The Building Capacities in Innovation Procurement for Cities (BUILD) project will roll out a number of training and capacity building actions targeted at upskilling the public procurers on the topic of innovation procurement. Public procurement is a powerful instrument to drive faster adoption of innovation among public sector users while simultaneously promoting economic growth by providing innovative companies opportunity for first user references. The strategic use of procurement to boost demand for innovative goods of services has become an important part of the innovation policy agenda in many EU countries, and is at the core of the new EU public procurement directive (2014/24/EU), which underlines importance of opening opportunities for public procurement of innovation (e.g. by introducing a new innovation partnership procedure). BUILD integrates the highest-quality capacity-building tools to facilitate the roll-out of capacity building and training services to cities. BUILD will engage and train public – private procurers, SMEs and startups via both onsite and online avenues on a number of topics like; 1) Guiding Principles (Valonia) 2) Legal Knowledge and Procedures (Rotterdam) 3) Preliminary market consultation (CE) 4) Pre-commercial procurement (Turku) 5) Competitive dialogue (Turku) 6) Competitive procedure with negotiation (Tartu) 7) Innovation partnership (Valonia) 8) Legal questions and considerations (Rotterdam) and 9) Risk assessment (Valonia). Lastly, BUILD will link and establish synergies with research and innovation projects funded by the EU (via Horizon Europe or other EU funding programmes), with specific focus on EU funded projects fostering PPI, with the aim of facilitating mutual learning and knowledge exchange and will also set up a pro-active dissemination action which will facilitate outreach to key target audiences, namely; public and private buyers, public-owned enterprises, SMEs and start-ups, research institutions among others.

Inequalities in living conditions and health is a reality for many of the world's cities today. It is also the context of which the project Open the door for reading has emerged. The report, Closing the gap in a generation (WHO 2005), has resulted in strategies in many European cities, of which the partners cities Gothenburg, Bristol, Brussels, Milan and Turku are examples. The action plans undertaken by these cities address the general and specific challenges to enable better livelihood and equality for all. Support for social sustainability exists on all levels, for example the UN Agenda 2030, the European Pillar of Social Rights, the emphasis on social inclusion in the Erasmus+ program. Within this framework all five partner cities are committed towards implementing actions and/or policies to support a good start in life for all children. This ambition has been the common ground for the partnership and Gothenburg´s initiative “The city where we read to our children” has been a driving force for the project’s theme and content. Early language development and reading is perceived as a fundamental right of the child as it plays a vital role in a child's ability and motivation to learn during school years. Open the Door to Reading has been geared towards strengthening the support of children’s language and literacy development. The most important resource to encourage children’s language development are the parents. Focus has therefore been on developing supportive methods to strengthen parent’s ability to support their children. The partners have exchanged innovative practices as well as developed new tools within this field. The projects cross-sectoral structure involved professionals from pre-schools, library’s, child health care services and family Centres. The aim was to share and improve existing tools and methods and in partnership develop a training manual for professionals from different fields of expertise on how to reach children and their families. Transnational Partner Meetings (TPM) have been used to share and develop competence around reading promotion. Each partner has hosted a three-day TPM with a specific theme which included presentations of good practice, study visits and workshops. Workshops around the training manual were also implemented. The five TPMs enrolled 140 people participants (pre-school teachers, librarians, family centre staff, strategic planners in education, university teachers, adult education and teachers working with multilingual families). Two Multiplier Events have been held, in Brussels and in Milan which included representatives from different academic fields and professionals giving both an operative and a strategic perspective to reading promotion. The events reached in total over 250 people, far greater than anticipated in the project proposal. The Training Manual (TM) for professionals is a supportive guide and provides a selection of tools and methods professionals can use on a general basis as well as directed at specific targets groups. Over 190 professionals have taken part in the testing and local follow-up of the TM. The project has influenced the cities' in so many ways and has had an impact at both an operative and policy level. For example, Gothenburg´s programme has inspired Bristol’s new strategy ‘Bristol: A Reading City’ and Milan has implemented a group of Reading Ambassadors. The TPM in Brussels, presented kamishibai as a method to support language learning in early childhood education which generated great interest amongst the librarians from Turku who applied for national funding to implement the kamishibai in Turku. The cross-sectorial collaboration between professionals are the most prominent long-term benefit. Milan has for example introduced a strategic multi-stakeholder group, composed of the early childhood services area, library area and the Health Department. In Turku, the library sector has set up a new network between pre-schools, child welfare, NGOs, church, children culture planner, and director of early childhood education. The TM as an educational tool will also have long-term benefits within the cities. Supporting a continuation of reading promotion and the knowledge amongst professionals on the importance of early intervention and child literacy support. This is expected to have a long-term effect in the form of new co-designed approaches.The partner cities are now also better equipped to adapted reading promotion to meet the needs of children and parents. There is greater insight into steps needed to stimulate reading and literacy from a very early age and better understanding of the needs and challenges facing vulnerable families and their children. Hopefully, the knowledge and practices from this partnership, will lead to greater opportunities for young children, especially those children growing up in a non-literary environment. By supporting children’s learning conditions, we can contribute to the greater goal; social equality.

