At the end of June, the Co-Engage project held the second in its series of training labs to test the co-creation practices it has researched from across Europe.

The lab, organised by School Raising was hosted in Bologna, Italy and focused on applying our learnings so far to co-create a crowdfunding campaign designed to engage citizens in assisting a local school with a project to improve its facilities and educational offering. Unfortunately, due to ongoing COVID travel restrictions, PVM had to attend online, but it was good to see that many of the partners were able to attend in-person – hopefully we’ll be able to join them soon.

The work in the labs included deciding on a project to crowdfund for, brainstorming pledges and settling on the amount we would charge for each one (think The Price is Right!). We also discussed how we could publicise the campaign, settled on a name and shared contacts we could use to help us gain support, before presenting our ideas to each other and finalising the campaign.

Although managing a hybrid training lab with a mix of online and offline participants was certainly a challenge, the School Raising team and the rest of the partners who were attending in person did everything they could to ensure online attendees were able to engage with discussions. We even got a quick tour of the venue at one point!

The next lab is in Toulouse later this month – one we will also be attending online – but, hopefully, come August we’ll be able to meet our Co-Engage partners in-person for the first time in 17 months.