eSignature Lawfulness for Assignment of Partnership Interest in European Union

How to eSign a document: e-signature lawfulness for Assignment of Partnership Interest in European Union

just a second yes we do record this session okay so hi welcome everyone uh for joining us today um i'm very happy to see you all here my name is christina i'm the european programs officer at the wheel and i'm happy to welcome you here today together with my two colleagues emma and emily and our very special guest damian macklin from creative lives we have a lot of participants today which is great and shows how essential and important our topic of today is building an eu partnership partnerships are indeed essential to eu funding and today we will show you how you go about finding partners and how you go about establishing a partnership at eu level so just to let you know in the beginning we will record this event and share the recording with you afterwards as well as all slides links and materials so no worries about that um just to mention uh this event is part of a series um we have um already done two of those events for an overview of how your funding works an introduction to your funding programs in general you're very welcome to watch back the training we did in february and if you would like to know how to go about designing your eu project you will also find the recording of this event on our youtube channel um today we're talking about building new partnerships and if you're interested in the process of writing any application the event on 12th may uh may be of interest to you so again we will share these slides and you can just click on the links and then you um and then you and then you find our youtube channel or the registration page for the event in may so where are we right now just to give you an overview we already covered in the previous events how to do your research how to consult relevant people how to develop a concept node for your project how to get buy-in today is step five building partnerships and in the next event that i just mentioned in may it is focused on how to write your draft how to circulate and how to submit it so this is our agenda for today first we will look at eu partnerships what they are and what they are not then we will share tips and tricks how to develop your networks and how to find partners we will go into very short breakout rooms this gives you the possibility to exchange between each other about how who you would need for your project no worries if you don't have a project uh yet or an idea or actively looking for partners this is only an exercise to get you in the right mode of thinking after a short break um our whoop sorry about that uh our special guest damian mcglinn from creative lives is here today and he will tell us in his case that case study how they usually go about finding partners and how they work together once the partnership is established because this is usually where the fun starts um afterwards emma will talk about 10 very concrete steps for connecting with new partners and how to initiate a project and in the end we reserve time for q a taking into account that we have quite a lot of participants today we would like to encourage you to post your questions into the chat box either we answer them directly in the chat if it's like simple ones or we will answer them in the q a session if you have a very individual question we would like to invite you to write an email to our team we will be able to respond those better there thanks a lot but we will come back to all of them we promise that so let's start with a short call so we would like to get a sense of how much experience you all have in working with eu partners this is really about european partnerships so not the national ones on i and on an irish level um please answer the following questions that emily should put up now exactly so how much experience do you have in working with your partners the possible answers are none experienced some experience or lots of experience so let's see not all i've answered now but just give it a couple more seconds okay so do you see the results or am i only seeing them now we see them okay that's great so okay what you see is 70 actually have no experience yet some have experience and a lot of experience only four percent so actually this is uh good because this is why we are doing exactly this event today okay so we will now have a very quick look at your partnerships what they are and what they are not um as you know whoop again sorry it's my mouse i'm sorry about that so as you know partnerships are essential to you funded projects um with the exception of some very particular cases there's no eu project which would not require cooperation among different actors and countries so let's have a look um what the benefits of this cooperation are for you and your organization it is always an opportunity to learn and share the exchange of good practices to acquire new skills to access new ideas and new knowledge for your organization it is an opportunity to connect with and influence policy because eu funding is always too connected to eu policy and to eu strategies um it is the opportunity to be innovative this is quite obvious if you bring different people together different perspectives this foster better and innovative solutions and it is always a chance to access new sources of funding if you have participated in a new project it enhances your credibility for potential new donors it has a positive influence on your organization's reputation so in conclusion these are the long-term benefits of european development for your organization but there's always a bot what are european partnerships not you can imagine working in a team comes with many challenges especially in multi-partner few funded projects building a team with multiple partners in a multicultural environment is indeed a challenge gathering different organizations on a transnational level might involve different agendas of the different organizations which can be in conflict with each other so it is fundamental for you to be aware that joining new partnerships never should be an afterthought or inconvenience a pure subcontracting or outsourcing of tasks it is a relationship building on a daily basis and for a very long time span so the entire process of a project can last a couple of years so we'll be working with them very closely together it is also not a tick box exercise so a partnership needs to be patiently built to make this partnership successful and productive and this takes a lot of resources of time and also of course of nurse and they are never without risk so with this in mind let's take the very first step and check how to develop networks and how to find partners we share now here our tips and tricks that we learned are the best methods during the past years the easiest way of course is to use your existing contacts if they may be here in ireland or if you have any throughout europe many of those organizations that you know of those contacts they may be active in new projects or they are connected to european networks you can ask them with whom have they worked before could they recommend someone and a personal recommendation recommendation in this case can go a very long way as i mentioned before you will work for years closely together so trust mutual understanding essential for the partnership and if this is established by an organization who has already worked with them even better so this is kind of the first step look who's out there who who you actually know eu networks are also a really good starting point so there's an eu network for nearly every topic made by democracy arts volunteering education social economy sports some are even dedicated especially to european civil society organizations and european activism we recommend you to join those networks to be active in them it can keep you up to date on not only on new policy in the in the area but you get updates on funding and events and you can connect with partners um you will get to know these organizations involved and again you have the snowball effect of finding then new