Abstract Summary
This workshop shares our model for building public civic partnerships between social initiatives and governments to jointly tackle complex challenges the city is facing in fields as the energy transition, food production and housing. In this workshop Waag Futurelab offers lessons, tools and practices to (re)built a collaboration between the government and social initiatives. There is a growing urgency within society to tackle diverse social challenges. Social initiatives, such as food , housing or energy cooperatives, deal with these challenges in their own way by organizing themselves in decentralized and dynamic networks. Yet collaboration between the government and social initiatives hardly gets off the ground as they don’t know how to work with each other. We need to (re)built public civil collaboration to use the power of society and tackle complex social challenges. A collaboration not based on the idea of citizen participation and a single subsidy, but based on a joint new frame for an equal, sustainable, reciprocal relationship between social initiatives and the government. More information: https://waag.org/nl/article/overheid werk samen met maatschappelijk initiatief/ In the last two years Waag Futurelab has researched what is needed to form balanced and stable public civic partnerships. We have organized a series of workshops for governments and societal organisations to put this knowledge into practice. The findings of this research are documented in a Playbook for creating public civic partnerships with lessons, best practices and methods for establishing these collaborations. The workshop The workshop consists of two parts. During the first part we will share the lessons learned on public civic partnerships and what is needed in its core foundation and shared infrastructures (such as financial, legal and governance agreements) to be successful. The second part we will introduce participants to several methods from the Playbook that help form the foundation of collaboration and create shared infrastructures. The workshop uses co-creation methods and the materials used during the workshop will stay available under a creative-commons license. The target audience is a mix of policy advisors and citizens initiatives that are working on societal challenges. Ideally the participants are already collaborating in an initiative around e.g. energy, housing, food production or another societal challenge and looking for a perspectives to design their collaboration. Participants can bring their own case(s) to work with during the workshop. No specific prerequisites or experience is required. After the workshop participants have: • Knowledge of public civic partnerships as an alternative form to tackle societal challenges, including its opportunities as well as challenges • Gained practical experience with methods and tools to start or further develop public civic partnerships
