UMBRELLA - Boosting cross-border cooperation capacities of local actors in South Baltic Sea

What is the project changing?

UMBRELLA supports small local and regional organisations in the South Baltic area to initiate their active participation in cross-border cooperation.

What was the challenge?

The Interreg South Baltic Programme is still poorly available to small organisations, because of insufficient institutional and financial capacities.

What is the project creating?

UMBRELLA creates awareness raising events to address newcomers in cross-border cooperation. In order to increase skills and capacities, UMBRELLA creates trainings on participation in cross-border cooperation.

Project Outputs

UMBRELLA Moodle training platform

Project Website

Find the UMBRELLA Project Website here.

Full project description

The research shows that the South Baltic Programme (SBP) is still poorly available to small organisations, because of their insufficient institutional and financial capacities. In general among the SBP stakeholders there are still communication barriers due to lack of English language skills, lack of competences and capacities for project development and implementation, especially by small local actors. As a consequence, low-level international activity of small actors can be observed. This leads to the fact, that local community actors (especially newcomers and small organisations) are hampered in participating in cross-border cooperation projects, thus in using cross-border cooperation as an instrument for local policy development. To address these challenges, Umbrella project aims at developing know-how capacities for small local and regional organisations in the South Baltic Programme area to initiate their actively participation in the cross-border cooperation in their daily activities. To achieve this goal, project implements significantly wider approach (in comparison with the regular projects financed by the SBP within Priority Area 5), going much beyond typical scope of projects’ intervention. This is determined by a strategic decision of the partnership to address different levels of capacity building processes – from single institutional capacity of potential project partner, via micro-activities addressed to the micro organisations till strategic capacity building on the programme macro level. To ensure relevant spectrum of competences, the partnership structure covers whole geographical South Baltic region and consists of 6 Project Partners and 9 Associated Organisations representing regional authorities, macro-regional structures and scientific / training institutions, partly involved in the previous Capacity Building Project implemented in the programming period 2007-2013.