we already determined a list of tasks in preparation of this first 2-day workshop.

Fully motivated and enthusiastic, the consortium is much looking forward to collaborating on this exciting experiment of bootstrapping rural resilience: SISU.

Programme Manual Online

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