Crowdpolicy @ 2nd Blue Crowdfunding web meeting
The 2nd Web Meeting of the Blue Crowdfunding project took place on June 17–18. The meeting was attended by 14 stakeholders from 9 Mediterranean countries, including 5 Βlue Εconomy chambers, 3 participatory funding organizations, 2 universities and 4 Regions.
Crowd Policy, together with the European Crowdfunding Network, E-zavod from Slovenia and Goteo Foundation from Spain, participated as Crowdfunding Expert partners.
Michael Psallidas, Managing Director of Crowd Policy, presented the main aspects of Civic Crowdfunding on June 17. He explained how civic crowdfunding enables the public to support the achievement of worthy goals, by encouraging people to support collectively and in a truly practical way social or business ventures they feel merit their backing. Civic crowdfunding differs from other crowdfunding types in that it pursues objectives of common interest. Typically, it concerns place-based projects instigated by citizens and civil society organizations. Consequently, civic-crowdfunded goods usually belong to a specific category of public goods known as “urban commons”. Mr Psalidas showcased the Act4Greece platform as a best practice from Greece.
The broad agenda of the meeting covered organizational aspects of the project, its communication strategy, the development of training tools for stakeholders and SMEs, best practices, alternative finance instruments, and prepared the organization of workshops by institutional and business support partners.
The “Blue Crowdfunding” project aims to improve the skills of stakeholders in the ‘blue growth’ economy sector in the Mediterranean region, by boosting innovation through participatory funding. In particular, it seeks to improve the competitiveness of blue economy SMEs through participatory funding and to develop the operational capacity of the Regions to use participatory funding.
CrowdPolicy and the other expert partners were assigned the task to assist the regions of Central Macedonia, Vlora (Albania), Marche and Campania (Italy) to organize co-creation workshops in September and October.