organizations across europe so european networks always a good thing to join then the most obvious possibility uh you can go online you can do some google research and they also partner finding tools dedicated partner finding tools for eu funding programs just to mention not all of them are useful or targeted especially as at civil society a lot of them are across sectors across a lot of countries so they can be a little bit messy some are better than ours is we listed some of them here again we share the slides so you can just click on links afterwards um there are also partner finding tools for single eu funding programs for special for example i listed here in direct europe and interact northwest europe they have their own um partner partner building platforms so you log in you can set up a profile um or you can just search for already um ideas that were pitched by other organizations and they are looking for more partners they already like create an idea and a consortium around that and also um we i recommend to join linkedin groups and facebook groups always a good possibility to meet people do your research means in this case to look up former beneficiaries so you have the eo funding programs websites they always list all funded projects of the of the last years they list success stories this will lead you to project websites there you will find a list of partners who deliver that project and that links again to their organizations so again this is kind of a snowball method looking to see who's active in the field who has done such a program or a project in my area beforehand and then it's just a quite easy step to reach out and say hi i saw you did already this project we're developing a similar project would you be interested in a conversation around partnership and this can be a very effective method because they already know they have been involved and this also gives you really good possibility because they actually maybe they already have new they have new contacts and so forth so again this brings you into contact with the organizations you are looking for um national contact points is another really good entry point so we are lucky in ireland to have excellent national contact points for nearly every eu program so for example liargas or esmos plus or the creative europe desk for creative europe they can be super helpful in advising you around your project and also to help you maybe able to help you when it comes to partnership um check out their websites you will find the link to their websites on our website so we have the eu funding guide on the access your website there's listed every program relevant to civil society if you click on the program you will always find a link to the national contact point so this is also really good place to start and now with travel restrictions east you could also consider planning some partner finding trips to cities in europe so this actually is the only possibility to build a personal relationship and to actually beat the people that you could be working with for a long time so there are a lot of eu events often even partnership making events that you could join um again look at these women networks that i mentioned before usually they list events they send out newsletters it's for events all over europe you can also search for those events online it's definitely worth to invest some resources here especially for this personal aspect of building up a partnership and just to say the idea of course of building a consortium can seem very daunting in the beginning but it's really rare that you would build the whole thing completely from scratch on your own we always do recommend to start as a partner not as a lead applicant especially if it's the first time that you are involved in your project and often as i said before someone has a project idea already started to build a consortium and it's looking for another partner so if it's the first time joining a partnership on a new level this is the best way to learn all about it without taking on all the responsibility so the last tool i would like to share for finding partners is of course our access your partner database maybe you have heard of it before so what we want to do with this tool is to make partner brokerage easier especially for irish civil society organizations what i mentioned before often these um european across europe partner databases and matchmaking tools they are across all sectors this one is focused on civil society and on irish civil society so if you are interested in finding project partners from other you countries you can set up a profile for your organization you describe the focus of your work your interests eu funding goals key strengths you can add pictures videos and so forth and the platform then gives us a possibility to filter all organizations and to contact the organization directly this is on the one hand an opportunity for you to showcase your potential and on the other hand it is an opportunity to think about your funding goals and your european development plan at the moment we have more than 50 profiles on the platform and we started disseminating the platform across europe via our networks via platforms national contact points and agencies individual contacts social media so it's really bought broadly spread we are trying to bring it in front of the eyes as many people as possible so interested organizations can then easily reach out and contact you so this is us we have shared our tips and tricks on how to go about finding partners and now we would like to know from you how do you usually go about finding partners and we set up a mentee for that so emily will put the link into the chat you can just click on it and then there's a possibility for you to say to tell us what do you usually do so do you use personal contacts do you use online databases which ones do you use do you join events did you do before um like which ones were they so this is not only a new level you can also tell us what you usually do if you're looking for partners um in ireland the idea here is to collect uh your ideas um and then we share the list afterwards so we actually have a collection so we shared what we what we would say like our tips and tricks and would be great to um uh for you to also share yours and then we have a collection and share with you afterwards in the follow-up email and i would give you one minute to put your ideas your recommendations and your tips into the chat and i need to ask emily if i need to stop sharing my screen so that you can share it with the results yes please okay we'll do that okay so what we see here is that yeah our good good friend google we have uh relationships yes we have networks okay this is changing very fast i'm trying to grab it um using existing networks as we said talk to colleagues this is a good use use the stuff in your own organization word of mouth exactly so if you hear of interesting organizations um what do we have meeting partners on events exactly what i mentioned this is a really good and now we actually can meet in person again the access europe database perfect this is what we like to hear similar organization ask the wheel yes of course ask us we are here to help and support and trying to match you databases conferences exactly um yeah personal contacts again good great i think this gives a this gives them good overview of how you can go about uh and looking for partners okay so i share again my screen and now we would like to put you into breakout rooms this is only 10 minutes um we recommend to use this opportunity to get actually peer advice even if you do not have a concrete project idea or actively looking for partners this is no problem as i said before this exercise is really to get you in the right mode of thinking um and we would like you to share in the room so every person will get two minutes your name your organization and um who would add value to your working project so what is a special skill that you do not have yet so for example research digital skills training skills what kind of experiences knowledge geographical spread are missing like what would add value to your