A guide for the social route in Amsterdam!
Our neighborhoods are full of energetic initiatives by Amsterdammers who feel responsible for a sustainable, healthy and social city. Urban agriculture, local savings circles, circular textiles, innovative care practices, platform co-ops, energy cooperatives, housing cooperatives by self-builders, food collectives, mobility …
Such citizen initiatives add a lot of value to the city and are the pioneers in a community economy. Their impact can be greater, stronger and better through so-called public-collective collaborations.
To support their ambitions and to gain experience as a local government in collaborating with citizen initiatives, a pilot incubator program for the community economy was started in 2024 by MeentCoop and AmsterDOEN, an action program of the municipality of Amsterdam, in collaboration with BuRosa. In the pilot incubator program, initiators and civil servants investigated in pairs what is needed to make collaborations successful and to strengthen them. And especially: which obstacles can be removed, and how.
The lessons from the incubator program are summarized in this mini-guide with six signposts to further the collaboration between citizen initiatives and the municipality:
- Re-evaluate value
- Local embedding
- Grow as a movement
- Intermediate space
- Public-civil-private
- Finding space in policy
Read the mini-guide (only available in Dutch) here!