PROSPECT+ will build on the existing H2020 project PROSPECT to enable capacity building in regional and local authorities in order to finance and implement effective and efficient sustainable energy plans, including their proper monitoring and verification and also ensuring that such plans are using synergies from other local plans and that their effects are properly monitored. The learning will continue through the 5 learning modules (public buildings, private buildings, public lighting, transport, and cross-sectoral), with more attention given to improved decision-making of cities on how they choose projects for financing, as well as how to assess and ensure that their projects are finance-ready. The types of innovative financing and the modules will stay the same, but the methodology, the process, and the learning materials will be greatly improved. The ambition of PROSPECT+ is to ensure that over 200 EU cities in at least 20 EU MS improve their capacities when it comes to implementing projects from SECAPs and similar sustainable plans.

Five tonnes of waste per capita are generated every year in the EU. These annual 2.5 billion tonnes of waste contain large volumes of valuable materials for Europe’s industrial base. Proper collection of waste is a pre-condition for their optimal recovery. The current trend of increasing higher collection rates is promising, but progress is uneven between Members States and between regions. Good regional practices have the potential to serve as good practice examples for other regions. So far, however, results of existing studies and good practices have not been effective enough in supporting the implementation of better-performing systems elsewhere. The main objective of the COLLECTORS project is to overcome this situation and to support decision-makers in shifting to better-performing collection system. COLLECTORS will therefore: (1) Increase awareness of the collection potential by compiling, harmonizing and presenting information on systems for packaging and paper waste, WEEE and construction products via an online information platform. (2) Improve decision-making on waste collection by the assessment of twelve good practices on their performance on: (1) quality of collected waste; (2) economics; (3) environment; (4) societal acceptance. (3) Stimulate successful implementation by capacity-building and policy support methods that will increase the technical and operational expertise of decision-makers on waste collection. (4) Engage citizens, decision-makers and other stakeholders throughout the project for validation of project results and to ensure the usability of COLLECTORS-output. The COLLECTORS consortium is well-equipped to achieve these impacts as it is directly connected to more than 30 PROS and 2000+ authorities spread across the EU. In addition, the project is embedded in the full secondary raw material value chain ensuring alignment with waste management, recyclers and producers.

Distress Flare (FDD) is a European cooperation project operating in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and France. Its aim is to unite, compare and contrast the various skills and experiences had by citizens, researchers, artists and local public decision-makers working to counter migrants’ social exclusion.Europe has recently experienced one of its sharpest ever rises of its history in migrant people numbers. The issue of welcoming these migrant people is gaining greater traction in both EU-wide and local debates going so far as to severely divide populations. Populist ideologies often capitalise on a fear of foreigners, and their rise runs counter to ambitions to consolidate Europe as a space for peace, while also driving a wedge between citizens and institutions.Given the urgent need to rebuild a culture of solidarity that can overcome nationalist narratives, eleven organisations from six countries are banding together their skills, their capacity for innovation and their networks to honour the contribution and role of migrants in Europe today. Our objectives:- To contribute to migrants’ social inclusion and help them actively participate in democratic life. We will do this by strengthening migrants’ ability to express themselves publically as they acquire new interpersonal and intercultural skills.- To empower migrants and non-migrants to work towards a more creative Europe with a greater sense of solidarity. - To support the design, implementation and dissemination of innovative teaching methods through a combination of the eleven partners’ pedagogical, social, artistic and academic skills.- To promote and apply the idea of cultural rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fribourg Declaration.Over a three-year period, the project multidisciplinary consortium will work to create several multilingual resources, including handbooks for all participants, a reference material kit, a website, a scientific and educational publication, a manifesto and a documentary film series.To do this, in each countries of the project, from 2019 to 2021, we will organise six training sessions, each one due to run over seven consecutive days comprised of :- an educational artistic workshop in which adults and young migrants and non-migrants, ultimately will display their work in public;- a communications kit workshop, in which a group of students from a university or specialist college will roll out our communications in public spaces;- an action-research organised by humanities researchers, with a focus on the methodological innovations designed over the course of the project;- a plenary seminar for all stakeholders.The project’s third year will be spent finalising intellectual outputs and spreading the word about them locally and internationally. A training day for public decision-makers will bring the project to a close in June 2022 and lend it a global impact.We expect the project’s medium-term impacts to be the following:- A revitalised sense of citizenship from a local level upwards, as people are encouraged to take part in democratic life and engage with EU-wide social issues such as the challenges of immigration.- Greater legitimacy will be given to innovative learning promoting multidisciplinary skills.- Greater learning opportunities in Europe to support the education and training sector. These opportunities will emerge out of newly created and promoted multilingual open educational resources coproduced with project stakeholders. These attractive, high-quality OERs will be available online.- Sustainable transnational cooperative networks will be set up between universities and people from outside academia. - Partners will have more scope for working internationally and trialling new methodologies.- Participants, public decision-makers and partner organisations will become more conscious of their ties to our European community’s shared future.- New educational synergies will be developed between cities: training for public decision-makers is designed to be replicable, and its aim is to formulate public policy in which intercultural dialogue and citizen participation are encouraged.The FDD project’s primary audience is adults and young migrants and non-migrants who will take part in educational artistic workshops. FDD also aims to train professionals from all different backgrounds—including teachers, academics and public decision-makers—so that we can pass on the OERs to a wider student audience and facilitate better awareness and understanding of how migration has historically shaped modern-day Europe. The project has the capacity to get 3,600 people directly involved, and its outcomes will be communicated to more than 60,000 people.

GOLIA will work on an integrated, interdisciplinary and Adaptive Mobility Smart Governance Model, relying on data-based, social optimum-driven approach and inclusive policy making processes to ensure an adaptive, accessible and just mobility system. By relying on the integration of STEM and SSH expertise and approaches, GOLIA will revolutionize spatial and mobility planning by co-developing and testing (with three European communities) the vision-led Social Optimum Mobility Index, based not only on economic variables but also on indicators such as social support, healthy life quality, freedom to make life choices. The index will be location and time-dependent to enable dynamic management of transport offer and spaces. GOLIA also aims at understanding: - to which extent and under which conditions, data generated by Smart Cities supported by AI-based tools and - novel communication and consultation channels and methodologies to engage citizens and stakeholders beyond mobility practitioners might foster the establishment of a new inclusive and adaptive mobility governance, able to deliver policies resilient to political instability, pandemics or any other more or less disruptive event, as they are co-developed, co-designed, and co-monitored by and for citizens and firms. Finally, GOLIA will support European mobility communities in ensuring a Sustainable digital and green transition, by providing policy makers with tools, methodologies and evidence-based recommendations to align local, regional and national transport and mobility plans to the European Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals, enabling the gradual phase-out from car-dependency.