Projects and Activities

Citizens For Europe e.V. (CFE) initiates various kinds of projects and takes part in activities of third organisations and institutions that concern issues of European Union citizenship. If you are interested in detailed information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Right to Vote

 
Campaign: The European integration process and transnational migration lead to local communities that become more and more diverse regarding their nationality and culture. However, citizenship and electoral rights are still defined on the basis of nationality. Additionally debates around the European Parliament Elections 2014 are still trapped in national discourses.

To trigger public debates, political action and to promote equal opportunities for participation in the EU we proposes awareness-raising and mobilizing activities.
 

DiverseCity

 
Network: CFE participated in the replicating and adaptation workshop of DiverseCity on Boards in the Greater Toronto Area organised by the Maytree Foundation, BMW Group and KPMG beginning of October. In order to adapt this project in Berlin and Germany we created an operative taskforce in Berlin. The first steps will be a market analysis on the demand and motivation of public and private institutions in Berlin to diversify their leadership. The project started in November this year. We keep you posted! DiverseCity in Canada

 
Publication: Open Citizenship is a hybrid journal published by Citizens For Europe e. V. to bring EU citizenship issues to an engaged general readership. Open Citizenship combines scientific discourses on the subject of European citizenship with articles and reports on positive and negative effects of its current legal definition. The journal is a source of information on actors, scientific debates and projects concerned with European citizenship, migration and political participation in the EU.

Democratic Community of Practice (DemCoP)

 
Network: Geographical, social and economic processes of large scale challenge the way we used to organise our societies in Europe. Such processes materialize in the fading of national boundaries, an increase of internal and external migration, the demographic change and last but not least the collapse of financial systems. The Democratic Community of Practice (DeCoP) brings together different actors to lay the path for a long-term collaboration between civil society organizations (CSOs), public institutions, and engaged individuals to develop a network that promotes political participation of young people, migrants or disenfranchised groups.

Seminar: INTEGRA – European Seminar for Integration Officers at Local Level. Today more than 30 million people in the EU reside permanently outside their country of origin. This development – paired with the current financial crisis and subsequent cuts in the public social sector – pose great challenges to our societies. Across the European Union, cities and regions have come up with innovative solutions to meet these challenges by striving for an inclusive and participatory society. The INTEGRA seminar brings together key actors who have devised such solutions. The aim is to boost cross border knowledge production and cooperation among integration officers.

Conference: The Brückenbauer Summer School 2012 is designed as a highly interactive and flexible platform for individual and collective experiences, networking and knowledge building. The methods  support the resources present in the group to emerge, create a space for participants to learn from each other and to build new synergies on the basis of everyone’s experience. Documentation

Campaign: Symbolic election gives Berlin’s foreigners a voice. To promote democracy, Jede Stimme 2011 is organising a symbolic election and events inviting representatives from politics, academia and civil society. The objective was to create a momentum of public interest and pressure in which the integration of disenfranchised groups becomes an aim of political parties that, on mid-term, introduce more inclusive instruments of political participation for EU citizens and third-country nationals applicable to other communities in the EU as well.

Conference:Looking For European Citizenship. Globlisation, the European integration process and transnational migration lead to communities that become more and more diverse concerning their nationality and culture. One particular challenge is the current legal construction of European citizens as national subjects, which has become politically limiting and lacks functionality. The conference served as a platform for the development of new local as well as transnational cooperations, projects and initiatives.

Website: Vote-Exchange is the political complement of labour mobility and the fundamental freedoms within the EU. Vote-Exchange.org meets the growing desire for political participation in the EU and empowers EU-citizens to exert their will to vote at national level in an innovative way. The website promotes a new and modern form of transnational- and residency-based EU citizenship free from national and cultural attributes and empowers citizens in the EU to participate more fully the political process: independent of their national, cultural, ethnic or religious background.