Alma Cívica, through its City Laboratory (LAB) program, invites citizens to participate in the contest “Experimentá tu Ciudad” – Building community projects, which seeks to award financial support to innovative community projects related to public spaces, environment, local culture and education, which improve people’s quality of life.
One of the biggest challenges in executing and implementing citizen initiatives is finding the funding to do so. Due to this, Alma Cívica promotes this contest, aimed at groups of citizens from all over the country, inviting citizens to submit proposals related to light urban interventions, focused on the recovery of public space, improvement of road safety, increase of green urban or promotion of public life, the environment and sustainability, which solve or mitigate a current environmental problem; or to educational and cultural projects related to the promotion of history or the revaluation of local culture.
Registration is open from August 24 to September 11 and the process to select the winning project has four phases, the first is to register the projects in bit.ly/Experimenta-tu-city. Those shortlisted will be trained in virtual and face-to-face workshops that will provide them with planning and organization tools around the objectives of their respective projects. The shortlisted projects will be presented at an Alma Cívica event where the 3 finalists will be defined. These will go through a popular voting process through the social networks of Alma Cívica and will finally be presented, virtually, before an Examining Board that will define the winning project, on October 31.
“Experimentá tu ciudad” aims to promote the active participation of a citizenry that transforms and improves its territory with the strength of the articulation of its local government, being an excellent opportunity to generate meeting and communication spaces that allow a loyalty of the link between Government and citizen, thus directly increasing the local social and human capital”, mentioned the Executive Director of the organization, Olga Caballero.
For her part, Ana Barriocanal, Coordinator of the City Laboratory Program, said: “With the City Laboratory we guide and promote initiatives proposed and managed by citizens, who are the protagonists and know their local reality better than anyone. We want to generate innovative spaces for collaborative work between citizens and their local governments in order to promote a more participatory democracy and the commitment to work for the common good”.
The bases and conditions of the Contest are available at https://bit.ly/Bases-y-
About Civic Soul
Alma Cívica is a platform that provides support, encouragement and collaboration to a network of ethical, talented and effective citizens who contribute to the development of their localities and to democracy in society.
It works in defense of democratic values, such as justice, social equity, freedom and solidarity at the district level, with people involved with their local reality.
Among its programs is the City Laboratory (LAB), an incubator and accelerator of high-impact projects, which provides accompaniment, training, mentoring and technical support to groups of citizens from different districts of the country. LAB currently works in 20 cities in the departments of Guairá, Misiones and Caazapá.
