The sixth Exchange of Experience event of RegionArts project was held partially on March 19th and 20th. Due to the COVID-19 situation, the event was forced to be made with re-arrangements. Deriving from the original plans the event was held as an online session focusing on timely vital activities for the project. According to this, an Action Plan workshop was arranged for the first day and Steering Committee Group Meeting on the second day - all in virtual form. The remaining activities, such as the study visits and workshops/presentations were postponed with the agreement of Lead Partner and Joint Secretary of the Interreg Europe. The next meeting for the whole project consortium is to be held in September 29th–30th 2020 in Rovaniemi Finland (assuming the situation allows).
As previously mentioned, this virtual EoE focused on RegionArts Action Plans and the work needed to ensure the progress of the project. The overall goal was to have a common understanding of action plans in general and to gather the necessary tools to start working on a first draft version. The session consisted of an introduction part and an active workshop part.
In the introduction part, there were presentations for ‘From good practices to policy change Development’ by the director of Regional Council of Lapland Päivi Ekdahl; ‘Creating the Action Plan’ by Pirkko Sivonen, Inno4Sports Interreg Europe project, Regional Council of Lapland and ‘Creating the Action Plan’ by Sari Nisula, Social Spa Interreg Europe project, Lapland University of Applied Sciences. Also, two Inno4Sport project partner representant from the Netherlands was involved according to the collaboration with these two projects. Through the presentations with a theoretic approach and practical examples as well as discussion, the common understanding was created in terms of principles for action plan work and how should project utilize regional knowledge base, learnings from the project as well as additional knowledge from other project partners. The discussion part focused more on questions on how policy change/influencing can be done amidst the change of the programme periods and if the targeted instrument can be changed.
Overall, the virtual event was successful despite the quick re-arrangements and was seen definitely worth it. Presentations offered a good overall view on the action plans and discussion enabled to focus on more specific questions by partners. In other words, RegionArts consortium gained a shared understanding of the practical level concerning the action plan work.
