Celebrations of the European Cooperation Day 2019

It is the end of September now, and we cannot wait to share our excitement about this year celebrations of the ECDay!

We started in Pskov, 7 September, when 14 project managers representing 25 cross-border cooperation projects met at the Capitalization Brunch to make another step in experience sharing and capacity building. Together with Estonia-Russia CBC programme we discussed lessons learned during partnership building and project application process. The capitalization exercise was followed by a grand introduction of 400 local schoolchildren and students to 10 cross-border projects at the “School of eco-friendly citizen” offering more opportunities to take care of our joint cross-border environment.

In Salaspils, 20 September, we paid homage to the World Clean-up Day in the National Botanic Garden of Latvia. The students from Ogre Technical School and volunteers joined the representatives of the Programme to boost the sense of responsibility for the environment and to make our region a cleaner and greener place. About 50 participants planted beautiful hydrangea garden, discussed cross-border cooperation and ecological issues. We hope that students from Ogre Technical School would become even more active in solving environmental issues and would be eager to see the results of our projects: visit new green tourist routes uniting the border regions of Latvia and Russia and enjoy renovated castles, manors and parks all over the Programme area.

We are closing the ECDay season 2019 with the interactive event “Nature as our common treasure” in St. Petersburg, 25 September. It gathered school graduates and students from the Leningrad Region and St Petersburg, officials representing the European Union, the Member States, the Russian Federation and the representatives of the Managing Authorities of the Programmes to get a closer look at the environmental projects implemented within the Latvia-Russia, Estonia-Russia, South-East Finland – Russia CBC Programmes and the “Interreg. Baltic Sea Region Programme”. The projects inspired students to brainstorm new ideas on environmental management and nature protection and to present them to the officials. It is notable that these ideas may actually become of interest for EU-Russia cooperation. By tradition, the event ended with the gastronomic journey, where the participants, totaling 150, tasted specialties of Latvia, Russia, Estonia, Finland and Germany.

Check out all of our ECDay events on our Facebook page!