Valmiera March 2021

Focus group discussions in March, 2021

Valmiera, Latvia, online meetings

For the Europe Challenge in Valmiera we had decided to work on topics of local identity, participation, and building relationships between local communities. This is especially important in a time where Latvia is going through a new administrative reform, the main point being that smaller regions will now be a part of bigger ones. There are concerns about specific topics like services, finance management etc., but there is also a concern about the unity of the larger region and people working together on strategies, development and preserving local heritage.

Encouragement from the ECF and Democratic Society pushed us to further explore these topics and their relevance for the community. We planned to organize two focus groups that would consist of people from different backgrounds but that are generally engaged in the region and are active citizens in one form or another. These would serve as expert opinions. Before this we put together a test group that consisted of librarians in the local region, so we could try out the tools we wanted to use - Jamboard and design thinking templates Democratic Society introduced us with. During the test we recognised a lot of things we needed to change in the format of the conversation and we did another test with a different group of librarians. This helped us to form the flow of the conversation but also gave us two more discussions that were meaningful and gave more results. All of the focus groups were held via video conferencing platforms and each was about 2 hours long. We used post-it notes in the Jamboard tool, which was very effective in compiling all of the ideas and opinions.

The other two focus groups consisted of people who identified themselves with different kinds of roles - mother, senior, student, librarian, land owner, businesswoman, farmer, reader, cultural person, etc. They were also from different parishes of the new Valmiera region. All the participants of the focus group were also asked if they wanted to get more involved in this project and activities that we would organize. A lot of them shared an interest in further cooperation, we will include them in our activities.

These conversations gave us a large amount of information we used to formulate our local Europe Challenge. The biggest result was our understanding that we need to move towards the ideas of participation and different forms of participation. We also understood that identity is not as big of a concern as we thought it would be as nowadays people are very mobile and generally feel connected to more than one place. And another conclusion was that there is a need of bringing people together to share experiences about local involvement and engaging citizens and this is an area where libraries can give a lot of support.