work and project maybe let's say you are building an e-learning module you'll need a partner with expertise about digital learning because you are the one is probably being the experts for volunteering and you want to have a volunteering e-learning module but you're not not you're not a professional in building digital devices so just to give you an idea what this is about this is really about to give you time to think about the design of your consortium and who do you need to partner with to deliver the project so as i said you will have 10 minutes you will be three people in the room everyone has two minutes the other two people listen actively and then share their advice with this person maybe you know of some organization maybe you have heard of something so news is time to really um help each other out on this how you could go about finding these partners that you need i stopped my screen for that and emily will set up those breakouts soon have fun we might have one person in a room by themselves so i'm going to move them that's great how do you move them actually oh you can move them oh that's great i see just make sure there's at least three oh that's a good idea true oh so there's another one that's moved to six so that yeah and seven is alone actually maybe we can put him somewhere else yeah i've moved him now oh that's great thanks emma no worries okay that looks good okay so we have three in the first one yeah i just want to make sure um oh i have to move just keep an eye on them because there might be ones that are joining now perfect okay let's just see let's go check out for anybody who's just joining now i think a couple of people have just joined we're just doing a breakout room activity so um you can relax for a few minutes but until people come in from the breakout rooms um and if you would like to join a room it just started so just let us know we can also put you in one room you might have been talking to me at the end of it it just came through a bit delayed there now there was just a couple of people who joined and we just put people into breakout rooms for a short activity so um we can put you in if you like but i know you weren't there for the kind of preamble so if you want to take a break for a few minutes while people are in the breakout room i'll definitely do that you have to forgive me i'm kind of on my mobile office at the moment so i'm on the road so yeah i'll just i'll just join and when you can when you go back into the group exactly just be five more minutes of scratch okay so much all right no worries i can see a couple of other people message just saying that they're not in a position to talk so don't worry if you if you weren't able to join a breakout room you can just take a break for a few minutes and we'll all be back soon to take it as a homeless coffee break that's lovely thank you so we're actually a bit early yeah should we should we do the break now or should we say just damien go ahead i think uh damian can go ahead with his case study and then we can we can have the break afterwards yes exactly i think so too i just saw that i messed up the agenda a bit no no i think it just looked quicker than yes if and emma that's absolutely fine as well i can see a message remember there don't worry at all and we will be back soon so just grab yourself a cup of coffee or water or something like that and we can we can ask as well if there's any key feedback from people when they come back from the breakout rooms if there was anything that they yes if someone would like to share that again it's possible totally let's see um no worries okay just gonna disappear for one minute hello to the one who just joined us uh just to let you know that we are right now in a breakout session which is going on for about two minutes more so uh just relax everyone is in breakout rooms right now and we will continue the the session in about two minutes so everyone will come back then hello welcome back so people are slowly coming back from their rooms we just wait some more minutes seconds okay so hello everyone should be back by now yep i see people coming back so um i just would like to ask if there's anyone who would like to share a key insight something very new that you have learned in your groups you're having the space right now um if it's anything that you think okay this is really worth sharing it was really good i got a good advice here that i didn't think of before you're you're very much invited to unmute yourself and share it with the group okay well i think you had it i just so hope you had some really good conversations and have the possibility to exchange about this well like i can share yeah so i got good tips in my group um about intro europe funding for networking and learning um i didn't know that about that that funding instrument i would kind of only looking into the regional ones and then actually the other participants also said it'd be good to find like a good partner who's already if you haven't done this before who has already gone through it and has experience and to be a lead partner and then kind of just follow along and build your kind of capacities to then put in a full application later so that was a that was a good reminder thank you hello breakout room beautiful people oh great that's great yeah actually the interac calls are open right now and they have pretty good websites and also community platforms and partnership platforms we will share them afterwards in the follow-up email this is actually a really good resource if you're interested in this kind of funding um okay anyone else okay i totally know that feeling i have been on your side of the event so often [Laughter] so just say asking damian we're pretty good in time right now before we go into a break would you like to do your case study because uh we actually have some have some space if you would like to go and do it now and then we have a break afterwards would that be fine for you just asking uh yeah no it's fine for me uh we could probably do another breakout room we didn't get very far that is good to hear time flies and breakout rooms that always moves quicker but yeah uh give me a sec here just yes so can you all see that yeah yes perfectly okay um so you don't need to see that that's just my title uh so my name is damian mclin as you've heard uh i'm the ireland director for a charity called creative lives uh that's what i look like in my front garden uh in black and white because that makes it look a bit classier um i'll tell you a little bit about who we are because it's relevant kind of to how we work in in the european context so some of you may have come across us over the years we used to be called voluntary arts ireland we changed our name last summer we spent 30 years with a bad name so now we've got a better one and we think creative lives sort of sums us up a little bit better and voluntary arts ireland is leading to lots of confusion about what we do we've we've clarified that with the the line you can see there uh our purpose is to celebrate encourage and champion people expressing themselves creatively in their everyday lives practicing their creativity socially with other people it's a bit of a mouthful uh but essentially i always say it's about people having fun uh and we sometimes end up feeling a little bit within the sort of charity sector people think oh that's it's not very charity is it just having a laugh but um we've spent a lot of time i guess on different projects and research trying to measure the the impacts that those things have and a lot of you will you know working in the charity sector you know um you know the impact that those things have in terms of people's health and well-being but also in terms of cohesion communities local economies there's a huge number of things that come from that but also we sort of argue that all the great work that other charities are doing uh is really to try and enable people to lead full lives uh and and that part of your life where you get to have fun and be creative is the part that makes it worth living so we do think that's important but all of that is kind of relevant then to