Community Engagement & Sustainability
Here our focus shifts to assessing the impact and ensuring effective dissemination of the project’s outcomes. The SKILLS4Water consortium will employ a Quality Assurance Plan to evaluate the project’s achievements objectively. This plan includes various measures like efficient management, active partner engagement, daily activity monitoring, and regular quality reports. To gauge the project’s impact, the team will use questionnaires, monitoring forms, and group discussions, alongside statistical methods to assess participant numbers, event attendance, and digital engagement.
SKILLS4Water aims to encourage participation and civic engagement in different project phases through various means.
Firstly, the project includes a needs assessment analysis, which involves stakeholders from various sectors, including academia, industry, and civil society. This ensures that the project is informed by the needs and priorities of the wider community, and that stakeholders are actively engaged in shaping the project’s direction and outcomes.
In addition, the project includes training and capacity-building activities for young water professionals and teaching staff, which will empower them to become more engaged and active citizens in their communities. By equipping them with the necessary skills and knowledge, the project aims to enable them to take a more active role in shaping water management practices and policies in their respective countries.
Furthermore, the project includes the development of a community hub, which will enable defined target groups to connect and collaborate with one another throughout the project’s implementation. This online platform will facilitate the exchange of ideas, best practices, and experiences, and will enable stakeholders to contribute to the project’s objectives and outcomes.
Overall, SKILLS4Water aims to foster a culture of active citizenship and civic engagement by involving stakeholders in different project phases and equipping young water professionals with the skills and knowledge necessary to take a more active role in their communities. It also empowers Europe with the future generation which is equipped with the necessary skills to create a Water-Smart-Social and contribute significantly to EU Green Deal.
Objectives:
The main objectives of WP5 are to mainstream the results of the project and to identify mechanisms to foster the selfsustainability
and valorisation of project’s results beyond the funding period. To achieve these objectives, ACEEU, as the
WP leader, will integrate all project partners and its own wide-reaching network into all the activities related to
communication, exploitation and sustainability. Such objective is composed of four specific objectives:
O5.1. To develop and implement a comprehensive outreach and engagement strategy that identifies the needs and
preferences of the stakeholders and generate value for the relevant internal and external target groups of the project.
O5.2. To set the communication and dissemination channels, as well as to establish a permanent update on the
advancements, developments and results of the project, aiming at leveraging existing communication channels and networks to raise awareness about SKILLS4Water and its objectives.
O5.3. To set a sustainability strategy that collects the vision developed by the partners on how to sustain and expand the impacts of the project after the funding period.
O5.4. To disseminate the project results and engage the potential users of the results of the project in a final project conference to reach young water professionals and students, industry experts and practitioners, academics and researchers, policymakers and regulators, and businesses and investors.
The four specific objectives will be developed in each of the activities that compose WP5, trying each objective to the specific outputs of the project. Additionally, the transversal nature of WP5 allows the gathering of continuous feedback to inform the establishment of a robust sustainability strategy.
