Late April, Eutropian’s Levente Polyak was in Bucharest, hosted by the municipality and civic leaders to talk about our work on conceiving spaces, structures and collaborations for civil society and social economy initiatives.

Relying particularly on the experiences of URBACT projects ACTive NGOs and CO4Cities, but also drawing lessons from European Urban Initiative projects DARE Ravenna and CUP 4 Creativity Újbuda, Levente helped participants explore various modes of co-governing and co-managing community venues,

The objective of the Bucharest visit was to better understand the local socio-economic and political context in order to support the conception of a local NGO House, with the participation of municipal and civil society representatives. In a series of meetings, presentations, workshops and site visits, local protagonists of the future NGO House can learn about different models and mechanisms to co-design the new institution as well as to organise a strong civic ecosystem around the future space. The visit was organised by Bogdan Dragnea, public officer at the Bucharest Municipality, responsible for public-civic relations.

In the past years, the Bucharest Municipality has built a close cooperation with the city’s civil society. The ambition of the Municipality is to bring this cooperation to a higher level, by establishing a space to accommodate NGOs as a permanent venue and reference point. For this undertaking, the URBACT Transfer Networks ACTive NGOs and CO4Cities serve as inspiring and informing models, allowing the Bucharest Municipality to draw on the experiences of a variety of cities that had established their own versions of NGO Houses or Neighbourhood Houses.