how we uh go about our kind of work so we have three strategic priorities uh broadly around networks uh about kind of well-being and social connectedness and then the third one is around spaces and this was something we came up with just before the pandemic these three uh priorities part of a strategic framework uh the issue around spaces became very different over the last two years but it's actually now come back to being a much more pronounced problem a lack of available kind of community spaces but the one that i've highlighted there is first priority which i think is most relevant to a lot of our european work we do a lot of kind of advocacy work on kind of a national level and things like that the relationships that we build with other peer organizations around europe has been really really important to how we go about that in terms of gathering evidence uh examples of work in other countries that we think we would like to see you know adopted by by government or local authorities things like that here being able to draw on examples from all over europe uh has completely changed how we how we go about that kind of advocacy work but also in the kind of delivery work we do we do a lot of what we would class as kind of pilot projects to try and demonstrate uh an effective way of working uh and a lot of those are things that we've borrowed from from peer organizations around europe so that's been really uh invaluable um to give you an idea of some of the things that we do within ireland i've listed some of our current or recent big projects so we're running a program called creative places in eden dairy and county offaly and it's the three-year creative place making uh program funded by the arts council it's very much about how we use arts and creativity to to enhance the the quality of life in a place that's basically been neglected uh particularly by arts and culture funding uh for many many years so we're almost completing uh completed the first year of that program love to draw ireland was also a pro project that was funded by the arts council and this is something that ran in donegal in cork and in carlow and it ended up being completely reimagined because of the pandemic and it was about similar thing about um bringing people together to try drawing or re-engage with drawing for first time in a long time and that was all about kind of health and well-being and the benefits of just taking the time out to draw what's in front of you and it doesn't matter if you're good at it or not uh and there was you know fantastic feedback from people of all ages from from doing that um and then the other one that i've listed there was one that we did in partnership with the leary wrap down council through the arts office uh and it was another creative place making project in an area called baliogen uh just off exit 15 of the m50 so it's called exit 15 um an area that is obviously within one of the more the i think the most affluent uh local authority area in the country but an area that was really neglected and on the kind of peripheries of that and had a lot of uh kind of socio-economic issues uh we we spent a couple of years there working with uh you know a lot of people from the traveler community and other other areas around that that felt kind of marginalized and not part of the cultural life they weren't connected in with the local authority and with some of the venues and different things didn't mean they weren't doing anything we've always argued that people are active in their own cultural life it's not always um approved or connected with the the state or the council or whoever that might be but that's that's just to give you a flavor of the type of work that we do um and then in terms of what we've done in the past uh i don't know if anybody else take lots in the um poll at the beginning because it only came up with a tiny proportion but i i classed this as having lots of experience with the partnerships and all of these projects i've listed here within about the last 10 years um so you can see we've done quite a few of these erasmus plus strategic partnerships uh if you're not familiar with erasmus plus it's kind of primarily leaning towards the kind of education side and lifelong learning is sort of how it's phrased i think so so when we talk about you know the reason i was giving you the example of the kind of work that we do um we're all about people uh trying new things expressing themselves creatively and doing that right throughout your life not just for kids not just for older people but all through throughout your life so we we managed to kind of fit that into a lot of the aims of the erasmus plus program because it's seen as kind of an opportunity for lifelong learning and their funding is often very interested in the social benefits that come from that in terms of cohesion and inclusion and things like that so a lot of these projects have had that kind of slant to it it's about um tackling a particular uh issue or or demographic and they're also very much about kind of experimentation and learning and kind of research for us so it's a way to kind of test things and test it in a number of different countries and then pool the findings of that so art age was focused on on uh older people uh and about how we could have an impact in that kind of uh space and then both culture guides and spar were very focused on rural areas so culture guides were setting up this network of cultural volunteers in rural areas to try and signpost and connect up because you don't have the same uh infrastructure as you do in a big city where everybody's very aware of where all the activity is and the big cultural hubs and then bridging and boost uh boost is the current project that we're working on and they're both very much on the the social side and very focused on on those issues around social cohesion uh social inclusion and things like that um both of uh bridging had a particular focus on kind of trying to um connect across different demographics and build trust which was a major uh thing that you might have seen in various eu programs is this idea of a lack of trust between people and institutions uh people who don't trust people from different national or ethnic backgrounds things like that so the project was all about how do you use uh cultural activities to to bridge those divides and build trust and cohesion and boost is kind of a continuation of that um that we're looking at um we're developing a benchmarking tool essentially for cultural organizations to self-assess um [Music] how well set up they are to achieve some of these different social outcomes and then once you do the self-assessment you will get this tailored guide that isn't you know we're trying to be very clear that we're not doing a one-size-fits-all kind of answer here's how you do the perfect project but we're using the findings from partners across five or six or five european countries to to give them uh some ideas some principles of how you might go about some things and some case studies of here's how one organization tackled this about it and then in a slightly different way we've also done uh one creative europe project which was in the network strands the creative europe has a couple of different strands and one of them is in particular for networks so we just completed that uh in december it was slightly extended because of the pandemic so it ran for four and a half years total and that was through our european network and mateo so we got funding to basically build and strengthen this this network and to undertake various different activities within that and then at the moment i'm busy working on a cooperation project application which is due at the beginning of may so that's open at the moment and we're working with some members of the european network and mateo on that program at the moment so fingers crossed there that we might get some more funny funding for that in the next few years um so it's worth talking about amateur uh which i mentioned there amateur is a network that we helped found in 2008 so in lots of ways when we talk about european partners and and all of that this is