The second European Policy Platform ended on Saturday 23rd September 2023 after an intense two-days kermesse in the PISTE partner municipality of Ninove, Belgium. The event, which gathered policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders from four different countries to discuss immigrants’ participation in small- and medium-sized towns, was opened in the morning of Friday by the greetings from the mayor Tania De Jonge in the marvellous location of De Liberale Kring within the town centre. Afterwards, the several services dealing with migration-related issues which are offered by the town have been presented to the EPP participants. Firstly, they visited the centre “De Mallaard”, where various civil society organisations supported by municipality have organised initiatives for the social inclusion of vulnerable persons, including a social grocery store, training courses, a tool library and youth-oriented initiatives. Then, they moved to the Social House, the new building of Ninove social services, in which various social workers explain how local offices are carrying out and planning new immigrant and inclusion policies and how they relate with clients. Finally, after a guided tour of Ninove, which allowed EPP participants to understand its history and peculiarities, invited stakeholders and researchers visit the youth centre Habbekrats, which is also the location of the PISTE policy experiment within the municipality.
The second day was entirely dedicated to the actual European Policy Platform and to the PISTE Consortium Meeting. During the first, policymakers and researchers from the four partner municipalities across Europe explain how they designed the policy experiment that is planned within the PISTE project and updated about its implementation. Further information about experiments in each municipality are also available in our dedicated section on the website. Then, researchers from the University of Antwerp – the WP3 leader institution – guides the following discussion, whose findings will be later published in the section of this website dedicated to policy platforms and will feed the second Stakeholders’ Assessment (click here to read the first one). As in the case of the first EPP, this second cross-national platform allowed various stakeholders from small- and medium-sized towns to echange experiences and ideas among peers, witnessing the crucial importance of this tool to foster the improvement of immigrant policies in these contexts, that are more and more at the forefront of immigration flows. The PISTE project will now proceed with its next steps, which will include the redaction of the White Paper on the participation of immigrations in small- and medium-sized towns and two other important meetings: the field visit in the partner municipality of Bebra in December 2023 and the project’s final event, scheduled in Brussel in January 2024.