This project aims to increase the efficiency of the youth policies through promoting and raising capacities for cross-sectorial cooperation and youth participation in youth policy-making and its implementation on different governmental and non-governmental levels and sectors. The project consists of 5 mobility activities, 2 capacity building activities and local activities between the phases which are not showed in the budget, but it’s a part of the project.First the project invests in professional growth of the youth workers and youth leaders, through training course and fellowship. Fellows from partner organisations and municipalities will shadow job in Sweden and Finland to observe and examine successful youth work and youth policy practices. The project gives space for developing competencies and transferring to the partner organisations through working locally to put knowledge into action and affect the youth policy. We have planned local activities when the municipalities prioritize issues to address, develop strategies, policies, programmes and budget. We believe it’s a good chance to have impact on the decision-making and policy-making. The non-governmental organisations (from EaP) and primarily the fellows involved in this project will take part in government meetings and foster youth participation. The participating organisations will make an analytical research of the political documents produced in the municipalities and make the first intermediate report. These youth workers and youth leaders (fellows) will together organise a youth exchange in cooperation with Gori municipality as a chance to implement good example of youth participation on a local level and developing and supporting youth initiatives. Therefore, a youth exchange builds further on the fellows’ competencies and gives them an opportunity to network with municipalities and directly work with young people who will benefit from this exchange by developing competencies for democratic cultures.The local activities planned in between the capacity building and mobility activities are designed so that there is an exploitation of competences and outreach to young people. The mobility activity – seminar will give chance to the fellows and other representatives from the partner organisations to share the practices from the local actions and evaluate the changes and furthermore shape the plans for the conference and follow-up of the project results The capacity building activities – information and awareness-raising campaigns, conference and handbook for EaP stakeholders in the youth field are planned to enhance the outreach of the fellows and the partner organisations and strengthen the impact on the civil society on local, national, regional and international levels.Since the project has a great focus on public bodies and the fellows will also be the representatives from the public bodies the project resembles a good practice of cross-sectorial cooperation.