our go-to place because this is a network that's very much for us and the work we do and we helped found it because we started to encounter other organizations a handful of other organizations who did similar work in in other countries around europe uh i think there was a conference in 2006 or 2007 and that brought more people together and then they said you know we really should start a network and we ran for almost 10 years with with no real funding just members paying a subscription fee every year running an annual conference that somebody would host in a different european country and then in 2017 we got the network funding um for from creative europe which just massively scaled up uh what we were able to do um as a network so obviously this is a network that's very relevant to us it won't be particularly relevant to a lot of you because you'll be in your own areas but i know um christina had said earlier there's a lot of european networks out there certainly within creative europe because they have a separate fund specifically for networks you can go and see all these different ones i was just telling somebody about the european festivals association that's one that's relevant um but that will be the case across pretty much every area though you will nearly always find there will be a european network and if there isn't start one uh and then get some other people on board and get get some funding for your network um but yeah i i won't really need to tell you too much about what the amateur network does in terms of what that means for us you know some of this again has been covered earlier on the session so obviously if we're looking for partners that that network that now has more than 55 uh organizations in is our initial go-to if we want to find somebody even if say our member in portugal or greece even if they're not the right partner for what we want if we want slightly different skills we have a contact to go and talk to and say who who do you know in greece that maybe does this kind of social work or works with older people or something like that so so that network is just an amazing route to to a huge number of people for us um i've listed two of those um partner search websites the e-pail one and eu partner search and i think those up to europe and a few others that christina shared earlier they're all slightly different we've used some of them the thing about them i would say is you know we're listed on a couple of them and and we were uh proud to be the first ones listed on access europe when they launched the database last year i was straight in there um but it does mean we get inquiries out of blue sometimes and it's always worth doing a little bit of research and trying to kind of find out a bit more so we we get some really random emails people say oh we need an eu partner next week and you just think god this this doesn't sound appealing and so you know take your time go through these look into the work they've done read up on their reports their projects find out you know if this is really the right kind of partner rather than just firing out like a load of requests through one of these databases um but i think more than using those the way we would generally come across a lot of our partners is through things like conferences and seminars uh i've been to so many more conferences over the last two years because they've all been done in this format so all the european stuff suddenly you don't have to go to stockholm or something for a few days you can just you can join in but also kind of if you're interested in a particular area now it's quite easy to look up conferences and things that have taken place recently and it doesn't matter that you weren't there you can see the program you can find the case studies the speakers presenters things like that and just digging into whatever the theme is that you're interested in or who you might want to find being able to find people who have done this kind of work and are kind of active on the the european stage it's really useful obviously if you get to go to these things whether it's online or in person that's where a lot of those relationships build up and we've established a lot of partnerships just through that just meeting people uh at these things so if something you're thinking about doing a little bit further down the line do start getting out there now and those kind of events are the really the best place to to meet those people and obviously the other thing is previous funded projects so this this would be the case of course with any of the eu funding programs that you can look up and see who who's been active who's received funding that track record thing does seem to be really important especially you know if you're coming in new as christina was saying don't don't try and lead a project when it's your first time it's quite unlikely you might get funding but find out who's already doing these things and then offer to speak to them join in as a partner and i should have mentioned at the beginning our organization has always been a uk and ireland organization my work is running our ireland um operation uh a lot of the eu funding we got over the last 10 years actually came into the uk organization now all of it comes into ireland and that's already we're already seeing the impact of brexit there that we're very attractive because we've got a track record of european funding a lot of partners know us but you know the uk used to be the most popular country for partnerships of any country in the eu and a lot of that i i have this experience that people just love having a native english speaker to proofread things that's our most endearing quality i think uh is proofreading um but obviously people are now looking for other partners because every project we've ever done has operated through english as the kind of language of meetings and and uh the the reports and things that we might produce so there's a real attractive prospect now to to offer yourself as a as an irish based organization but that that will be in demand and so it would look at some of those partners that were in previous projects and you will probably see uk partners in a lot of them up until now and start seeing could you fill that gap as an irish organization could you drop in and uh be part of a future project um just a little bit about what happens obviously once you get into the work um we've had definitely some some good partnerships and some ones that were a little bit more uh ropey at times uh and it usually comes down to a couple of different uh criteria so so the kind of the good ingredients that i've listed there is you know reliable partners uh people who who you can trust people who are experienced in these areas and european projects clear roles and then understanding of the project aims those if you have those things tend to work smoother but quite often what you do to end up with is like like i was talking about somebody drags a partner in at the last minute who none of us know they don't have european project experience they're just a bit of an unknown quantity and that can end up causing uh some difficulties we've definitely had partners who joined the project and then just sort of said actually we don't know what any of this is about it's not really relevant and they've dropped out really quick because they they just didn't think it was suitable for them but that should have been established you know beforehand before they were signed up so as i said here making up the numbers you will see this happening a lot in european projects that people are just saying oh it'd be good to have somebody from that sort of sector or be good to have somebody for that part of europe um and and that can then yeah it'll often just mean that you've not got a well-balanced or well-functioning partnership you've just got six partners because you wanted six partners and you will run into problems with that a bit further down the line and that is usually due to the third thing i've mentioned there is a lack of interest or understanding you have a partner who comes in and isn't really keen on the aims they're not keen on the tasks