Charter of the “Europe Bottom-Up” Platform
Following the horrific wars of the last century, the countries of the European Union drew the right conclusions and founded a common project based on democratic values. We Europeans and our cities and towns are the beneficiaries of this project. It is time for us to think more about our own responsibility for its success. Europe needs us actively to assume shared responsibility.
The “Europe Bottom-Up” Platform helps us to do this. It is a digital platform for action and cooperation, which is meant to encourage awareness of our responsibility for Europe and to support it. It is open to organisations, groups and initiatives that want to contribute to Europe’s success in a wide variety of fields. All of us, including our towns and regions, have the potential for making such contributions. And Europe needs them. For, in the final analysis, it is the lives and actions of many people on the grassroots level that is decisive for the success or lack of success of Europe in social and economic and also cultural terms.
Participation in the “Europe Bottom-Up” platform stands for
1. understanding Europe also as a union of its citizens, with their cities and regions representing the grassroots level and the potential of Europe and the European community. They, above all, embody the cultural energy that gives Europe life: their stories, their democratic values, their convictions, their diversity.
2. strengthening the involvement and lived responsibility of European citizens, of their cities and their regions. The future of Europe cannot be successfully shaped without the participation of the European grassroots. The platform aims to offer a digital infrastructure for cooperation to those who are interested in the success of the European project and who are prepared to make their own contributions to it.
3. viewing Europe’s grassroots as a cornerstone for the success of the European project. Hence, insisting also on the responsibility of the grassroots level and, at the same time, supporting its development: promoting the work of grassroots organisations, making it possible for them to connect up with other initiatives, to learn from each other, to create alliances — also so that together they can more effectively convey the importance of bottom-up responsibility for Europe to the public.
4. also publicising “best-practice” examples of European work and cooperation, as well as presenting contrary, unsuccessful examples. For the bottom-up idea does not promise a simple path forward, but rather involves commitment to a complicated path, which it is, however, in Europe’s interest for us to take.
Stiftung Zukunft Berlin is developing a digital cooperation platform together with its partners and the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany. The “Europe Bottom-Up” platform is designed to provide cities, regions and various initiatives with a tool for exchange across national borders. It is a tool that makes it easier to learn from each other and to arrange and carry out joint projects. The explicit goal is to strenghten the European unification and to attract others to it through the joint presence on the platform. More information on the platform project can be found here.
