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ALDA - MEDAR

ALDA – European Association for Local Democracy
Strasbourg, France
alda-europe.eu/

Participants of the organisation: Giulia Sostero, Sofia Corsi,
Apolline Bonfils
Areas of work: Local and participatory democracy, active citizenship, good governance, decentralisation, SDGs localisation
Social media accounts:https://www.instagram.com/aldaeurope/?hl=it

ALDA – European Association for Local Democracy, is a French-registered association dedicated to the promotion of good governance and citizen participation at the local level in the European Union, its Neighbourhood and beyond. ALDA is a key stakeholder in the field of local democracy, active citizenship, and cooperation between local authorities and civil society in Europe, its neighbourhood, and all around the World, mainly acting through participative methods and decentralised cooperation. As a core element, ALDA supports citizens and groups of citizens in their initiatives aimed at improving their local context and building bridges with local authorities in order to make this change real. ALDA is a membership-based organisation gathering today more than 350 members, including local authorities, associations of local authorities, and civil society organisations, coming from more than 45 countries in enlarged Europe.

 

MEDAR
Istanbul, Turkey
medarder.org

Participants of the organisation: Derya Özkaynak Suer, Ayşegül Algan, Büşra Ağaç, Gürkan Özturan
Areas of work: Media and Journalism
Social media accounts: https://twitter.com/medarder/

Media Research Association (MEDAR) aims to conduct training, monitoring & research, present opinion pieces, and curate theoretical & practical ideas deriving from the significance of mass communications tools for society. MEDAR positions itself on the side of people in a critical fashion, focusing on alternative media. The association’s goal is to contribute to the emergence of a free, independent & ethical media atmosphere as well as to gather qualitative & quantitative data on media professionals’ working conditions, media’s general operations, and political & economic atmosphere to increase awareness in this field.


Program Name: TEAM4TEAM: Turkey-European Active Movements for Training, Exchange, Action and Mobility

Our partnership was born through common contacts since ALDA was looking for Turkish media organisations to partner with to apply to the CSEP Program. Despite not having met in person for a long time, however, our partnership grew a very strong spirit of collaboration. For us, the opening meetings, despite being online during the summer of 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, helped in building a wider community of CSO actors interested in working in Turkish-European cooperation on several different topics. We met many interesting people and learnt new useful skills.

On our side, the exchange program focused on media and active citizenship, respectively the focus of expertise of MEDAR and ALDA. It was also the opportunity for us to learn from each other and to merge our fields of interest, finding a common ground in the role of citizen journalists. We gathered our beneficiaries among CSO workers interested in media and active citizenship from Turkey and Europe, as well as individuals (i.e. activists, journalists) willing to deepen their knowledge on the topic.

We kickstarted our collaboration with the webinar “democracy Vs disinformation”, which helped us disseminate our call for participants for our project.

TEAM4TEAM consisted of an online school, which we organised online in April – June 2021, followed by a short exchange period where 4 partnerships had the chance to meet, learn from each other and organise joint activities. Finally, the participants met all together in Tarragona (Spain) for an intensive “spring school” where through practical activities such as games and simulations we deepen their insight of active citizenship and media. Since the effects of the pandemic were already taken into account since the beginning of the program design our project implementation was not greatly affected by it, even if unfortunately the restrictions hindered travels in particular during the exchange period.

Therefore, TEAM4TEAM has achieved its goals in terms of reinforcing partnerships and exploring how we can work on active citizenship through media, together. As ALDA and MEDAR, we learnt a lot from each other thanks to our different fields of expertise, and we managed to build up an amazing working atmosphere despite being apart for a long time.

“For us, this partnership did wonders even if born online. The exchange we had was real and felt despite the distance, and we learnt a lot from each other.“

We added links to the outputs by the subgrantees of our program.
You can find the Turkish translation of the Electionville game at this link: http://www.electionville.se/

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