LEADER South Limburg would love to work with Maastricht University students who have a soft spot for bottom-up projects to strengthen society.

LEADER is a European grant program for rural development and supports local initiatives that strengthen the quality of life and economy in rural areas. Citizen participation, entrepreneurship and self-management are at the core.

An important element in the LEADER approach is community support and involvement in the realization of plans, driven by and for the residents.
In practice however, initiators of these plans often it challenging to create community support and participation. Therefore, in this PREMIUM project, LEADER is looking to develop a framework or a toolkit to help local initiatives engage their communities.

Some questions that come to mind:

– What is the value of a joint project for the neighborhood? (e.g., a farm as a meeting place, a community garden, a shared water issue, energy generation, etc.)
– What are the critical success factors for gaining strong community support for such a project?
– How do I actively involve residents in the implementation?
– How do I ensure that this involvement is sustainable?
– How do I deal with resistance?
– What role does communication play in all this?
– What are the dos and don’ts for inspiring and activating the community?

We would be interested in knowing the ‘best practices’ as to how to motivate and activate a community, as well as getting new and creative insights from our students on how to achieve maximum support and participation from communities. If successful, we would like to share the outcome with the other 30 LEADER regions in the Netherlands or even in the EU.