It doesn’t matter how many partners’ meetings you missed while flying around Europe, how wet your summery shoes got because you forgot for the 3450390 time to bring an umbrella and how far from your hotel the Commission decided to host the event. At the end of the day, all that we want is to go to Brussels and have the chance to sit down in front of that Commissioner and tell her/him how we feel about that specific programme or initiative – I mean this is the ultimate dream of at least us, the euro-freak!
And so this has finally happened to me: last week I sat in front of Elisa Ferreira, Commissioner for Cohesion and Reform, and I dared to ask her if the European Commission would ever provide clear indication in binding the investment of the Cohesion Funds to cultural priorities.
But let me rewind. On the 21-22 of June, the European Commission hosted “The New European Bauhaus in Regions and Cities”. Organized around the Awards Ceremony of the NEB Prizes 2023, the event was an opportunity to reflect upon the contribution of the EU’s Cohesion Policy to the NEB initiative over the past three years.
With over 350 participants, it also became a forum for practice exchange, bridging the missing link between grassroots and municipalities, creators of the NEB projects, and the managing authorities of cohesion policy.
Bear with me because this was not even the best part! During the NEB Prizes ceremony, which awarded 15 exemplary NEB initiatives out of the 1400 applications, I had the chance to see a great friend and colleague from Materahub walk on the stage and receive the NEB prize for her wonderful project “Noi Ortadini: Community Gardening” (I leave to her the responsibility to tell you everything!)
Participants from all around Europe clapped to her project and to a vision of work that everyone in that room shared. At that moment I felt at home, not in a geographical sense of course, yet as part of a community that partakes in a very clear idea of the future. This is what makes Brussels so unique: an island of people in the daily no-sense that speak the same language in the name of democracy and change for the better.
In other words, this is what makes everything we do at Materahub worth it and transform all the flight connections into just another coffee at the airport.
