This event was held on 11 February 2022 and below we look back on the successful event. For more information on what came about after this event, please see our May 2022 newsletter.

What was the Stakeholder Event about?

Local policies and services play a key role in people’s lives. Sport, leisure and cultural facilities, health and care services, work, public transport services – they provide people a means of living, working, caring, and playing in local communities.

The ERC CAPABLE team, led by Dr. Mara Yerkes, held an online, interactive European stakeholder event, “Local policies and services: Moving communities forward in post-covid times” on Friday, 11 February 2022. Stakeholders from local governments and civil society organizations joined with academics and were asked to reflect on and answer the following guiding questions:

• How do local governments and stakeholders deal with challenges of making these services available and accessible within the community?
• What is needed to move forward after the pandemic, to (re)assess local needs?
• What will these policies and services look like in post-Covid times?

Final programme

Below you will find a draft of the event programme, which was finalized one week prior to the event.

12:45          Virtual Walk-in
Participants join the stakeholder meeting via the Teams link

13:00          Introduction Stakeholder Meeting
Mara Yerkes, Principal Investigator ERC CAPABLE     

13:10             Inspire me!
The stakeholder event will kick-off with a few speakers sharing short and inspiring examples of how they’ve dealt with challenges to local service provision.

Confirmed speakers include: Karin de Roo (manager at Markant, organisation for informal carers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Eva S. Kreslin (director of Mala Ulica, Center for Children and Families in Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Sonia Ruiz (Department of Gender and Time Policies, Barcelona City Council).

14:00          Short break

14:10 –
15:25          Breakout Sessions:
During these smaller, interactive sessions, you will have the opportunity to share your experience in reaching out to parents and carers. Which services are you trying to provide? What challenges do you face? What have you learned today that might help in tackling these challenges? What policy and/or knowledge gaps remain?

15:25          Plenary Session
The plenary session brings together the information from the various breakout sessions, sharing best practices and outlining potential and knowledge gaps in moving forward. These insights will be integrated into a policy report that will be shared in the weeks following the event.

16:00         Closing & take-home message

Registration for this event is now closed.