The Regional Funds Week, organised from 6th to 10th December as a virtual version of the Annual Seminar, ended with a nice “question and answer” time between Grethe Haugoy and Nora Mehsen. With the presence of Malgorzata Nowak, Gian Luca Bombarda and Mateusz Wiśniewski representing the Fund Operator, Grethe and Nora explained how, respectively, they represent the past and future of the Funds, ensuring continuity to the objectives our Projects are reaching.
The main goal achieved during this week is that, together, we have reached important results: we had in only one week almost 1000 participants registered, more than 40 people and up to 80 at a time participated at the different round tables and it has been satisfactory to follow our Projects’ social media channels enriched with invitations to visit their stands. Our Instagram and Facebook fan pages increased in terms of likes and re-posting and, we have to admit, it was great to register those numbers.
We started with two important sessions dedicated respectively to the Youth Employment and the Regional Cooperation Funds, moments were we listened interventions coming from some “Friends”. We are referring to our loyal readers and writers of our Online Magazines: another great success has been represented by the words dedicated to our platform confirming the networking strategies they contributed to consolidate in the past months. We really appreciated the words coming from Hjörtur Sverrisson, Head of Funds and Horizontal Concerns Unit for FMO and Rannveig Skofteland, representing the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Regional Funds Week run with 15 special conferences organised and held by the Projects in first person. There is no need to repeat all the topics covered since they all have been linked to the Funds’ main goals. At the end of the RFW 2021, all the Projects gathered the achievements reached trhough those round tables.
It has been important to realise how efforts were put together, therefore, a big thanks goes to the Projects’ engagement. Due to this success, the Fund Operator decided to leave the dedicated Platform open until the 20thof December, thanks as well to the confirmation of its importance in terms of the possibility to create additional cluster and network initiatives.
One can talk about numbers and topics, but – talking about the whole FMO and FO Team, the main achievement is that we all demonstrated the value of being a Family.
We hope, at the very end, that you all felt to be an important part of it.
Thank you for being an active part of the Regional Funds Week,
The Fund Operator Team
And finally… a look behind the scenes
For those who have made it this far, we have also prepared a short piece in which we reveal the details of the entire technical background of this year’s Regional Funds Week.
Although our event was held entirely online – we moved not only the meeting rooms, but also the exhibition hall and project presentation stands to a virtual space – the whole thing was supervised as much as possible offline.
In order to be able to carry out our development, a temporary headquarters was organised in one of the rented office spaces in Rome, where all the technical team, FO representatives and invited moderators who managed to get to Italy gathered. A studio was set up in the building, where necessary technical equipment – computers, lights, stable Internet connection, stage design, sound system – was collected to allow all points of the programme to run smoothly. All in all, a dozen or so people passed through our quarters in Rome during the week, and all this under a sanitary regime.
The on-site team made sure that every participant logged on on time, solved any technical problems in real time, and ”directed” all the meetings on the Zoom platform. The group effort paid off and resulted in a great, attractive event, which attracted almost a thousand participants.
See you next year – who knows, in what format!
Mateusz Wiśniewski
Francesca Bombarda