Context: In the coming decades important geographical, demographical and environmental changes will take place in the urban environment. The rate of urbanization is increasing rapidly, the age structure of the urban population is shifting towards more elderly people, and environmental pressures in especially urban areas are increasing. These changes challenges us to develop integrated sustainable solutions for economic, social and environment problems in urban areas. To optimize solutions, a tight cooperation between HEI's and local authorities is needed. The need for a transition towards more sustainable cities requires a reinforcement of academic programs that educate professionals being able to develop viable solutions for creating smart sustainable cities. The cooperation of universities and municipalities will result at the end in local changes, learning from each other’s approaches and learning to work together on societal challenges. The key-objectives of ESSENCE were: 1) (Inter) Regional dimension and cooperation: ESSENCE aimed at accelerating the design, development and uptake of viable solutions for sustainable cities by enhancing cooperation between HEIs and regional authorities such as municipalities, incubators (e.g. by introducing an international Sustainable City student competition and a Start-Up competition for students). 2) Environment & climate change: ESSENCE aimed with developing a joint international course programme on creating sustainable cities, involving HEIs and regional authorities, and disseminate parts as open courseware and setting an example for other regions. 3) New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses: ESSENCE aimed at investigating, exchanging and testing best practices of innovative teaching approaches, blended learning, distance learning, flipped classroom and ICT methods, and to implement those in a joint course (30 ECTS) on creating sustainable cities. The project partners in ESSENCE were 5 HEI’s and 3 municipalities. The HEI's are partners in CARPE (Consortium on Applied Research and Professional Education), first of this kind in the field of Applied Sciences in Europe, started in 2011. CARPE aims at connecting education and research with their regions to increase social and economic value of the knowledge that they create.Undertaken main activities: In the first year the challenges for developing sustainable cities were discussed in more detail. A course outline was set up, and teams were formed to develop course material together, using the specific expertise of each other. The teaching staff was trained in the use of innovative teaching approaches (creative solution searching and blended learning). Two multiplier events were organised: a conference on blended learning & Smart Sustainable Cities and a conference on creative solution searching in a Smart Sustainable City. The infrastructure for using Open Education Resources (OER) was developed in Moodle. In the second year, the course material for a study programme of 30 ECTS was completed, and placed within the infrastructure. With the 3 municipalities the real life challenge was analyzed and described, in a way the students could work on it. The international Start-Up competition for students was organized, to try out a part of the learning material. In the last year, the course programme was tried out in Utrecht (in a blended learning format). Also the learning material was tried out in a pressure cooker, connected to the international student Sustainable City competition in the 3 municipalities (Utrecht, Turku and Alcoi) was developed. A conference on Viable solutions for sustainable cities was organised. The impact is to describe as an increased attention to sustainability in the participating urban areas, an increased collaboration between the regional authorities and between the HEIs, and finally, with help of this program the students of the five participating HEIS are better prepared for their future positions. New learning material is developed, new learning approaches were implemented. Longer term benefits are to find in: - An increased uptake of innovative teaching approaches leading to the modernization of HEI education, in blended learning, in creative approaches and in learning for sustainable cities; - More intensive collaboration within the HEI's, resulted already in the common effort to implement the results in Vietnam, in collaboration with 6 Vietnamese universities;- Intensified collaboration withins HEI's and with the municipalities about Smart Sustainable Cities;

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are governance techniques and models that directly and cost-effectively benefit both nature and humans. Despite the progress in NBS design and implementation, the socio-political challenge is that NBS are often tailored for the privileged, their design is expert-led, and their implementation hampered by institutional and administrative inertia. NBS have not been able to support a just transformation of habits for sustainability, and fail to incorporate non-human actors or include marginal and vulnerable humans as true beneficiaries of these solutions. COEVOLVERS goes beyond the state of the art by introducing a co-evolutionary approach, which offers a radically new view for NBS design and implementation by looking at NBS at the interface of technological and biological spheres and considering full co-creation as an interplay not only between the stakeholders but also between human and nonhuman actors. To accomplish this, COEVOLVERS explores through seven Living Labs (LL) across Europe the situational and place-based conditions around the socio-politics of NBS design and implementation. The purpose is to alter the socio-ecological conditions to provide governance models and techniques, motivation structures and practices for more inclusive NBS and resilient communities. COEVOLVERS helps develop already existing, incipient, and emerging NBS with local actors by means of participatory and digital transdisciplinary methodologies. COEVOLVERS will support the growth of novel capabilities, entrepreneurship, and renewal capacity for a just transition. COEVOLVERS engages and informs policy- and decisionmakers to ensure their contribution to transformational impacts. We integrate co-created knowledge and preparedness to act with actual governance and decision-making structures to ensure implementation and critical evaluation together with the continuous reconfiguration and development of models, techniques and tools.