Collaborating partners

PARTNER SEARCH – LOCAL DEMOCRACY/CULTURAL PROJECT

The Leader-supported project Ekenäs StoryWalk is looking for partners who are interested in collaborating with us in a project promoting local democracy and participatory city planning through culture/art.

The StoryWalk is a place-making project which aims to deepen local engagement, place identity and co-governing and at the same time develop a cross- disciplinary method toolbox. Our methods include artistic and social science research, geodesign, visual and audio storytelling. We want to encourage engagement with and analysis of our community as the place we call home and encourage an on-going dialogue about pasts and futures. At the same time we want to inspire a critical debate about city development, culture, commercialisation, diversity, democracy, migration, transparency and accessibility.

We are motivated by what we see happening in our home town Ekenäs after an administrative fusion with the neighbour towns Karis and Pojo and can sense an urgent need of a conversation about values and visions for the future. At the same time we see a need for a more democratic, accessible and transparent planning processes in general. A need we can see being expressed also in other parts of Europe.

We want to find European partner-project with similar goals and methods. We believe such collaboration can be friutful and inspiring for all involved and reslut in a better project as well as better results.

Note: Ekenäs StoryWalk preparatory project is financed for 6 months by our local Leadergroup Pomoväst. We are now working on an application for a 2-year project. Our collaborators have to have their own funding but we hope to find ways in which we can arrange different sorts of youth, project and cultural worker exchanges between the projects. We can co-operate with both rural and urban actors and projects and also projects which are not EU-funded both in and possibly also outside Europe. We are based at the Novia University of Applied Science R&D department in southwestern Finland. 

We already have several local collaboration partners: the municipality city planning department, the cultural department, the parks & recreation department, the toursit office  and the Pro Artibus Foundation.