Pilot 1: Hungary – Learning co-creation in public service

Objectives

The Hungarian pilot of the CoSIE project aims at developing a service model for triggering household economic activities in disadvantaged rural areas. The main aim of the pilot is to revive forgotten culture of household economy, including horticulture and livestock farming on disadvantaged rural areas of Hungary by enabling families to utilise their own resources of household economy. The pilot takes place in 10 different settlements, and no two villages are identical. The idea is to strengthen the role of grassroots initiatives within traditional communities. At the same time, the pilot enhances the operational mechanisms of local democracy, strengthens the ability of these localities to retain its population and contributes to the goals of sustainability.

The direct target group of the pilot are low or middle-income families, primarily ones raising children. The indirect target group are people who are responsible for executing and organizing social land programs: mayors, members of the local authorities, local civic organizations and Roma minority governments.

The main stakeholder of the pilot is the Professional and Interest Representative Association of Social Land Programmes (Szociális Földprogramok Szakmai és Érdekképviseleti Egyesülete). This organisation represents mayors and local communities executing social land programmes. Therefore, their participation and support is crucial for the success of the pilot. Other stakeholders are policy makers, interest representative bodies, research and educational organizations, and civil organizations.

Questions and tasks:

Read the text above, watch the following video from 0’00 to 1’04 minutes and answer the questions!

A) What development area does the pilot focus on?
B) What is the main purpose of the pilot?

Learnings

The pilot experience proved that the active involvement of citizens and local leaders in the decision making and planning processes indeed activated their resources. Local governments are also under pressure to organise the economic activities of the citizens and to transfer from service-oriented approach to an entrepreneurial one. Families and local communities did not only expect contribution from the project, but put more resources from their budget to achieve their goals. In many localities, the mayor extended the number of participants or contributed to purchasing more expensive assets to families. Our experience also showed that participants did not chose only economic agricultural activities, but also entered other sectors (food processing, tourism, hairdressing for instance).

The next vlog about the Hungarian CoSIE pilot demonstrates, how co-creative methods can mobilize resources on local level in line with asset-based approaches on which the method of co-creation builds.

Questions and tasks:

Watch the video (from 3’34 to 5’41) and collect the forms of activity that have developed in the small settlements as a result of the project!