they need to do and suddenly you have other people trying to pick up more than their fair share to to cover for that and so the the things that i've identified as being a good partnership definitely relevance so if people are coming in they've got to be relevant to what you're trying to achieve whether that's that they're a very similar organization to yourself in another country or they're bringing something that you don't have uh and and that's got to be key you know you've got to see where do they fit into what you're trying to do in the project not just they're a good organization and capacity is definitely a key thing i think one of the notes there earlier that cena put up about um it was an inconvenience wasn't it yeah so we've definitely had that for partners they'll they'll take on the project but in reality they don't really have the capacity and they kind of just want a bit of money but they don't see this as part their core work it's just this added extra that you know they don't really want to do but they just want to take the boxes so you do have to be careful about kind of understanding the capacity of each of your partners are they actually going to be able to deliver their part of this and engage with the project properly or are they going to be kind of a bit flaky and this isn't high on their priorities and working cultures is something that i've definitely learned a lot about over the years other countries around europe work in different ways meetings are different the way people speak to each other can be different it's it's definitely interesting and if you've not experienced that before it can take a bit of getting used to and i would say it's important we've often had kind of a kick-off meeting at the start of one of these projects where we sort of try and talk that through and we say this is this is what we think is acceptable or not acceptable and some of that is about how you how and when you contact each other when you might expect a response you know i've gotten used to the fact that most of europe switches off for the summer we're always busy working away and they're all off for six weeks or something they disappear but i'm used to it now and i just expect that and so yeah getting to know how how your partners work is really important and then a clear definition of the work packages the timelines and the roles this should all be in your application but people should also understand that the application is often difficult to understand so you need to all understand what are your responsibilities in terms of the different work packages what are your deadlines what's contingent on other things you know it's basic kind of project management that lots of you will be used to but you've got to make sure that everybody across the partnership really understands uh each of those things uh or else you know you'll end up running into these problems further down the line and it will get really really messy and somebody ends up trying to pick up the pieces and keep the whole show on the road and yeah so connected to that uh i love this homer simpson line that he thinks the problem with marriage is is communication that there's too much communication and that is something that i think it can go up and down so in a lot of our partnerships there's been issues with this either that people aren't communicating in time or there isn't enough where you get sort of bombarded and you get you know i've had inboxes full of long email chains you know it's really hard to follow what's going on and it just makes you not want to engage with the project at all and so one of the things we've gotten better at over the years is trying to find the best way to collaborate and communicate across europe obviously a lot of this has become easier i think as people have adapted over the pandemic we were always a very dispersed organization and did a lot of this international work so we were used to working kind of remotely and collaborating in the clouds things like that but for others certainly around europe this was new scary territory um for for some some smaller organizations and in some countries and then others are you know incredibly skilled in all of this um but some of the things we've found to work really well um we've uh so google drive i'm sure a lot of you will know that you can get the google uh whatever they call it workspace for non-profits i think it's called now so if you're a registered charity you can basically just fill in the forms you get access to all of this you get as much as you will ever need for free from google and you'll get your email drive storage all these different things um you also get some of the free google ads and things like that that are a great benefit but but we found at the beginning of that amateur network project at the beginning of the four years um the person who had written the bid had written in that we were going to use this project management tool called reiki which i wasn't familiar with maybe some of you are and it was just i'm sure it's brilliant but it was so technical and so complicated and nobody had used it before and it was just a nightmare and for the first few months we were all being told to look at it to find the information we needed and it just wasn't working and it was it was just stopping us from getting the project started and eventually i convinced a few of the others you know we use google drive in our organization i said i'm sure a lot of people are using google already for different things it's much more familiar it's simple and and it worked you know it's just having that shared drive storage where everybody could go to the one folder and they were familiar with our work and and then easing them into the idea of using kind of google docs and spreadsheets and things so we could all collaborate live on on one document rather than people emailing attachments and that that was quite transformational for some of these some of the partners we were working with and made our life a lot easier um but it doesn't do everything it's great for documents and collaboration and storage and all of that but in terms of communication um again in our organization we use slack there's lots of other similar platforms like this we find it quite good for that informal quick questions things like that you can have separate little groups and channels and things like that but you've got to find some way of allowing your team to communicate and collaborate as as quickly and easily as possible and i think we've all learned over the years that email kind of isn't the answer to that it's great for some things and some more formal stuff but if you want to work as a team you've got to do that thing of trying to recreate uh you know a collaborative office environment we've also used obviously whatsapp and signal uh there's a few other things what is it telegram again in different european countries we're surprised that you know they don't use whatsapp it's not a thing um the viber as well in some of the eastern european countries it can be hard you need to try and push people to all agree on one thing but it's really worth it it makes such a big difference when you know you can quickly get to everybody that you need to with a quick message rather than emailing and waiting two weeks for somebody to dig through their inbox to respond to you and so there's there's my quick run-through of ingredients of what we think works and doesn't work uh i i can definitely give you more horror stories and i can also tell you those fantastic stories of you know just getting to meet wonderful people uh i often say i feel like i can now arrive in any european country and i have a friendly face i can go and see which is just brilliant in terms of your own uh career your future you know whatever i might be doing in the future i feel like i have great contacts all over europe and it's one of the best things about about the work that we do so i think it's all been it's been really valuable on the sort of personal and professional level and as i said at the beginning it's it's a huge part of how we do our work and it's hard to kind of imagine our organization