The Secretariat of the AIE took part in the “We are MED” event, organised by the Interreg MED Programme, in Alicante, Spain, on 17-18 May, This was a community building event attended by more than a hundred participants representing the whole community of horizontal and modular Interreg MED projects.

The aim of this event was to make the 8 Interreg MED thematic communities to work together on a common work methodology, sharing ideas, solutions and good practices and finding a common work for the communities. At the same time, this event contributed to foster the team spirit and to strengthen the community at large. Participants from the blue, green, social and creative, efficient buildings, renewable energy, urban transports, sustainable tourism, and biodiversity protection communities took part in a team building exercise, where they got to know each other. The event was also the occasion for preparing the capitalisation process of the mid-term transnational event in April 2018.

The Secretariat of the Euroregion has participated as partner in one of the thematic communities: MED Sustainable Tourism Community (featured by BleuTourMed_C3).

The event of the MED community took place in the venue of the Museum of the University of Alicante. After a session dedicated to the “team building”, the first part of the event was plan for presenting the community. In the first part of the day the 8 Horizontal Projects (HP), representing the thematic communities, present themselves in a plenary session. The basic information were about how each HP is going to work on building the community, how they are creating synergies among Modula Projects inside and outside their community, and what they have planned for the capitalization activities with particular attention to the next year. In addition, presentations of the Interreg Europe Platform and of the Axis 4 “Panoramed” project were made.

The second part of the day, called “world cafè”, was planned as working table, with mixed groups of Horizontal Projects and Modular projects and Panoramed project, in which every groups was asked to react to the architecture of the MED, its strengths and its potentials, and how they see the role of each actor in this architecture.

Finally to ensure the effective development of all modular projects in the Communities, the project partners signed a symbolic ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ officially outlining their commitment to providing outputs to their assigned horizontal project.

The event underlined the need for horizontal project partners to improve the collaboration between their respective communities by finding a better way of coordinating themselves and working together.

Agenda of the “We are MED” event, as well as additional background information are available here

For further information on the Interreg MED Programme and the thematic communities, please visit: http://interreg-med.eu/

Take a look at our Community of projects on Sustainable Tourism and download here the BROCHURE “MED SUSTAINABLE TOURIMS COMMUNITY”