Active citizenship: a gleam of hope

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Written by Teresa Petrangolini - Director of Active Citizenship network

Citizens living throughout Europe are experiencing the worst economic crisis occurred in the last 30 years. The weak governance of the EU, together with the huge power of the financial sector are leading people to a state of poverty and a lack of future perspectives. On the other hand, due to these problematic issues, active citizenship is growing everywhere both as public opinion and as people able to organise themselves for their rights’ protection with the aim to put up a different future.
This web site and the activity of Active Citizenship Network is strongly oriented to support projects, programmes, aims and positions of citizens’ organisations involved in public policies such as Health protection, Youth education, Consumers rights, Voluntary action policies and Corporate social responsibility.
Our mission is twofold:

• Contributing to the development of a European Active Citizenship;
• Promoting the participation of citizens’ organizations in European and national public policy-making process.

Since ACN was born, it promoted 18 projects and policy initiatives on European citizenship, involving about 100 organisations of 30 European countries (members and associate members).
This means that our Network is a real nest of ideas, experiences and concrete achievements which have to be valorised in order to build an active citizenship in Europe.
We do need more democracy to ensure a new development at European level. Changing “high branches”of politics is no more enough; It is necessary to give the floor to civil society,  widening the opportunity of participation and exchange of views in matter of active citizenship. Numberless of ACN projects are focused on rethinking the principle of subsidiarity. For this reason, strengthening the presence of civic organizations, promoting and assessing the Patients’ rights’ protection and enabling a more accountable and transparent governance in at EU level, seems to be the only way to succeed.
This web site information concerns everything can be useful for all ACN partners taking a step forward to transform this little gleam of hope into reality.