Sunshine and a Mediterranean breeze: The FUSION Partner Meeting in Valencia

It was a welcome change from the cold of the European winter, when the FUSION partners gathered in Spain’s third-biggest city in November 2022. Valencia not only offered beautiful sights and delicious food, but also a productive partners’ meeting.

By Montserrat Llinares

On the 24th and 25th of November 2022, the project partners travelled to Valencia for one of the last transnational partner meetings of the project. We met in the facilities of the Centro Municipal de Juventud de Quart de Poblet, one of the frequent collaborators of Backslash, FUSION’s Spanish project partner.

The first day of the meeting was mainly a review of the work that needed to be done for the first 2 intellectual outputs, the FUSION guide and toolbox. We discussed how the writing process of the guide was going, we set deadlines for its layout, we reviewed the content…

For the second intellectual output, a toolkit for festival makers and social organisations on how to come up with collaborative projects at festivals, we created a dynamic to work together on the content. We debated and reflected on the specific needs of social organisations and festivals when looking for collaboration between them or during the collaboration. Each partner could bring in their own expertise from the perspectives of social innovation, education and festivals.

Finally, the coordinator, Holger Jan Schmidt, introduced us to the Superbloom Festival (Munich, DE). Its NGO area, YOUR Planet, is dedicated to environmental and social issues and presented lots of perfect examples for a successful cooperation between festivals and social organisations.

In the afternoon of the same day, we did some sightseeing in the centre of Valencia, including climbing the Micalet, one of the highest bell towers in the city, from where we had some beautiful views.

The second and final day of the meeting was almost entirely devoted to planning and designing the sessions of the alliance’s meetings, the intellectual output 3.

We finalised the objectives and target audience of these sessions and prepared the content of the first international session. We also decided what the website for the alliances would look like, both in terms of design and content.

Finally, we ended the meeting by discussing how we will disseminate the materials we produce, that means how we will get these resources to our target audience.