Valmiera July 2021

Meeting community members in July, 2021

Several locations in Valmiera region, Latvia

The Europe Challenge in Valmiera, Latvia is about our community in Valmiera administrative region and each individual’s significant contribution in shaping the public space. Our main event - Conversation Day - will take place in September. During the summer our two main goals are to organize the Conversation Day and to create short video clips that emphasize the topics that are important to the community in terms of participation, local heritage, identity and the role of libraries in shaping the public space.

The short video clips will be made in cooperation with a local TV network ReTV. We have defined 5 different video clips that will be used as a marketing tool for the Conversation Day as well as conversation starters during the event. In addition to that, we hope that the video clips will be broadcasted prior to the event on the network ReTV and published on different social media accounts.

In order to create the content of the video clips, we reached out to different community members that are good examples of the topics we are going to talk about on Conversation Day. The topics include communities and neighbourhoods, families and libraries, cultural heritage and storytelling, professional arts and cultural education, local identity. Throughout these topics we want to emphasize libraries as places and tools that help and support participation, people coming together and sharing ideas and opinions. In addition to that we want to show how local communities strengthen democratic values with the work they do at the local level.

In the beginning of July, we met with all the community members that had agreed to film for the video clips. During these meetings we talked about their work and role in their local communities, the challenges they have and the meaning of their work to them, the community and the bigger society in general. Because the video clips will be filmed by professional journalists from the TV network ReTV, it was important to us to meet with each of these people. These conversations gave us an opportunity to talk about different subjects that shape the public space and strengthen democratic values, to understand each other and the ways local libraries can support the communities in tackling their local challenges.