on our work without the input that we get from peers and the ideas that we've stolen from others you know it's it's been yeah completely it's it's core to everything we do is that international learning really i'll leave it there anyway and and uh we can have questions later on excellent oh damian great wow you covered so many points and you kind of give it gave it like a human face like what what i what i shared before with all your stories so this was great so kind of the good and the bad of partnership building and what i actually like is what you said in the end that it's about this relationship building part and it's about meeting people and getting to know people and establishing those relationships and having a nice smiling face in every european country this is this is great this is what it's actually all about it's about this european cohesion aspect and sometimes you forget it about all these project management all this administrative stuff that it's actually about connecting to other people also uh so thanks a lot this was super uh valuable um very concrete uh ideas tools thanks a lot for sharing this um great so again if you have questions put them in the chat because what we will now do um is we go on a break 10 minutes and we will all be back i would say 11 15 and then emma will share 10 very concrete steps on how to setting up those partnerships how to manage them and then we have the q a session in the end so this is what will happen in the next hour and uh yeah thanks again damian amazing that was excellent thank you very much damian it was brilliant um okay yes so sorry no i just say we see people in 10 minutes then yes exactly 11 15 see you all back then to uh okay we can start i think welcoming people back in now after the break um i think can you see my slides okay there christina great thank you i can see yes your little video on the screen so um i think we can it's area court pass now we are okay and so welcome back everybody um and a huge thank you to christina for steering us through the first half of our session today uh very skillfully and to damien of course for that excellent insight into that experience of being a project manager and putting together the um a partnership i i don't know if you could probably see me i was nodding along to so many things there um because damian was exactly right and it was very similar to my own experience of managing projects and i started out as a european project manager before i ever kind of came to the wheel i was managing a variety of different projects and had that very similar experience of the relationships that you build as a project partner and you know how it can be difficult to kind of quantify beyond the funding itself sometimes it's hard to quantify the impact that these projects have on organizations and how transformational they can be and the learning that you get from them and and the fact that you know of course there is a big opportunity now with um we often get the question of can the uk be partners in projects um no the uk is no longer eligible to be a partner in any of the european projects uh ex or the european programs except for northern ireland is obviously qualified to be in the peace plus program so that's the new peace program some of you might have been aware of piece one two three and four that have gone on since i think the 90s or maybe even earlier and so we're now in the stage of they've left behind the numbers and we now have a piece plus which is the new piece program and and so that obviously will you know it will allow you to partner with northern ireland but none of the other programs will allow you to do that except for there are exceptional circumstances where you can demonstrate that a uk partner is absolutely necessary to the project um in in certain european programs you can uh justify bringing in a partner from outside of the eu for um specific reasons if there is an expertise that you can demonstrate just does not exist uh elsewhere in europe and you need to bring it in whether it's from the us or australia or somewhere in asia or even the uk so but you know in general um uk are no longer part of european programs and so therefore cannot be partners um and but and this i suppose could be difficult for some irish partners because many of us you know they were our closest neighbors and they were kind of our goal two partners for many things but it's also a huge opportunity because as damian said we're now the main english-speaking country in europe there is still malta obviously it's officially english speaking but um we're the biggest english-speaking country in europe at the moment and i'm very attractive partners so it's a good time to start getting involved as uh as partners in projects for the first time um and as well as that we're relatively near the start of a new multi-year annual financial framework so that's a bit of eu jargon but it's essentially the eu budget period it runs ing to seven year cycles the last one kicked off last year in 2021 so um if you start getting involved now the learning that you have the connections that you build the projects that you have it will run ing to seven years so essentially these programs will stay relatively the same over these seven years then when the budget period changes again there can be new uh new things can be introduced and there's a little bit of learning involved even for those of us who are very active in eu projects it can be there's a bit of learning but it's it's a good time to get stuck involved at the beginning of a budget period because you get um the benefit of kind of learning about these programs alongside everybody else so um thank you very much for that damian and for christina i am going to go into the 10 steps soon of how to go about building a partnership and 10 very kind of solid steps of how you kind of practically go about building one and i just wanted to touch very briefly on why is why european partnership is important and why partnership for schools in general is important um christina touchdown is already there but obviously the vast majority of eu funding programs require some kind of partnership not all of them i'm sure like a lot of the national ones like the european social fund or leader um or some other kind of uh kind of smaller skilled ones or especially at those ones at national level don't require an eu partnership also there are some where you don't necessarily need to cooperate at an eu level or you can just have national partnerships i've seen that under programs like the life program which is the environmental climate program or the serv program which is the citizenship equality rights and values so there are some exceptions where you don't need that eu partnership and but the vast majority do require it or if they don't require eu partnership they require some kind of partnership some kind of external collaboration with another organization so and in general for all european projects even if they don't specifically require an eu project's partner and you know apart from another european country you do want to build in that eu dimension in some way because they'll usually explicitly ask you in the application why is this a european project and why isn't this something that you could just do nationally so you'll need to kind of prove that eu dimension so even if they don't specifically require you to have eu partnerships having one can help to demonstrate why this is a pan-european project and so there's that kind of thing uh obviously then there's the opportunities now with uh ireland being that kind of mainly your speaking country there's opportunities to learn and to innovate and to network build as damien outlined there everything that they were able to share i think you said steel but we say share and borrow and learn from your partners is obviously um very important but the other thing that i think is really important is that partnership is it's the right way to go about creating impact and making meaningful change there's actually this model that some of you might have come across before i actually took it from a european program uh one of the internet programs uh for the north sea region so this is the one that ireland is in but the interests all use a similar approach and they've started calling it this quadruple helix approach it must be called a kind of engaged approach i've seen different terminology for it but it's um an innovation and collaboration model that is citizen slash end user led that incorporates that perspective and it is a useful it is useful in the innovation process when citizens needs are central so basically you know up until uh it used to be the triple helix where it was public authorities slash government uh working along with industry and along with academia to affect change and to make an impact to kind of create solutions to problems and and they almost forgot about the end user about the actual citizen the people whose lives that they're trying to improve and so now they've come out with this quadruple helix thing which is uh kind of illustrates that all of these stakeholders are essential parts of the puzzle if we're going to tackle climate change if we're going to tackle uh injustice or equality or inequality or even trying to solve simple problems at local level you need a little bit of all of this working together in order to create that change so partnership is you know even beyond the fact that you know there's funding in it there's opportunities for learning and there's uh opportunities to uh obviously access funding all of that kind of thing you know even beyond that it's also the kind of right way to go about doing things is to bring in all of the relevant stakeholders working together to actually solve the problem and this is something that the eu is very much favoring more and more in different programs now and this is really good news for our sector because it means that there's now a place for us in programs that effectively excluded civil society and ngos before like the research and innovation space but there barely used to be any space there for civil society or for community and voluntary groups but now more and more um whether it's universities or higher education academia they're being kind of pressured to you know if you're if you're researching a societal challenge there should be a citizen group or a a representative group um of who the end user is uh and that's that's kind of represented in the consortium so it's this kind of thing of nothing about us without us if you're trying to come up with a solution that is to uh serve some particular group of the population they should be involved in the decision making design process that's just good practice and so that's just something i wanted to kind of touch on there and it kind of factors into when you're designing consortiums yourself it's about thinking about representing different sectors and stakeholders so maybe looking at the controllable helix seeing it is there different not every consortium is going to perfectly you know uh follow that formula there's lots of different ways of going about it but it's worth kind of asking yourself these questions when you're looking when you're putting together a consortium am i representing different sectors different stakeholders am i getting a diversity of perspectives here um are there different skills and expertise that these people can bring so christina touched on it like you know if you want to build a project where uh like for example the wheel we wanted to build an e-learning platform we have no idea how to do that so we needed to bring in expertise and people who've done this before or people who have some kind of you know their digital specialists or whatever so it's about looking at what it is you want to do and what skills and expertise you need to bring in in order to deliver on the top on on the project uh for eu perspective geographical spread it can be very important so you're you don't want something that's it depends on the program and you know obviously if it's an interact program where they define what region you're you're pulling from then that's fine but uh in general you're looking to have a diversity of different member states usually wanted to western europe you know you want to have a few from the south and the east as well to show that you've got lots of different perspectives and it's about kind of sharing learning across the different member states regardless of where they are in their journey of developing and and then things like reach and capacity so not every partner has to have all of these things but every consortium should consider all of these things in how it's designed and i just wanted to give you a couple of examples so as i said i i started off managing several different european projects for a small nonprofit before i ever came to the wheel one of them was this whole project eu so this was a project it was to do with healthy acts of living for older people and it was specifically about equipping kind of informal carers with kind of basic skills around promoting um strength and balance and physical activity as part of their everyday home care so you can see what kind of this was a very diverse a consortium they kind of did it by the book they had two universities one was a sports science department of a german university the other was she was an internationally renowned expert on exercise for all physical activity for older people and she was based in israel so that was an example of where we were able to demonstrate that we needed this partner from outside the eu in order to complement this consortium so she was brought in with special exceptions essentially to to be part of this consortium and we had one private home care company so a little bit of private sector we had one nursing college one technical college and and two ngos so you have lots of different you had a bit of private sector a bit of academia um a bit of the ngo kind of sector no public authorities bush you know other other consortiums might have something like that uh the school project was the first project i wrote for the wheel and this was a little bit different the point of the project was to build um an educational platform for uh ngos for third sector organizations and it was about kind of reach and um reaching as many current sector organizations as possible so i picked the wheel and three other sector representative bodies from different um organization or from different eu member states a vt provider who had done kind of that digital stuff before and could maybe help us with the validation of learning because we didn't we weren't sure how to go about that and they've done it before and a technology partner many of you might be aware of on kazan and so they were a technology partner and again i was able to justify having two irish partners in this project because i balanced it out with more eu partners and i was able to justify that on hassan were kind of unique in that they were both digital specialists and an ngo kind of civil society group themselves so they had like a special kind of perspective that they could bring into this project and then a more recent one that we have is foundations for sector three so it was the wheel another representative body uh oh one other representative why it should be body not bodies and a vt provider actually the same one from the scope project so you'd often find that if you get on with partners you use them again and again in projects and a university so these are the types of you know bringing in different stakeholders and things like that and so with that we'll move on to our 10 steps now and it shouldn't take too long to do these and we should have plenty of time then at the end for questions we have at least 10 minutes so if you have any questions throughout just uh throw them in the the chat box there and we get to them um but she already gave some kind of great ideas for how to connect and reach out whether it's nationally or at eu level when we're doing the mentee earlier and you were 100 right sometimes when people ask me about building european partnerships they imagine that there's some kind of secret key it's it's not really any kind of secret it's it's as transparent as uh what damian was saying